After a year marred by tragedy, it was the fans, and the fans alone, who were able to turn the Wickerman Festival into a carnival of joy this weekend.
Around 17,500 festival go-ers made the most of the few back-to-back hours of sunshine that the Scottish summer has offered so far to party at Wickerman in East Kirkcarswell Farm near Dundrennan. The 2015 festival was co-headlined on Friday by Squeeze and The Waterboys, and on Saturday by Tom Odell and Example.
For organisers Patsy Gilroy and daughter Jennie Camm, the event’s success was justification for Wickerman going ahead after a difficult year occasioned by the death in a shooting incident of Jamie Gilroy, the festival’s co-founder and the farmer on whose land Wickerman takes place.
“The easy option was not to carry on with it,” said Patsy, Jamie Gilroy's widow, “but that was a kneejerk reaction. To see new people here, as well as so many loyal customers, has just been great. People have embraced the fact that the festival is the same but maybe edgier and a bit more vibrant, which I think Jamie would have liked.”
The festival’s dress-up theme this year encouraged people to wear waistcoats, the signature item of clothing worn on site in past years by Patsy Gilroy’s late husband. From the number of middle-aged men who took up the challenge, it seemed that wearing a waistcoat was a way for long-term Wickerman-goers, many of whom have attended the festival for all of its 14 years, to show visible support for the family.
Patsy Gilroy was clear about her own favourite act from the opening day. “Lulu was fantastic,” she said. “She’s having such a brilliant year. Her voice is great, really strong, and she’s as fit as a fiddle.”
On Friday, a few hours before her full main stage appearance, Lulu performed a four-song acoustic set, followed by an audience Q&A, in one of the smallest tents in front of 300 people as a fund-raising gig for Maggie’s cancer charity.
After playing The Man Who Sold The World and Shout, the Glaswegian star, whose mother died of cancer, made clear why she was supporting the charity. “Speaking for myself, when someone from your family is ill, you can’t think straight,” she said. “Maggie’s support system offers a little TLC for the family as well as the patient.”
The festival line-up ranges from up-and-coming local acts to international household names. Bedecked in comic-book green, the winners of the Sunday Herald and XFM’s Unsigned Band competition, Supa & Da Kryptonites opened the main Summerisle Stage on Saturday under a noon-time shower. The Lothian-based eight-piece funk-ska-rap-swing collective were delighted to end the set with an audience perhaps five times bigger than when they started.
“About halfway through the second song we played, about 20 or 30 people came over the hill and started running down because they could hear us play,” said trumpeter Matthew Edwards. “That was exciting.”
Wickerman is a festival with a long history of ska bands, particularly in the Scooter Tent, so Supa & Da Kryptonites were a natural fit.
“This is the biggest stage we’ve played,” said frontman Jay Supa. “It’s quite overwhelming when you see people getting drawn to you, especially if it’s people who don’t actually know us. I mean, our dressing room is sandwiched between Jimmy Cliff and Example. And we were camping ten feet away from Lulu yesterday. You can’t make that up.”
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