The July Wakes Festival took place on 23 , 24 and 25 July 1976 at Park Hall, Charnock Richard, Chorley, Lancashire. Promoted by Brian Adams and Barry Holt in conjunction with Rubber Records. John performed on Sunday 25 July at 10pm as headliner. The concert was bootlegged and subsequently released by Voiceprint Records on the One World Label as The July Wakes.
JOHN MARTYN
John Martyn is a man of paradox. A performer who interplays a cockney brashness in conversation with his audience against an emotive warmth in his singing and fiery virtuosity in his playing.
His roots weld traditional folk and blues aspects with the frontiers of jazz, and in his hands his guitars are singularly expressive and spellbinding. He draws strength from two sources, his music and his family, and it is to these that he devotes his total energy.
It is this kind of intensity which John applies to everything he does. When he turned his attention to music and began playing guitar at age 19 (in 1967), he progressed so rapidly that three months after he started recording his first album for Island.
It was called ‘London Conversation’, and was a most impressive debut which clearly showed his potential. Since then many albums have followed, John Martyn’s music refuses to be typecast; it is an amalgam of several constituents which lose some of their defining characteristics as they merge together to form a whole greater than the sum of parts. There is no concern for phony proprieties which dictate which people are allowed to perform certain forms of music.
THE WAKES TRADITION
There appears to have been an ancient, wide-spread belief probably of pagan orgin, that excessive mourning can raise the dead, or if not actually to bring the corpse back from the grave, then at least to cause it terrible torment and prevent tt from resting in peace. It has long been a practise of primitive peoples to make feasting, dancing and merry-making a standard part of the procedure at funeral ceremonies.
If song references are to be taken seriously there seems to have been a wide misuse of this belief, since it appears to have been a common practice, amongst breaved lovers of either sex, to mourn for the prolonged period of twelve months and one day – a curious length of time – in order that the departed lover would rise from the grave and so rejoin their partner. This does not always seem to be successful, since the risen dead appeared to want nothing more than t o be left to rest in peace.
It became common practise to hold a Funeral Wake at all funerals, and the name ‘Wake’ presumably having its orgin in this ancient belief and being derived in some way from the ‘waking’ of the dead. The ‘Wake’ incorporated various kinds of merrymaking as an antidote to the mourning that was feared might arouse the dead. These ‘Wakes’, as might be expected, are not common today, though they are still held in parts of the British Isles under this name. The Irish Funeral wakes are rather more common in the more rural areas of Ireland, and are rather more boisterous than their preseht day English counterparts, being celebrated, one would imagine, in the manner in which the older-style wakes were once held. The mourners are expected to provide whiskey and a barrel of porter as well as food and tobacco. The mourners then proceed to sit up all night with the coffin, eating and drinking all the while.
It becomes rather more difficult to trace the origins of the present day ‘Wakes’ as we know them: They were originally held as fairs, generally to mark a church’s patronal festival and were usually of a days duration. They appeared to have little or no connection with the dead, and one can only hazard a guess as to the link between the old superstitious beliefs and these festivities. It is common knowledge however, that in the early days of Christianity when the Church could not persuade the people to rid themselves of such pagan rites then these ceremonies were placed under Church patronage and the pretext for the festivities was changed from pagan to Christian even though the ceremony often retained a similar title. One of the oldest such surviving fairs is St. Giles’ Fair at Oxford, which has outlived four of the city’s charter fairs.
As time passed the wakes became longer and the underlying religious meanings were forgotten. Many factories began to close down to allow the machinery to be overhauled , thus giving the workers several days unpaid holiday. In the early and mid 19th century the Wakes were festivals held during these periods of enforced idleness, and were three or four days or even a week in length. They consisted of a Fairground, feasting and dancing, and sports of various kinds, some of which sound to have been extremely odd, to say the least.
The Stockport Advertiser August 5th 1825, contains the following paragraph: Didsbury Wakes… The enjoyments consist chiefly of ass-races, for purses of gold; prison-bar playing and grinning through collars, for ale; hag-racing, for hats; foot-racing for sums of money; maiden plates, for ladies under twenty years of age, for gown pieces, shawls etc; treacled-loaf eating, for various rewards; wheelbarrow races, the best heats; smoking matches; apple-dumpling eating; bell racing and balls each evening…
At the present time Wakes Week has become synonymous with the closing down, not only of factories, but of other Industries and shops as well, and the town’s inhabitants join in a mass exodus to mass congenial areas. It is not that Wakes Week (or more recently, Wakes Fortnight, now a paid holiday) is no longer celebrated with the old verve, but the merrymakers are no longer content to stay at home to do so. The Wakes towns are uncannily still and deserted, and long way divorced from the old Wakes festivities when the streets were packed with people.
The connection between the old superstitions and the present day Wakes is indeed so tenuous that the link may be in name only, but one fact is clear and cannot be disputed; whatever its meaning in the past, a Wake has become an occasiqn of pleasure and long may it remain so.
