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home » festivals » Truck festival » Wood 2011
Wood feels like a big garden party with folk musicWood 2011 reviewWednesday 25th May 2011 Set in the depths of south Oxfordshire, Wood festival, now in its fourth year is the successful friendly little sister of Truck festival. With many folk and world music acts to see and an extensive array of workshops to get involved with, it's certainly making a name for itself as the most family friendly festival in the country.
There are also numerous kids tents, and lots of big toys left lying around for them to play with, accompanied by the occasional appearance of the 'Truck Monster' for them to hug and get their photo taken with. Arriving at the festival on the Friday evening the first thing that strikes you is how compact the site is, with just 800 paying customers everything is contained in the one 55-acre field, with only the car parking in a separate area and you can walk from one side of the site to the other inside five minutes. After setting up camp in a blustery field we went to see our first band of the evening.
The festival adopts an approach of organising the timetable as such that you don't miss a band, so you could in theory watch every band on the top two stages if you so wished. As the evening drew on, Mama Rosin claimed what must have been the biggest crowd of the evening. With a lead singer looking like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons they invited the crowd to get up to dance to their popular song 'Honky Tonky' which had all the parents and young children in face paint jumping about at the front of the stage.
Due to the site being so small, there isn't much in the way of entertainment apart from the Cycle disco after the bands have finished so the organisers put on a controlled bonfire for everyone who wanted to stay up after hours to keep warm and enjoy a few more drinks long into the night. Everyone got into the spirit of things, and punters and performers brought along their instruments to play, with guitars, bongos, harmonicas and clarinet all being brought out whilst everyone else clapped away to the beat.
A glorious morning had most campers up and about early, with some of the workshops up and running by 9am. Due to the small scale of the festival, the music stopped whilst the workshops were open to ensure no one missed out on anything so they could do something else. Most of the workshops tried to either make something or teach you a new skill.
We sat in on the sun soaked bank of the main stage sipping on a few Cotswold ciders and enjoyed performances from Band of Hope, and Owen Tromans before heading off to enjoy some of the food the festival has to offer. Despite a small attendance there was still a good choice of grub to keep you going. There was a pizza stall where you had your pizza cooked in open wood-burning oven, or the main restaurant area which served tea and cakes on one side, with the other running through full English breakfasts, healthy organic lunches and full dinners such as curries and chicken and rice all provided by a restaurant from Oxford.
Back at the Wood stage unusually named 3-piece Uiscedwr (taken from a mix of Irish and Welsh language meaning "water") fired the crowd up with an array of traditional Irish music to get the crowd going. As the sun went down and the temperature dropped rapidly, we took place up by the fire whilst watching Willy Mason on the Wood Stage.
We sat round the campfire chatting to other festival goers, and trying to keep ourselves warm, whilst listening to a group of girls murder an array of songs, when they got round to Grease's 'Grease Lightening' that was our cue to leave and retreat back to the warmth of our sleeping bags. Our last day at the festival was not as hot, and as such I was saved the boil in the (tent) bag effect till nearly 9.30am. After we had sorted ourselves out with a few coffees and breakfast we settled down to watch Polly & The Billets Doux who were a 4-piece from Winchester. Giving the crowd a mix of folk, country and blues, the trend was suddenly broken when Polly started rapping in-between one of the songs, which certainly woke the majority of the crowd and showed the depths of her talents beyond her usual realms.
As the weekend drew to a close we enjoyed Two Fingers of Firewater, Green Lines, and Zeus, before finishing off our Wood festival experience with Eliza Carthy Band, who provide the crowd with an array of amusing tales through their songs including one about having her drink spiked at the premier of Jerry Springer the opera and jokes about watching too much daytime TV now that she's heavily pregnant. We then decide to pack up and trudge out of the festival, listening to local heroes Dreaming Spires play the last set of the weekend in the Tree tent. It's an odd feeling though, I didn't even feel like I'd been to a festival, more like a big garden party with music. If you like folk music or you just want a weekend at a festival where your young children will be safe and have plenty of things to keep them occupied then Wood is the perfect setting for you.  review by Stuart Watson photos by Ian Norris 
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