Hop Farm Festival 2010 Part 2

READ PART 1 OF EMILY KENDRICK'S HOP FARM FESTIVAL REVIEW HERE

Similarly affecting on Saturday, Villagers’ one-man show really sparkled for Conor O’Brien’s dynamically varied vocals. ‘Ship of Promises’ drew us into his storytelling, while ‘The Meaning of The Ritual’ fully deserved the breadth of silence it received and teeming response it gained afterwards.

Bringing the fun to the sun, Los Lobos brought us drinking songs and the unifying strains of ‘La Bamba’ which, despite the levels for Cesar Rosas’ guitar being more than a little too loud, could never have failed to make this feel like a party. Billy Vincent are similarly loud in the face of adversity – their adversaries being Blondie on the main stage – and lend a soft touch of fiddle to their twin vocals for ‘On The Five String’. Blondie are, of course, brimming with hits and Debbie Harry is still the platinum blonde bombshell who invites the crowd out for the night following ‘Atomic’.

As for the headliners; who could really pick between them? Van Morrison’s was a show of measure and control – he, at all times, authoritarian and un-acknowledging – but entirely brilliant for his reworking of ‘Into The Mystic’ and considerably complex improvisations on saxophone, guitar and harmonica. The night built in a slow ember diffusing its heat, there was an early suggestion of warmth from ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, but his cool efface lasted right up until closer ‘In The Garden’.

And what of Robert Zimmerman? Well, as I had been forewarned, this was not to be a night of ‘sing-along-a-60s’, and in retrospect neither should it have been. Despite opening with ‘Rainy Day Women No 12 & 35’ and playing near-perfect renditions of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, Bob Dylan’s voice never raised to the curvatures of it’s former self. Instead, with an exceptional band behind him, he beat the lyrics into the frantically-delivered sentences of a poet, and being in his 69th year, well, that’s alright. The weekend, for us, ended on the tail mouth organ notes of ‘Forever Young’, delivered humbly, it served to remind us the world was just outside these fields, ready to take away the serenity of this night and made enjoying it to the last seem even more important.