Cambridge Folk Festival compere Keith Day retires after 50 years
After 50 years as a compere at the Cambridge Folk Festival, Keith Day is stepping down from the role, meaning the 2024 edition, recently held at Cherry Hinton Hall, was his last.
Keith, a musician himself, moved to Cambridge in 1974 from Newcastle, having graduated with a degree in agricultural botany. He spent his second weekend in the city going to the 10th Folk Festival.
After becoming acquainted with Ken Woollard, the then festival director, through his association with the Cambridge Folk Club, Keith compered for the first time the following year.
“I did my first semi-pro gig [as a musician] when I was 14,” recalls Keith, who is originally from Lincolnshire, “but that wasn’t folk…
“Then when I went to university, I left the rock ‘n’ roll life behind and took an acoustic guitar, and the rest is history.”
Keith notes that everybody who works as a compere “either was a musician, or still is – and I’m in the ‘still is’ camp as I play in all sorts of bands”.
Recalling how he got the compere role, he says: “It started off running what was then the Club Tent where folk clubs ran the third stage on behalf of the festival. It doesn’t exist now.
“I was a member of Cambridge Folk Club, and started doing that, and then after a year or two I was writing the programme notes and still doing the Club Tent.
“Then Ken Woollard, who was the founder and director for the first 20-odd years, got fed up with people doing the announcements – he used to ask artists who were booked to do some them.
“But these were people who wanted to go on and tell a joke and almost dominate the stage. He said I want people who can get on, tell them what they want to know, and then get off.
“We [comperes] should be able to walk through the crowd with nobody recognising us. We weren’t part of the act, we were doing what we had to do.
“So he decided to use the Folk Club senior people to handle the compering on the main stages. I was in the first tranche and the other two have fallen by the wayside.
“One of them sadly passed away and the other one is rather infirm – in fact he stopped after two years, he just didn’t like doing it.”
Keith finds out information about the acts he’s introducing from the programme notes, and reveals: “You also have a word with all the acts before you go on and ask them ‘Is there anything you want me to say?’ It just gives you a little something.”
As this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival was his 50th and final one, Keith was awarded some “privileges”.
“On Thursday night, I opened the festival, welcomed people and I closed the Main Stage on Sunday night – so I bookended the event,” he explains.
“I was allowed to select who I wanted to introduce over the weekend, which is not normally done, and I had a little spot on Stage 2 to sing a couple of songs. So it was quite special because it was my 50th and my retirement.”
So why is Keith hanging up his microphone? “I didn’t want to be the Joe Biden of comperes!” he laughs.
“I mean I’m 71 now, and I thought at some stage in the next 10 or 15 years, I will get forgetful, or I won’t be able to climb the stairs as quickly, or I won’t be quite as on the ball.
“And I didn’t want to be the one for whom people would say ‘Well, he used to be good but look at him now’. So I thought ‘Get out while you’re ahead’.”
Keith says that the backstage team has had “virtually no change in personnel for years”, noting the most recent of the four main comperes joined about 15 years ago.
Looking back on some of the greatest performances he’s witnessed over the last five decades, he says: “Memorable and best are not necessarily the same thing because you remember them for the wrong reasons...
“I always love to see people who enjoy playing; I sincerely believe that if the people on stage are having a ball, the people in the audience catch that and they get to it.
“And there are two or three bands over the years, some of which I’d never heard of before they appeared, who were truly memorable.
“The two that spring to mind are an American Western Swing band called Asleep at the Wheel – world famous – and they came and they had an absolute ball on stage, and it made 5,000 people seem as if they were sitting in your front room…
“And there’s a band called La Bottine Souriante, which is a Canadian Québécois band who spoke very little English, and they had a ball. They were just great fun.
“You have to remember that sometimes being a compere is very frustrating, because if you are timetabled to go onto Stage 2 and the person you want to see is on Stage 1, that’s tough – you can’t go. So there’s lots of people who have played the festival which I haven’t seen.”
Has Keith ever felt a bit ‘starstruck’ coming face-to-face with some of popular music’s biggest names?
“To some extent,” he replies, “I mean meeting the likes of James Taylor and [French jazz violinist] Stéphane Grappelli…
“I was the only person who spoke French backstage when Stéphane Grappelli was playing there, so I was the person that had to talk to him because nobody else could.
“And my French ain’t that good, but it was better than anybody’s else’s!”
Keith, who worked in industry and then as a teacher at The Netherhall School before retiring, notes that comperes can eventually “get a bit immune” to being around famous people.
“Everybody’s very professional backstage,” he says. “Very rarely do you get a real diva – I could name some, but I won’t.
“Most people are very approachable, very amenable, very adaptable, and if you treat them with professional respect, they will treat you with professional respect.
“We’ve got jobs to do and they know behind the scenes that that’s what you’ve got to do.”
Come next summer, Keith says he’ll miss the “camaraderie of the backstage team”.
He adds: “They’ve already said I can have a ticket, which is very kind of them, but it’s the working with the same guys I’ve worked with for 20, 30 years and seeing them will be the bit that I’ll miss.
“It’s the people behind the scenes that the punters never see – the stage crews, the sound crews and those sort of people, the catering staff… they are friends and that’s the thing that I will miss more than anything else.”
Keith’s association with the festival also includes a double bass he owns which is on permanent loan to the festival, providing those who use it sign it. It was used this year by Transatlantic Sessions and was also signed by the late, great John Prine when he played the Main Stage a few years ago.
In other news, Keith has written his memoirs and hopes to publish them next year. However, he has made the chapter on the Folk Festival available to view for free.
It was made available ahead of this year’s festival and has already been downloaded around 130 times. It can be downloaded from shorturl.at/ZO7lK.
