Tartan Heart Festival
FIONA SHEPHERD

TARTAN HEART FESTIVAL ****
BELLADRUM, NR BEAULY

EVERY festival should have its own identity. In a few short years, Belladrum's Tartan Heart gathering has garnered a reputation as Scotland's laidback family-friendly festival, with its rather random musical bill offset by its characterful setting, strong local connections, its late-night revels and the amount of people wandering around in fancy dress - white rabbits, man with TV on his head, that sort of thing. Surely they can't all be children's entertainers?

For such a bijou festival, there was an impressive array of activities. At any one time - say, around eight o'clock on Saturday night - you could be watching a Johnny Cash tribute act on the main stage, checking out a hip new band on the Hothouse and Seedlings Stages, attending a reading with Liz Lochhead in the Verb Garden spoken-word tent, watching a musical in the Venus Flytrap cabaret tent, salsa dancing in Madame Fifi's Dance Parlour, communing with folk singer Martha Tilston at the Signing Tent, going hell for leather on one of a number of bouncy castles or churning your own smoothie using pedal power.

Later, when the main programme of live music shut down for the night, various tents transformed into comedy clubs, cinemas, burlesque shows and singalong-a-musical jamborees, and the Miniscule of Sound - the world's smallest nightclub, with a capacity of six - opened for business, with instructions to tie up your sheep and salmon outside.

Rather than dominate the site, the main arena, housing the Garden Stage, is set in its own picturesque enclave. This natural amphitheatre in the remains of an Italian garden is one of the loveliest settings of any festival stage. On Friday, Skye's Peatbog Faeries fiddled up a storm there for the partying crowd, while a bunch of kids conducted their own ceilidh in the corner, brandishing streamers.

The Magic Numbers may not have been the most scintillating choice of first-night closing acts, but there was no disputing their feel-good vibes. They were joined on stage, first by Martha Wainwright for an idiosyncratic version of the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra track Some Velvet Morning, and then by larger-than-life inflatable versions of the cartoon incarnations which appear on their artwork.

Wainwright had already performed her own spellbinding solo acoustic set on the Hothouse Stage, where she in turn was joined by Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham on one track. The righteously barmy Julian Cope was another highlight, rocking the biker stormtrooper look, dishing out heavy, primitive riffola, plus a handful of hits, and scaling his extendable mike stand.

There were some scheduling anomalies over the weekend. Bright young Scots hope Amy MacDonald packed out the compact Grassroots marquee on Friday, causing traffic jams at the doors of the tent. The Venus Flytrap tent was even more oversubscribed the next day. As Fake Bush's affectionate, playful and accurate Kate Bush tribute act drew to a hysterical close with a communal rendition of Wuthering Heights, the queues were forming for another Kate - Kate Nash, whose estuary-accented keyboard ditties are this month's favourite flavour.

From the brand new to the venerable. Dub reggae veterans Misty in Roots are seasoned festival pros, and it showed in their effortlessly classy, danceable set on the Garden Stage.

Meanwhile, Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby seemed an odd musical partnership - he a cuddly old English punk and she a sassy Americana songwriter from New York - but it transpires that they are partners in life too, hence their adorable onstage rapport. In the flurry of appreciation for Eric's Whole Wide World, it was not entirely clear whether the audience - old-age punks, mostly - had just witnessed Rigby accepting a proposal of marriage.

Next up on the Grassroots Stage was the dreadlocked and eyelinered Duke Special, whose jaunty piano pop was dressed up with clarinet, saxophone and improv percussion from his band members to give the performance a colourful vaudeville cabaret flourish. Though Lloyd Cole could not compete on a dramatic level, he had the well-loved back catalogue on his side. However, he remains a diffident performer and eventually lost some of his audience to main stage headliners James, whose populist anthems galvanised the generations in the main arena. Even their sombre tribute to Tony Wilson, the Mancunian music industry kingpin who died earlier in the weekend, could not dampen the party spirit.

However, as the fireworks exploded over the Garden Stage, the most consistently entertaining act of the weekend were already engaged in a marathon set in a far-flung corner of the site. The Duke's Box exemplified, better than any other performers, the celebratory spirit of Belladrum, with their human jukebox renditions of everything from Johnny Cash classics to cheesy rave hits performed live inside their tiny party bus.

This was a great festival though the weather was disgusting. I think it was better before we arrived - almost from the moment we got out of the car the rain poured down. It was a bit like the battle of The Somme. Normal festival conditions in fact.
The organisers were very good to us and the backstage catering people let us hang out in their marquee drinking tea and munching our way through a box Crawfords Assorted long after they'd shut down for the night.

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We set off early and got there the night before so that we could see The Magic Numbers. They were very good, there was no denying that, but I felt somewhat disappointed because they were so fucking wholesome, or at least the frontman was. It's as though part of being OK about being fat (which by the way is fine by me) involves having no edge whatsoever lest they be accused of having a chip on the shoulder, of being hung-up about it. He was just so unerringly NICE, referring to and addressing the audience as you guys as in 'We've been walking around this afternoon and we've met so many of you guys today'. When the large inflatable versions of themselves came on at the end he came out with a matey smirk and chortled 'Hope none of you guys are tripping!'
I have to say that chortled is not a word I care to use - it's just that there really isn't another word to adequately describe this sick-making moment. I almost feel that I should apologise now. This disgusting word has been used against me a couple of times by writers whose entire reading experience before taking up journalism must have been The Beano, The Dandy and possibly The Hotspur (if they were old enough).
On the plus side of course he's a fabulous rhythm guitarist. And the bass player is wonderful.

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I get really pissed-off about this sort of thing - Amy gets described as Sassy - I come out of it with Cuddly. Other than that I can't decide which is worse, English punk or Americana. One conjures an image of some sort of diabolical cheap aftershave with a label depicting a galleon in full sail, a large safety pin stuck though its mizzen; the other puts me in mind of a model of America, much like Legoland, but made out of Meccano.
At the end of the set I just happened to mention that we were getting married. I think my exact words were 'Amy Rigby - she's going to marry me!' Something like that. It wasn't a proposal, it had already been decided. I certainly wouldn't have proposed on stage for fear of rejection which would have been extra humiliating in front of an entire tentful of people. And in any case she might not have heard me above the noise.
And apart from that, before I leave this largely positive review, I can't imagine how the audience could be described as old-age punks, with the possible exception of members of the Alabama Three who came to see us play and stayed up the front for the whole set shouting encouragement. (We were absolutely honoured.) But anyway, some of the audience were quite old, but not all of them. And just because they were old doesn't mean they were necessarily punks. Some of them might well have been caravanners, anglers, estate agents, check-out girls, mods, rockers, market gardeners or fish for all we know. And we had a good view of them from the stage. You wouldn't get that kind of view from the reviewers perspective.