TARS IN FALMOUTH
If it’s June
it must be Falmouth. Our year wouldn’t be complete without our annual
pilgrimage to the Falmouth International Sea Shanty Festival-the shanty
singer’s equivalent of Glastonbury or the last night of The Proms. This was our
eighth year on the trot, and the Festival keeps getting bigger and better-this
year there were 36 shanty crews performing over the weekend of 15/16 June. So
Falmouth becomes Shantyville, and if you don’t like this sort of music, there
is no place to hide!
For the last
couple of years we have opted to only perform on the Saturday, so that we have
some time to enjoy the town and other performers. But that then makes for a
busy day and we ended up doing five sessions in all between 1pm and 10pm.
This year
was different because it included three new venues we had not performed at
before, and a visit to our friends at Seasalt in their flagship Falmouth store,
where we were entertaining their staff and some surprised but appreciative
shoppers. The schedule also included The Shipwrights Arms, which we do know of
old.
The new
venues were the Courtyard Deli (where we followed the excellent and amazingly
young The Longest Johns), the Seaview Inn (with the best possible views of the
Town and harbour, but on top of the hill so rarely visited by tourists) and the
Brewery Yard/Café Cinnamon, which is much favoured by the town’s student
population. These students either love their shanties, or can afford to be
seriously pissed by 9pm on a Saturday night, or both. They were having a great
time judging by the level of noise and applause, even though you couldn’t
possibly hear a thing if you were more than ten feet away from us! Oh to be
young and carefree.
