This article was originally published in fRoots magazine No. 424. Spring 2019
Fire In The Mountain is a UK folk festival like no other. Held on an idyllic farm in Wales (the exact location of which is only revealed after you’ve purchased your ticket) the site has no bricks and mortar accommodation, mobile phone reception or flush lavatories. Costa Del Folk it most definitely is not. It has also banned plastic, does all its washing-up, recycles everything that can be and powers everything by just one biodiesel generator and lots of solar energy. Oh, and then there’s the music. The 2018 festival included Sam Amidon, Lankum, Julie Murphy & Ceri Rhys Matthews, Afriquoi, Martin Simpson, Tim Eriksen, Martha Tilston, Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith and Sheelanagig- along with the innumerable fiddle players, banjo pickers, singers and step dancers who occupy every tent and vehicle on site.
Festival Director Joe Buirski told me how this earthly paradise came into being.
“It really started out of an emergent folk scene in London about ten-to-fifteen years ago, that became The Magpies Nest. A few of us started going to the Islington Folk Club, where there was a generation who’d clearly put a lot of work into setting up that scene and we thought maybe it was time for us to put a bit of work into something for our own generation. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the established scene but that we felt we should have a go ourselves, too.”
“I was in a ceilidh band called Cut A Shine, and our fiddle player, Jerry Bloom, used to live on the old farm in Wales which was then owned by Marianne - an older lady who used to run a horse riding school. We were at Green Man Festival in 2009 and Jerry said we should all go and check out this old farm. We went and hung out with Marianne, and she was great! Through our network of the London folk scene and musicians we knew from Liverpool, we all started going up there at weekends, having a fire and playing tunes. The farm was in a bit of a state, so there was a move towards helping Marianne by getting some more volunteers in to do some work on the place and have a bit of a party. My role was someone who worked professionally at festivals as a licensee, so we got a temporary event notice in 2010, had a big work week at the farm in the April, booked some bands that we knew from our scene, and the rest, as they say, is history…”
“The festival was started both as a fund raiser and as a way of diversifying the farm, which was drastically under-used and falling apart. Since we started, the site has been used quite a bit by the local community for weddings and parties, as well as horse riding events. The objective of the festival is to always leave the farm in a better state. The other, subtler point about the history is to do with the big boom that we had in music festivals. Fire In The Mountain has always been the antithesis to those growth-based festivals. We strive to keep it down-home by combining all the best bits of the bigger events but always keeping it small. There’s a strong love of old-time music, but not exclusively. Our booking policy is to have one big American act, and then representatives of all the various sub-genres of folk music.”
Fire in the Mountain Festival Ltd is a registered Not For Profit Company, the aims and objectives of which are: "to hold a folk music festival on a farm in return for maintenance and repairs to the farm on which it is held.” Financial transparency and participation are central to the event, as Joe explains.
“To us, that’s part of the folk music ethos, and if you’re reliant on volunteers, then you shouldn’t be profiting from their work. That’s one of the criticisms we kept hearing about some other festivals - they rely on cheap labour to make these massive events happen. There’s an old adage - ‘know for whom you toil…’ The participatory element comes very much from the folk tradition, as well. All of the headline acts, regardless of who they are, are asked to participate and do little workshops and sessions.”
Let’s leave the final words to Tim Eriksen, who spent the 2018 weekend performing, running workshops, hanging out at the Slim Jim Banjos stall and jamming with Lankum deep into the night.
“It really is just about my favourite festival in the English-speaking world. It’s lovely to be part of a scene with such open ears, and I’m a little sad that my old band Cordelia’s Dad missed out by a couple of decades!”
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