1:39pm Thursday 2nd July 2009
FOLLOWING the torrential downpours that turned 2007’s festival into a challenging event for audience and performers alike, Sheep Music is bouncing back, from July 17-19, rejuvenated after a year’s absence.
Wales’s longest-established music festival returns with a whole new team who’ve broadened the family-friendly emphasis to embrace theatre, comedy and poetry as well as presenting a cracking line-up of the best in world and roots music.
Headliners in the Big Top will be sharp-suited reggae meisters the Dub Pistols and the welcome return of Maroon Town, the Brixton-based, multi-racial ska/dub/funk band who’ve been together now for more than 20 years and four acclaimed albums.
Other great bands on the 2009 line-up include the Berlin-based 17 Hippies (although there are actually 13 of them) bringing an infectious blend of Balkan, Cajun and French beats to Wales for the first time ever; the even bigger 15-strong Destroyers who energetically purvey their own brand of supercharged, klezmer-fuelled Gypsy folk music.
Dancing is mandatory with Banda Bacana whose powerful, Nigerian-born vocalist LouLou fronts a big sax and percussion-driven outfit dishing out contagious Latin American rhythms.
Direct from New Orleans, playing a stirring menu of traditional jazz, is the Hot 8 Brass Band.
Smaller in number but not in musical impact, Bristol-based Laid Blak will be pounding out their MC Joe Peng-led mash of reggae, with a heavy dash of funky jazz ’n’ soul. Also manning the decks will be top DJs the Dangerous Brothers.
Rather more off-beam, but no less entertaining are the fiddle and accordian quartet the New Rope String Band, described as “ploughing the lonely furrow of cutting-edge music hall”, and Chilean exile Valentina Montaya Martinez’s haunting vocals.
Sheep Music 2009 will also offer a delectable array of creativity and nonsense guaranteed to keep every member of the family engaged and amused, including performance poet Matt Harvey, performance artists the Whalley Range All-Stars and Is Everybody OK? – a tour de force that blurs the boundaries between theatre and stand-up comedy.
There will be all-day classes in circus skills, the solar and wind-powered Café Seren featuring all manner of movies from documentaries to family favourites, whilst in the Village Hall Tent there’ll be games, knitting classes and a groovy 70s disco, plus the Dressing Up Box.
Tickets are available from Ludlow Assembly Rooms box office on 01584 878141, and from The Rowan Tree and Premier mini-market in Presteigne High Street.
Prices start from £25 for single day tickets to £65 for an adult weekend pass. More details at sheepmusic.info.
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