Sun­day: One­da, My Bad Sis­ter, Clara Mann, Kather­ine Prid­dy, Eng­lish Teacher, The Orb, Dry Clean­ing, Bode­ga, Fero­cious Dog, Dinasaur Jr.,Big Spe­cial, Des­per­ate Jour­nal­ist, Amyl and the Snif­fers all played.

The Beard­ed The­o­ry ‘fam­i­ly Sun­day’ tra­di­tion lives on, and those in fan­cy dress gath­er around the main stage for the judg­ing (win­ners are award­ed two tick­ets to next year’s festie). The dress-up theme for this year is “Retro Future”. There were some inven­tive and fetch­ing cos­tumes on dis­play by the beau­ti­ful peo­ple of Beard­ed Theory.

The win­ners were cho­sen before we moved onto anoth­er tra­di­tion – huge­ly pop­u­lar band The BarStew­ard Sons of Val Doon­i­can who played their ren­di­tions of Lady in Red and Boo­gie Nights amongst others.

There was a wealth of artists – and a lot of actu­al (mud­dy) ground to cov­er – on Sun­day as it was rammed with musi­cal delights. At Con­voy Cabaret I caught a riv­et­ing act by iden­ti­cal twins My Bad Sis­ter, full of atti­tude and swag­ger and strong on the dance rou­tines and lyrics.

In con­trast was folk-influ­enced super-tal­ent Kather­ine Prid­dy with the most exquis­ite vocals. In com­mon with Bob Vylan, she has just appeared on Jools Hol­land, so hope­ful­ly she will reach a wider audience.

New York band Bode­ga were sub­lime on the main stage per­form­ing their own mate­r­i­al; like­wise their sec­ond set “Bode­ga per­form­ing Bob Dylan”. There were no fan­cy tricks here – just musi­cians respect­ing and lov­ing the mate­r­i­al and giv­ing it a rich and joy­ful ren­di­tion that had me blink­ing back tears by the time they launched into Bal­lad of a Thin Man.

Post-punk band Des­per­ate Jour­nal­ist per­formed their catchy mate­r­i­al with a dra­mat­ic inten­si­ty – Jo Bevan’s vocals soar over the pul­sat­ing bass and gor­geous riffs. Def­i­nite­ly a band on the up. And Amyl and the Snif­fers took the head­lin­ing set with a high ener­gy performance.

Fri­day pho­tos
Sat­ur­day photos

Beard­ed The­o­ry Festival