GREEN DIESEL

 

It’s day two of the Sweeps Festival in Rochester. You’ll have to insert your own Geordie Big Brother accent here). Things have got off to a heaving start in the town by half twelve with bands and dancers attracting huge crowds along the Olde Worlde High Street, at the end of which Green Diesel are playing in a pub, Dickensianly called Expectations.

The programme says Green Diesel’s music features both Morris dancing and funkiness. Despite my surname suggesting the contrary, I’m not a big fan of Morris dancing. Multiple Boxing Days spent outside Gloucester Cathedral watching bearded buffoons bashing batons against each other soon put paid to that. But funkiness. Now, funkiness is something else entirely.

As it is, Faversham’s Green Diesel have more of a 70s alt rock sound to them, rather than anything more suggestive of Sly and the Family Stone, Gil Scott-Heron or Curtis Mayfield. There’s a huge number people in the band. Any more of them and there’d be no room for the audience. Fiddlers, accordion players, numerous guitars, drums and a husky sounding female vocalist whose voice fits the style of the music well.

 

 

The music they play is a selection of good old folk songs that everyone knows from somewhere embedded deep within their psyche: “You Take the High Road”, “Galway Girl” (which, apparently featured in the film “P.S. I Love You”, not that the mandolin player introducing the song – or I, for that matter – would know: “I don’t have the right chromosome configuration to see it,” he points out) and even an old Kinks song, “Harry Rag”.

These are all interspersed with the original songs and tunes from the band such as a waltz written by bassist Ben Holliday.

This is music that, by rights, everyone should be dancing to. But as it’s only very early afternoon perhaps not even the good festival goers of this ale and cider fuelled musical celebration have imbibed quite enough to really get going yet. With a later billing, this band would rip any venue to pieces with their rock infused folk songs.

I leave to the strains of “Low Bridge, “Everybody Down” an American folk song covered by both Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen. It’s another great chance for the band to rock out, forming a bridge between contemporary alternative music and tunes from the past.

Catch them if you can.

 

Disclaimer: All comments and opinions are those of the writer.

 

1/05/2011 • Sweeps Festival, Rochester

By Stephen Morris • Photos by Stephen Morris

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