Dominic was the youngest of six children in an Irish Catholic family growing up on the moors that fringe Sheffield. His father worked in the plastics industry, making vandal-resistant bus shelters and this afforded him to send his final child to the most elite of private schools. He studied at Eton (a couple of years below David Cameron) and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 1995.

His early screen appearances included Mona Lisa Smile, True Blue and Chicago opposite Renée Zellweger; he also played Spartan politician Theron in 300. But his career-defining move was securing the role of Jimmy McNulty in The Wire. “I just did my best De Niro impression,” he told the Guardian. And there are obvious similarities with some of the skulking, unpredictable, but somehow competent characters associated with De Niro.

As a theatre actor he has extensive experience and has appeared as Konstantin in Peter Hall-directed The Seagull (1996), Orlando in David Lan’s As You Like It (2005) and more recently he played the lead role of Jan in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll (2007) in London’s West End.

Guardian columnist Marina Hyde will be interviewing Dominic at the festival this year, where he’ll also be reading with Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s from her dark new play, Wisconsin.

www.hbo.com/thewire

Video:

Jimmy McNulty gets trashed

The Promised Land — A Swamp Pop Journey is a film that takes you to the heart of South Louisiana’s musical phenomenon – swamp pop. Tracing founder member CC Adcock’s search through the swamps and flatlands, we witness firsthand the formation of a band of unsurpassed talents and heart-warming personalities they now call Lil’ Band O’ Gold.

Every member is a master of a different musical style: 70-year-old Warren Storm, a veteran blues drummer and Swamp Pop singer; 68-year-old Dickie Landry, a careering avant-garde art jazzman on saxophone and Steve Riley, arguably the greatest traditional Cajun accordionist alive today.

Filmed by London based filmmaker Matthew Wilkinson with an impressionistic, freewheeling affection for its subject and unfettered access over two and a half years, The Promised Land shows us a part of America where there is still a local, non-corporate culture based around music and food. It’s a culture that operates by word of mouth and local knowledge and one that never forgets to make ‘em dance. The Promised Land is a bittersweet film about people from America’s neglected South with one thing left to keep their hope alive – music.

“The Promised Land provides a convincing, amusing and sometimes moving cinematic treatise on the subject… Watching the sometimes casual, sometimes intense creative process of these ragin’ Cajuns is nothing less than captivating. This is a film you don’t want to end. In fact, where’s their next gig? I’ll fly, I’ll drive, I’ll walk.”
Ron Maxwell (writer-director, Gettysburg)

“A terrific film about Louisiana and a supergroup of local musicians who come together to make extraordinary music.”
Louis Black (Founder, South by Southwest Festival)

Links:

• The Promised Land on imdb.com
• The Promised Land trailer

Lammas (the festival of the first wheat harvest of the year) is approaching on 1 August, so she’ll be dressed as the Corn Mother and will speak about old harvest customs and other aspects of this ancient Celtic festival. She’ll also be joining Simon Costin at his Museum of British Folklore caravan.

www.stonewylde.com

Sean’s award-winning films include Mission Accomplished: Langan in Iraq (2004), Afghan Ladies Driving School (2006) and Fighting the Taliban (2007). In March 2008, whilst working on a film for Channel 4, Sean was kidnapped in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region by a group associated with the Taliban. He was freed three months later, unharmed, after his family negotiated his release.

Toby Young, writing in the Telegraph soon afterwards, said: “He is a real charmer, something that undoubtedly helped him get through this ordeal…he had done everything in his power to win over his captors, knowing that his fate could turn on whether they took a liking to him or not.” Wryly comparing his experience with I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, Sean wrote in the Guardian: “thankfully, the Taliban never tortured me in the same way Nicola (McLean) was tortured by Timmy Mallett.”

The Telegraph’s Mick Brown will be interviewing Sean at the festival this year.

www.seanlangan.co.uk

“Sean Langan is a film-maker who’s often managed to go where other film-makers fear to, or are unable to, tread. In Langan in Iraq he was one of the first filmmakers to document the Iraqi insurgency, and in Tea With the Taliban he got the first TV interviews with the Taliban. Fighting the Taliban saw him get a very rare embed with British forces in Afghanistan.”
– Intelligent Factual Festival

Links:

• Sean Langan article in The Guardian
• Watch: Channel 4 News meets Sean Langan

Video:

Sean Langan: Meeting the Taliban (Part 1 of 5):

Told in their own words: “Caught By The River was born on a bankside a little over two years back during an idle day’s casting. The idea – a website that would document lazy days out – became a reality a few months afterwards. Without a great deal of nurturing, it soon grew into a place that people could eulogize about the things that made the working week bearable – books, records, art, nature, angling, drinking, even cake baking. The approach was exactly like putting together a fanzine – an unshackled, uncynical torrent of enthusiasm. Here was our modern take on something hardwired in as part of punk rock culture, only this time the patron saints were Roger Deakin, Chris Yates and Chris Watson rather than Johnny & Joe; the sound of razored guitar strings replaced by bird song and the gentle plonk as the float hits the water.

“In an age of blackberries, mobiles, and time is money, fishing is an increasingly eccentric pastime. We often sit for hours and nothing happens. There really is no point to it. Coarse fishermen don’t even eat their catch. However, if you fish, you have the time to think again, to appreciate and savour the moment. Fishing enables you to take stock, gain perspective, remember great books, hum a tune you haven’t thought of in years. It makes you human again. Sitting with your own thoughts is good for the soul, and you never know, a float might go under, an alarm sound and there’ll be a flurry of activity. Then again, maybe not. It doesn’t matter, you’ve taken time out of the rat race. That’s the key.”

The Caught By The River area will feature readings, live music, DJs and sound installations – hopefully creating the perfect environment to kick back and float away for a few hours… or days…

LINE-UP

FRIDAY 24th (evening only)

Dancin’ Shoes – The Heavenly Jukebox and friends playing good time soul and rock ‘n’ roll.
SATURDAY 25th

The Heavenly Jukebox plus live music from:

1pm    THE LOOSE SALUTE
The ‘sound of sunshine’ from Heavenly recording artistes. The perfect way to start proceedings.

2.30pm  JOHN HEAD
A rare treat – a solo performance by John Head from Shack (and The Strands and before that The Pale Fountains).  A real big fave of ours. Great songwriter and amazing guitar player.

4pm  KATHYRN WILLIAMS
A solo performance from Mercury nominated singer Kathryn, who cites her influences as including Nina Simone, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Simon And Garfunkel and Velvet Underground.

WILL HODGKINSON reading from his new book THE BALLAD OF BRITAIN. From Spring to Autumn in 2008, Will travelled around Britain making field recordings. The idea of the journey was to update the work of the great US folklorist Alan Lomax and capture the spirit of the land and its people through songs and stories. For this talk he will document the journey with a weather map, a few anecdotes, some thoughts on the nature of folk music and, with any luck, a spot of singing from some of the people he met along the way.

ELLIOT EASTWICK’S POP QUIZ

‘SATURDAY NIGHT FISH FRY’
Pete Reilly from the Soul Jazz Soundsystem, plus The Heavenly Jukebox and Romeo from The Magic Numbers.

At midnight, the film WINGED MIGRATION will be shown projected onto the quarry wall behind our tent with the added bonus of the wondrous BRITISH SEA POWER providing their own unique soundtrack, live.
SUNDAY 26th

1.15pm  CAUGHT BY THE RIVER ‘NATURE DISCO’ WITH VERY SPECIAL GUEST CHRIS WATSON
Britain’s premier nature sound recordist (and founder member of Cabaret Voltaire) plays a unique set of recordings of rivers from around the world.

Followed by readings from the book CAUGHT BY THE RIVER – A COLLECTION OF WORDS ON WATER.
Our friends John Andrews, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Kathryn Williams, John Niven, Chris Watson and Kurt Jackson read from their contributions to our book.

At 4pm, we will bid you farewell with a performance from the legendary Fence Recording artist KING CREOSOTE.

Having garnered a massive following of daily readers, dovegreyreader is now archived by The British Library as a social record for future research, frequently quoted in the press and read in over 125 countries. Recently chosen as one of this year’s Devon Women of Inspiration, Lynne often wonders quite how all this has happened.

www.dovegreyreader.co.uk

“One of the best and most widely read of the literary bloggers”
The Telegraph

Born in London in 1951, Richard first released The Doctors of Madness on an uncomprehending public in 1975. He founded the hugely influential mixed media Cabaret Futura in 1980, and has subsequently worked as an actor, appearing extensively on stage, in films and on television – including Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, Inkheart and Men Behaving Badly. As a writer, he’s a regular contributor to publications as diverse as the Guardian, Tatler Culture and Travel, and Vogue.

In 1989 to 1990 he toured the world in a Russian version of Hamlet, directed by Yuri Lyubimov; then, in 2003, toured the UK with award-winning dance theatre company Protein Dance – contributing as an actor, musician and writer. He worked with Marianne Faithful (2004 – 2007) on the Tom Waits/ William Burroughs/ Robert Wilson collaboration The Black Rider, and recently performed with the producer/arranger Hal Wilner – alongside such luminaries as Tim Robbins, Shane McGowan and Suzanne Vega.

Now comes his solo show, An Accent Waiting to Happen – so dig your heels in for a Strange trip. Richard will be singing songs, telling stories and reading from his memoir Strange Punks and Drunks and Flicks and Kicks, which was published to critical acclaim by Andre Deutsch in 2005. Strange days have found us…

www.richardstrange.com

“Strange must surely be the funniest man in London…It is impossible to spend any time within his looming majesty without being engulfed in gales of health-inducing mirth and a sense of fraternal bohemian bonhomie long lost to our crassly commercial times.”
Adrian Dannatt, The Art Newspaper

“18 years after first meeting him, just thinking about Richard still reduces me to a state of near hysteria…and terror. He restores one’s faith in the ability of the human spirit to soar.”
James Nesbitt

Links:

• 3am magazine interview with Richard Strange
• Richard sings ‘The Headless Horseman’ at Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown Festival

Video:

Richard Strange’s video for his latest song, ‘The New Academy’:

The Cannes premiere of ‘Mister Lonely’ (2007):

The group, co-directed by Helen Tipaldy and Sally Williams, have established a growing reputation, both for their own choreographed performances and work commissioned by leading theatre directors. Formed from a diversity of styles and artistic influences, Cscape have placed their unique and identifiable stamp on the world of theatre and dance. Bold performances combine both the comic and tragic to ultimately depict performance narratives that are unpretentious and human.

Previous performances include Guilty Fingers, Blonde, Landings, Road to the Beach and appearances at the Polperro Festival. Cscape have worked on a variety of commissions from some of the leading names in the theatre and dance industry, such as T.C Howard, Fleur Darkin and Simon Birch.

David Mead from Ballet-Dance magazine is certainly a fan: “One of the nice things about writing about dance is that every now and again you get a really pleasant surprise. That was certainly the case with CScape Dance Company and their sometimes hard-hitting, sometimes humorous form of dance theatre that brings together choreography and clever use of film and text.”

www.cscape.org.uk

“Cscape is a young company that deserve to go places. If they come your way, go take a look.”
David Mead, Ballet –Dance Magazine

“Cscape do something very special – consistently upping the status of dance in Cornwall. Fresh and vital, this is great storytelling through dance.”
Rebecca Hazzard, Hall for Cornwall

Links:

• Cscape Dance review in Dance-Ballet magazine
• Article about Don John

This new performance, entitled Pleat Mind Grease, incorporates sculptural elements and the spoken word, translating the manipulation of shapes and letters into a live process so that language and its formation is presented as a sort of choreography.

The ICA is “a meeting point for exploration between artists and audiences,” says Ekow Eshun. “The ICA examines the questions that shape our culture, society and individual lives. The ICA believes in creative adventure and art as inspiration. Ultimately, it’s not so much a place as a principle. A belief in the new. An enduring faith in the creativity of tomorrow.”

The Institute of Contemporary Arts was established in 1947 by a collective of artists, poets and writers to showcase and champion contemporary culture across a wide range of art forms. Since its establishment, it has been at the centre of many of the most significant artistic and cultural developments in the past 60 years. It has also introduced numerous artists, performers, writers and other cultural figures to a wider audience, both nationally and internationally.

www.ica.org.uk

More about Poor Old Tired Horse at www.ica.org.uk/poth

Auditions will be held and a programme created to give experience to young local performers to realise their potential through the chance to perform here and start to gain the knowledge of how to put on a festival themselves. Twenty Five aims to create a special experience bursting to the seams with dance, music, poetry, plays, workshops and much, much more.

Twenty Five is in partnership with Livewire of Saltash for this part of the show.