Philtopia: music

Last Thursday, Sean (fiddle teacher) said "There's a folk festival on this weekend at Newstead. It's small but really good". So I checked out the website . Apparently it's an annual event every Australia Day weekend. It used to be at Chewton but they moved it a few years ago.

So I arranged to have the weekend off, (had to sacrifice easter but it looked like I was going to be working then anyway) booked a motel in Castlemaine (cos I just wasn't in the mood for camping), and we drove down there on Friday evening. It took only an hour and a half to get there, which is a big improvement over Canberra.

Like all folk festivals it's a mixture of genres and you have to just pick-and-choose among the bands. I was looking for mainly Celtic (Trouble in the kitchen and a couple of other celtic bands were there, Luke plumb ran a celtic mandolin workshop. and there was a lot of session action at the pub), something different, and hopefully something totally off the wall.

The most important thing being to aviod the singer/songwriter tree hugging neo-hippies with their schmaltzy three chord gum-tree-and-koala songs. This was unfortunately the only area where I didn't totally succeed.

Anyway, it was a good weekend. Sean was right, it's small - only a few hundred people were there. But they have some big names, and the quality is generally good.

Here's some more photos: