Now seven years old, the Clonakilty International Guitar Festival has rightly earned a reputation for both quality and open-mindedness. Bearing in mind many of the gigs and sessions are free, its’ value for money factor speaks for itself, while the ‘international’ status is also warranted as this year’s headliners include UK folk icon Roy Harper and ex-Captain Beefheart/ Jeff Buckley alumnus Gary Lucas. With countless shows over four days and nights across 22 venues in this busy West Cork town (including the local Sacred Heart Secondary School) you could say the old cliché ‘something for everyone’ springs to mind.
Content-wise, diversity is very much the festival’s watchword. It’s quite normal to stagger from stoner blues bands to virtuoso classical players to electro-pop acts and back again, though the emphasis is largely on well-crafted songs, so superb Clare/ Cork folk-roots alliance DAVID HOPE & THE HENCHMEN are surely in their element here.
Admittedly, mid-afternoon slots are never the longest of straws to draw, but the lads survived their 4.30 slot at Scannell’s on the Saturday afternoon with their dignity intact. W&H are here to watch them tackle another potentially difficult crowd of Sunday Game big-screen watchers at the intimate Bernie’s Bar and the initial prognosis ain’t so good. Strolling into the venue, we almost step over a guy who’s collapsed outside in a splattering of blood while a member of the Gardai stands over him. Thankfully, further enquiries reveal he’s just a weekend reveller trying to outdo Lemmy’s record of staying up for two weeks straight. Not that this guy's spirited attempt was ever really going to get close to the prize.
But we digress. Inside, David Hope & The Henchmen have been allotted a generous 90-minute slot and they more than fulfil the promise. Having seen them half a dozen times or more over the past 12 months, W&H can say with some certainty that there’s a whole lot more where the three tracks comprising the band’s excellent debut three-tracker ‘Hell or High Water’ come from.
Drawing upon tracks from both David Hope’s solo releases – the Terry Woods-produced ‘A Picture’ LP and the 7-track ‘Daybreak Someplace’ EP – as well as the recent EP and a clutch of unreleased songs, they have an absolute wealth of material at their disposal and tunes like the poppy ‘Random Scandinavians’ and the fatalistic outlaw blues ‘Livin’ By the Gun’ (“I woke up crying, you were crying too”) are more than enough to get the uninitiated to look up from their pints.
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This being very much a drinker’s crowd, the band wisely slides a few well-chosen covers into the set for good measure. A terse version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’ rubs shoulders with the smoke and mirrors political commentary ‘Cloak & Daggers’, while later on, a wonderfully languid delta blues take of Robert Johnson’s ‘Love in Vain’ and the Bob Dylan/ Byrds staple ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ precede an emotional version of ‘Watch Over You’. To these ears, this latter is arguably Hope’s finest self-penned tune to date, though it has a lot of competition, not least from the oblivion-bound folk-blues of ‘On That Train’ and the storming (and highly catchy) set-closer ‘These Days’ which gets an enormous round of applause despite being an unrecorded original. The single ‘Hell or High Water’ – another roundly defiant anthem – is kept in reserve for a well-earned encore.
While a venue like this is hardly ideal for such talented songsmiths and performers, it’s still a credit to both the band for making the best of it and winning over some new fans and the organisers of the festival for making it happen at all. In such perilous times the fact that committed music heads and (as yet) unsigned bands of this calibre are still out there is what keeps us all going. Serious respect to all concerned.
Clonakilty Guitar Festival
David Hope & The Henchmen on MySpace
Listen to David Hope and the Henchmen at Soundcloud
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