SUMMER’S END FESTIVAL
VENUE CHEPSTOW DRILL HALL
DATE 04/10/2019-06/10/2019
Summer’s End Festival reaches its 15th edition, something to be celebrated in its own right. And, as always, prog fans are flocking to it from all over the globe. With Norway’s Wobbler and The Windmill on the bill, as well as Swedes Hasse Fröberg & Musical Companion, there’s a healthy contingent of excitable Scandinavians adding perpetual smiles to proceedings all weekend.
It’s interesting to note that it doesn’t seem to be just the usual suspects arriving in Chepstow either. New faces are noted, some younger than before, and more women to boot. We don’t know if it’s just us, but the genial atmosphere that always pervades Summer’s End seems in even more plentiful supply in 2019.
FRIDAY
There’s a very busy audience in an already warm Drill Hall when festival openers take the stage. It’s perhaps not ideal, the band have also undergone an acrimonious split with former singer Lucie Vox. So tonight is a bit of a trial by fire for replacement vocalist Nigel Voyle, the former Cyan singer. It has to be said it’s not brilliant. No matter how much bonhomie is on display from guitarist Danny Chang and the rest of the band, it can’t mask the fact that Voyle isn’t on the ball, his pacing and phrasing are way off the mark, his tunefulness (which one assumes, having worked with Rob Reed in the past, isn’t an issue), pretty much nonexistent. Perhaps it’s all just a bit too early for the new line-up? Time will inevitably tell.
