Wood Festival
Braziers Park, Oxfordshire 

GOING to a music festival with young children, as I learnt some time ago, is not generally a relaxing experience. Parenting is hard enough as it is, without attempting it in rivers of mud, while carrying your home on your back, queueing endlessly and having to miss your favourite band because your little darling has suddenly decided they do actually now want that pizza they insisted they didn’t want 20 minutes earlier. 

Wood Festival is not like that. It’s small enough that everything is close by, kids can find their way around easily, and unless you’re an inch from the bass bin, the music is never ear-splitting. 

Musically, there is something for everyone. While the staple diet is folk, country and what is broadly termed “Americana,” there are always a few surprises in the mix.  

This year, one of them was English-Turkish instrumental duo Masal. Their music comprises stomping, jazzy breakbeats, with deliciously grimy and occasionally ethereal synths, sprinkled with harp melodies like droplets falling from stalactites in an underground cave.

These contrasts combine to exhilarating effect, evoking alternative ’90s club sounds like Loop Guru and Banco de Gaia one minute, cinematic soundscapes the next and early hardcore after that. 

I was not expecting to particularly enjoy Saturday night headliners Stornaway, not generally being a fan of the earnest country-tinged indie-folk pop in which they specialise. Sometimes, however, artists come along who just do what they do so damn well that it transcends what you think you like.

Usually a four-piece — all incredibly accomplished multi-instrumentalists — tonight they are augmented with trumpet, saxophone/ flute and full six-piece choir.

Their Beach Boys-esque vocal harmonies are already very powerful, but the addition of the Vocal Spokes as backing singers for three songs turns great songs like Josephine and Zorbing into something truly magnificent. 

Moving into the wee hours, DJ Count Skylarking provided an aurally spectacular history of the evolution of Jamaican music across the diaspora.

Starting with classic ska and dub sounds (including a delightfully reggafied instrumental version of Smells Like Teen Spirit), he takes us through ragga and finally into jungle/ drum and bass, with greats such as Smiley Culture, General Levy and Roni Size all making an appearance along the way, soothing spots that only the heaviest bass can reach. 

Alongside the music are some great talks. Jess Worth (aka Lady Gargoyle) gives a rundown of some of Oxford’s most rebellious historical moments, such as the de-arrest of 40 anti-enclosure rioters by an impassioned mob at St Giles Fair, building admirably on the phenomenal work of long-term local radical walking tour guide Ciaran Walsh. 

Later, nephrologist Nabil Melhem talks us through the barriers to healthcare in the Palestinian occupied territories, the biggest of which he identifies as the rest of the world’s failure to insist that healthcare is a human right. 

His personal stories of arbitrary denial of permits to children in need of specialist care, forcing them to have limbs amputated totally unnecessarily, and of dozens of babies dying during childbirth at checkpoints every year “whilst supervised by someone in a military uniform” blocking their access to hospital, bring home the vindictive and horrific backdrop which the occupation renders to daily life even in times of so-called peace.

Particularly moving was Emily Tammam’s talk on her daughter Neve who died last year aged 10, nearly three years after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Tammam began watercolour painting during those years in order to carve out a space of peace and of certainty, where she was not required to make any decisions. Neve loved these paintings, which would end up covering the walls of her room. 

After her death, Tammam began painting portraits of Neve as a way of both honouring her promise to tell the world about her daughter, and giving space for her own love and grief to manifest. Theirs is a deeply moving story, full of wisdom and compassion, about integrating, even embracing, grief and loss, as travelling companions. For grief, she notes, “in contrast with beauty and joy, heightens them both.” 

Tammam spoke very honestly about her feelings of guilt about not being able to cry very much; but she certainly allowed the rest of us to do so.