Set in the beautiful parkland setting of Cherry Hinton Hall, Cambridge Folk Festival is one of the highlights of the city’s calendar.
Attracting 14,000 people across four days in the summer (30 July - 2 August this year), the Festival draws on its unrivalled 50-year musical heritage, combining it with the brand new, quirky, up-and-coming and unsung, to create a unique event each year.
It began in autumn 1964, when Cambridge City Council decided to hold a music festival the next summer and asked Ken Woollard, a local firefighter and socialist political activist, to help organise it. Woollard had been inspired by a documentary – ‘Jazz On A Summer’s Day’, about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.
On the very first Festival bill, squeezed in as a late addition, was a young Paul Simon who had just released I Am A Rock. The festival’s popularity quickly grew, evolving over the years into one of the most well-loved and best regarded of its kind.
Today it features five stages – Main Stage, Stage 2, Club Tent, The Den and the latest delightful tiny gem of a stage, The People’s Front Room.
Festival artists over the years have included Jake Bugg, Laura Marling, Richard Thompson, Toots and The Maytals, Newton Faulkener, Jimmy Cliff, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bellowhead, Gillian Welch, Mumford and Sons, The Staves, Lucy Rose, Robert Cray, Christy Moore, Kate Rusby, Nanci Griffith, The Unthanks, Seasick Steve, Imelda May, Femi Kuti, Seth Lakeman, Nic Jones and many others.
Cambridge Folk Festival turned 50 in 2014, a milestone in a history marked by its true originality and unique ability to both celebrate the past and look to the future.
Tickets for Cambridge Folk Festival 2015 are now on sale.
Tickets are available to purchase online, by phone and in person at the City Centre Box Office in Cambridge.
Find out more at: www.cambridgefolkfestival.co.uk
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The colourful and informative book, Independent Cambridge, is available from Waterstones, Heffers, many of the independent shops and online at www.independent-cambridge.co.uk
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