Saturday, 11 September 2010 
Festivals
12/07/2010
Brampton 'Phoenix' rises as All Along the Wall hits the road
Just weeks after the North of England’s biggest roots festival - Brampton Live – was cancelled, the proverbial phoenix has risen from the ashes of the 16th Cumbrian music extravaganza.
The festival was due to take place near Carlisle between July 16-18 with a bumper line-up of artists from the UK, America and Canada but was sadly pulled by the organizers last month, amid disappointing ticket sales and decreased funding and sponsorship.
But now a new chapter has begun in the Brampton Live story. The specially commissioned, star-studded songwriting and poetry show celebrating Hadrian’s Wall, which was to be the centrepiece of the 2010 festival, is to take to the road under the banner “Brampton Live’s All Along the Wall”. It will now receive its official premiere on Sunday, August 22 at the first Green Phoenix Festival on the National Trust’s glorious Gibside Estate at Rowlands Gill, near Gateshead, Newcastle and Durham.
The show features a diverse mix of some of the UK’s very best songwriters – Durham’s Jez Lowe, Cumbria’s Julie Matthews and Orkney-based Rory McLeod together with Boo Hewerdine and Ruth Notman and Radio 4 poets Kate Fox and Elvis McGonagall (all of whom will also perform solo sets at the Green Phoenix Festival).
The 75-minute performance is the result of the septet spending a week “on retreat” Big Brother style in a remote Northumbrian farmhouse and brainstorming ideas for this collaborative melting pot work which celebrates the past and present of one of England’s best known landmarks – and one of the Roman Empire’s greatest engineering feats – Hadrian’s Wall, situated just a few miles from Brampton. The Wall stretches coast to coast for some 70 miles of the most scenic areas of Northumbria and Cumbria and the artists have managed to reference many locations along the way. More on what the performers made of their experience can be seen at www.myspace.com/bramptonlive
It has also been confirmed that All Along the Wall will be performed on January 26, 2011 at the famous Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow – the world’s largest winter music festival.
www.greenphoenixfestval.org.uk
