How time flies! FolkEast is 10 this summer. During the last decade it has transformed itself from a tucked away, fledgling event at Somerleyton Hall, to a nationally recognised, fully fledged festival at Glemham Hall, just outside Saxmundham.

FolkEast is the realisation of a dream for music fans and traditional music impresarios John and Becky Marshall-Potter, of Blaxhall, who, when you meet them, clearly pour their heart and soul into making it one of the leading events in the country.

The Jackalope, a mythical dancing hare with antlers, has become the widely recognised symbol for the festival and has helped give the Suffolk event an identity beyond folk fans. In fact, this year they are installing a four-and-a-half metre tall Jackalope sculpture by Tobias Ford, who created Pakefield Man for First Light.

The term folk music causes Becky to wrinkle her nose. She dislikes the pre-conceptions and the baggage that come with the term and wishes they could find a better way of describing the sort of music they stage, but 'folk' obstinately remains the best description.

“Folk, like country, like jazz, is a broad church. It embraces all sorts of creative ideas and sounds, but while it is rooted in traditional forms it is looking very much at the here and now – at people and their relationships, at life and love – at birth and death. It’s all there.”

The pair are based in Suffolk and pride themselves in FolkEast and all their events being rooted in the community rather than being imposed upon them.

It is important to both John and Becky that, as far as possible, all the infrastructure, the staging, the transport, the crews, the toilet as well as all the food and drink sold on site have come from the locality. The beer tent has 15 local ale, many from small, independent brewers. They actively seek out suppliers from Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex – many of them have been with them since the beginning. Even specialised stage equipment largely comes from companies based at the old Bentwaters airbase.

Becky said: “This means our carbon footprint is kept to a minimum. The majority of our gear and supplies comes from within the county and our two solar units meet a large part of our power needs.”

The pair are clearly proud of the fact that while FolkEast celebrates East Anglian traditions, it also attracts a national following and is highly regarded by the folk community.

For John it’s important that, from the beginning, they gave audiences the best experiences possible and provided artists with not only a warm welcome, but, a highly professional working environment.

“For me, it’s all about quality. It’s always been at the top of my list, right from the very beginning. We were a new festival. Nobody knew who we were. We had to build a reputation quickly, and the best way to do that was to provide both performers and audiences with the best experience they could imagine.

“We had the best gear, the best sound, the lighting, the best toilets, food, showers, beer… and people went away and they talked about us. So, when we started booking acts, we found that they already knew about us because they had run into friends who had already performed here and they had told them about how well they were treated.

“Similarly, when tickets went on sale, our audiences built steadily because music fans who had been in previous years not only came back for more, they brought their friends who they had been enthusing to.”

The popularity of FolkEast is helped by its bond with the Blaxhall Ship pub, which is well known in folk circles for its folk nights and its support for fledgling performers. John and Becky make sure the pub plays a major role in events the whole year round, not just during the August festival.

John says: “It’s great having the Blaxhall Ship, a pub that’s known nationally in the folk world, as the pub that’s closest to the festival. It’s here that we host a spin-off event through the winter months called The Blaxhall Sessions – which we do in the village hall and everyone piles back to the pub at the end.

“We had The Wilsons here three or four years ago they were sat in here until two in the morning having just played a gig in the village hall.”

John is bringing a lifetime of experience to FolkEast having been a part of the concert and event industry for the past 45 years. Becky was an actress and a schoolteacher before giving up the ‘day job’ to help John run FolkEast when it started growing fast.

John said: “I’ve always worked in the industry. The first professional event I worked on was Knebworth in 1979 and I have done stuff ever since – mostly open-air. I suppose FolkEast came about because I started thinking about getting older. I knew that there would come a point when, physically, I wasn’t able to rig a stage anymore. I have done most jobs over the years. I started as an electrician, but nowadays I act as the technical manager.”

For many years he was constantly travelling across Europe and driving up and down to London in the early hours of the morning. By his own admission: “it was exhausting.”

“I was working flat out. I remember thinking I can’t keep doing this, but I got to thinking as long as I can use a computer and have access to a phone, I can still put an event together. I love what I do and I just wanted to keep doing it.”

Then fate stepped in and provided John with a perfect opportunity to put his plans into action – and also work from home. The, then, Halesworth resident was offered the opportunity to take on the running of the annual Gig in the Park.

“The lad who set it up was unable to continue and the town was quite keen for it to continue, so I took it on – that was around 2001 and we built it up year by year before we finally brought it to a close in 2012 when we started FolkEast because there was no way we could run both.”

He says that doing Gig in the Park for 10 years allowed them to build up a loyal, knowledgeable crew. “We all did Gig… for the love of it but looking back today it was like a dry run for FolkEast.”

Although, the festival is now synonymous with Glemham Hall, the Jackalope and the ribbon-strewn tree in the grounds of the hall, FolkEast originally had a different home.

John explains: “The first event in 2012 was at Somerleyton Hall, near Lowestoft. It was originally going to be at Henham. Hector Rous and myself had been talking for a long time about it but in 2010 a new Noise Code of Conduct came into force and that meant that you could only do three nights a year on one licensed site at the maximum permitted db levels. If you did more than three nights you had to drop the db levels for all events.

“That meant that if we started our three-day event at Henham in August then Latitude would have to turn their volume level down and that clearly wouldn’t wash. So, we went looking for another site and it was the environmental health officer at Waveney who suggested Somerleyton.

“Having had a chat with Hugh Crossley, the owner of the hall, we agreed to do it there and it went very well. Hugh and Lara liked it, but Hugh is quite passionate about the land. So when I contacted him at Christmas about announcing the next year’s event – we had already started booking some of the acts for the following year – he emailed back and said that he’d had second thoughts about the festival and wanted to pull out.

“He said that it was clearly going to be successful and if that was the case it would be more difficult for him to shut it down later, if he had other plans for the site, so he would rather ‘knock it on the head now’ as he phrased it.

“So, we went into a slight panic. I immediately fired off an email to every stately home in Suffolk and Norfolk and the same afternoon Glemham came back to me. Donna Stockley, the events manager there, was very enthusiastic. We went to meet them, and within two weeks we had our new venue. We’ve been there ever since.”

Becky adds: “We’ve always got on very well with Glemham. It’s always been a family-based reciprocal thing. It’s how we work as well, so we have a very similar ethos. Also, it’s perfect from an access point of view because its right on the A12.”

This year’s anniversary event is the first full festival since lockdown. Ticket sales are back up at 2019 pre-COVID levels which confirms that cross-generational audiences are ready to party again.

Becky says that they are buoyed by that. “Research for the Arts Council has revealed that folk festivals take a long time to get off the ground but once they are established audiences are very loyal and return year after year. This loyalty is illustrated by the fact that advance ticket sales are doing so well.”

The pandemic hit FolkEast hard, as it did for all festivals, but they were able to make sure something happened each year even if it was to broadcast some live sessions online (in 2020 that meant playing to 200 people in four metre squares). In 2021 they were able to bring back a more secure, scaled back version of the regular festival which was also streamed.

John and Becky invested in new technology and got themselves trained up for a new digital world which enabled them to reach out and bring some joy to their locked down audience and also to remind the world at large that they were still here.

“Thanks to the Arts Council’s Cultural Recovery Fund we got some money for streaming equipment and we managed very well, providing we could get a good signal.” Becky laughs at the memory. “At one of the Blaxhall sessions in 2020 with Eliza Carthy, I found myself leaning over a hedge outside the village hall waving a hub up into the air with everyone going. That’s it, leave it there and I spent the next hour or so holding this hub aloft while everyone else was inside enjoying the show.

“We were determined to keep the festival going. Quite a few festivals up and down the country are struggling but on the other hand some good has come out of it.

John adds: “It has encouraged events to talk to each other. I have been involved in a monthly zoom meeting over the past two years with other organisers and what that did was provide a platform where we could all share our knowledge.

“Touch wood we have got away with things fairly lightly – apart from a slight issue with showers last year which we have fixed this year – we have managed to keep all our suppliers with us.”

He adds that the additional health and safety measures such as extra sanitising stations and better layouts would remain giving people confidence that FolkEast was a safe event as will elements of the digital world allowing live international link-ups but it is the live experience that remains at the heart of the event.

This year’s line-up includes The Unthanks, Kate Rusby, Festival patrons The Young ‘Uns, and supergroup The Imagined Village featuring Billy Bragg, Martin and Eliza Carthy, Simon Emmerson, Sheema Mukherjee, Andy Gangadeen and many more.

There’s locally sourced food and drink, an art show and the return of the vintage mobile cinema which will be showing local film-maker Bill Jackson’s documentary about the creation of Laurence Edwards' Yoxman sculpture.

FolkEast takes place at Glemham Hall from Friday, August 19, to Sunday, August 21. For tickets and more information visit folkeast.co.uk