(Originally posted on the ProperBlog)
Your faithful correspondent has returned from Cambridge, smelling slightly fresher and having had a half-decent night’s sleep, waking up not covered in mud in somewhere which wasn’t a freezing cold marquee. As regular readers will remember, we here at Proper run the CD stall at Cambridge Festival and, as such, don’t get to see any of the bands. So we’re not going to tell you about how great any of them were. Besides, there are plenty of people who can tell you all about that. So we shall tell you about our fun experiences instead… We left for the fest on Wednesday afternoon in three vans (we take a LOT of stuff with us). On the way down, one of the Luton vans (the one with all the stock) got a large screw stuck in the tyre, meaning the guys in the van had to stop off and get the wheel fixed. They were in Bow at the time and came across a particularly lazy, unhelpful mechanic who couldn’t be bothered to fix the wheel, although did make an effort to lift the van by using a jack designed for a normal car on the axel. He recommended another branch in Leytonstone. A Luton van (for illustration purposes) So the guys drove up to Leytonstone, only to find that the part they needed was in fact in the van of another mechanic who was out on call, who wouldn’t be back for an hour and a half. After 40 minutes of sitting around, the mechanic decided to have a go after all, although instead of changing the wheel he attempted to repair the tyre instead. Luckily the tyre held out and this was the end of any particular drama. In fact, to be honest, nothing else of any outstanding interest happened. But i’ll carry on anyway. On the first night we stayed up and had a jam with the nice people from the Hobgoblin and The Music Room stalls. This involved singing, guitars, concertinas, djembes, darbukas, those box things that you hit and sound cool, beer, whiskey and port. Other things that happened involved Martin Simpson turning up a couple of times. He was jolly nice and complimented us on our hard work. He and his wife (whose name i didn’t catch but was also jolly nice) brought along a bunch of Folk Against Fascism t-shirts for us to sell. We ran out pretty quickly, although from September 1st the website will go live and you’ll be able to get a t-shirt of your own. (Their young daughter was also a fan of the waving cat we brought with us.) Rachel Unthank turned up too. She wasn’t playing any of the stages this year but she was doing a workshop so decided to drop off some CDs. I had a nice little chat with her whilst taping up her remaining boxes of CDs. I concluded that she is also very nice. Máirtín O’Connor, Cathal Hayden and Seamie O’Dowd came and said hello too, in fact they were introduced to me as fans of this very blog! Which is encouraging, as this means someone’s reading it. (If you guys are reading, hello!) Other famous folkies turned up and were seen behind our counter too, although i didn’t get to talk to any of them. Unfortunately we were too busy to get any photographic evidence of this, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. In fact, the only photograph i managed to get was of this: A snail made out of Blu-Tack that someone made and stuck on one of our tills Well, that’s not entirely true. We got a picture of our export manager asleep in his pants but i think it would be a bit mean to stick that up on the internet. Now, some Properganda Blog awards which i’m magnanimously issuing which have absolutely no impact on anything: Artist of the Year Award Most CDs Sold Award “We could have done with more of those CDs” Award Most egotistical, annoying artist who got in the way and antagonised the staff Award Best Selling Book Award Best Customer Award Errr, that’ll do for now.
Máirtín O’Connor, Cathal Hayden and Seamie O’Dowd, because they read this blog and told me they like it.
Well, we don’t really know at this point until we see the numbers.
Rupa and the April Fishes. They sold out very quickly.
I couldn’t possibly say (but there was a clear winner.)
Graham Jones – Last Shop Standing (although it was the only book we were selling)
Steve (600 CDs. And a jolly nice bloke to boot.)
