I don’t think this is news to anyone by now, but I have been booked to play at this year’s Oxford Folk Festival (see here, near the bottom of the page).
I must admit this is quite intimidating, for a few reasons. I’ve played at OFF before, but not by myself and, Melomania aside, not for a few years. As a solo performer, I’ve played countless open mic nights but very few other gigs and, again, not recently. And only to non-folkies.
Odd as it might seem, playing to people who are fans of this sort of thing is more intimidating than playing to a more general audience, because for those people it has novelty value. If someone is attending an open mic evening, they are presumably willing to be fairly open-minded about what they listen to, and although a bad act will be all the more loathed if it is also a novelty, provided you can get people to enjoy what you are doing at all, they will generally enjoy it all the more if it’s something they haven’t heard before. In addition, if it doesn’t go well, you can always tell yourself it was just because it wasn’t their sort of thing, rather than because it actually wasn’t any good.
But a group of people at a folk festival are mostly going to be people who already like folk music and to whom what I do is not going to be particularly novel. Since I don’t write songs, but instead perform largely traditional material (and the odd contemporary cover), they’ll likely even have heard these same songs before, quite possibly performed better by someone else. Which means they may well be much harder to impress.
There’s also the fact that this was the first gig I’ve had that I initiated. Previously when I’ve done something I’ve generally been asked to do it by someone, but this time I contacted Tim myself and asked to play at the festival. And I feel that having said ‘hey, you should book me’, there’s then more pressure to deliver on the day.
I also haven’t heard anything about Melomania this year, and if nobody’s said anything by now, I’m inclined to suspect that it won’t be happening. If that’s the case, then appearing on stage may well be my only route to a free ticket in future, and so I need to do well enough that they’re willing to have me back again next year.
This worry has made playing open mic nights more stressful, too. Normally, if it doesn’t go that well it’s a bit disappointing, but no big deal. But now it gets me worrying: what if I have a similar ‘off’ day when I’m on at the festival? I’m not sure what would be worse, just not being good enough, or being plenty good enough normally but somehow not doing myself justice when it actually counts.
In other news, I’m also going to be playing a small spot as part of the Witney Music Festival. This is a smaller local thing, made up of lots of little events rather than being a single monolithic festival. At present I’m not sure exactly how much I’m going to have to do, but it should be at the Hollybush on the evening of the first of April. If nothing else it’ll make for a good practice run for the Folk Festival a fortnight later.