… that awoke me this morning. Things aren’t looking so good for the Festival. Still, the show must go on I suppose.

And no, this isn’t a misprint with me copying from yesterday – it’s merely a carbon copy of what has happened this morning.

However it did clear up enough for me to have a shower and make a coffee, and while I was on the computer Cécile appeared and so she had a guided tour of the Dodge and the campsite on Skype and the webcam.

Into town at lunchtime where the weather caught up with me again and I sought refuge in the library. With a stable internet connection I could do all kinds of things and catch up on a lot of stuff that I had let go for the moment.

The music this evening started off at 19:30 and I was in the Hoodoo House. First on stage was a guy called LeeBoy from Monastery, near Antigonish in Nova Scotia.

He’d had success in some of these reality TV stuff and songwriting competitions and while I’ve seen better acoustic blues performers, I’ve also seen a lot worse.

He certainly put everything that he had into his performance which, although it might not have been a lot, was nevertheless quite an acceptable warm-up act.

Next up was a three-piece blues band – guitar, bass and drums – the typical blues power trio. At last, the right number of musicians on stage.

This was Steve Strongman from Hamilton Ontario. He’s been on the road for over 20 years, so they say, so I imagine that he’s pretty tired by now and his feet must hurt. They say that he is quite well-known, with a string of blues albums to his name.

His set was absolutely excellent. I really enjoyed this. Shame that he got the gob-iron out halfway through his act but then again I don’t suppose that you can have everything. Why do blues musicians think that they have to have a mouth-organ?

There was a half-hour break at the Hoodoo House and so I went for a wander outside. We had the usual street entertainers who have now moved in, seeing as how the streets are now blocked off. This guy was on a plank on a few tin cans juggling with flaming brands.

Yes, it is a flaming brand, not a perishing torch.

I also enountered a couple of Fredericton’s finest. Two women as well, patrolling the streets of the Festival, the first that I’ve seen here.

One of them (for I did ask) told me that there was just 8 on duty tonight patrolling the streets of the city, a Provincial capital at that. I compared that to a music festival in the UK where there would be 800 bobbies patrolling the festival alone, always assuming that the festival would be allowed to go ahead, given the pathetic UK Health and Safety rules.

I’d seen the Avett Brothers, a country and western band from North Carolina, doing a sound check in the Alexander Keith tent earlier and so I went over to see what they were up to, because it sounded interesting.

I don’t think much of Country and Western but if it’s really good then it’s excellent and I quite enjoy it. However this wasn’t as good as it was cracked up to be during the sound check and so I didn’t hang around for too long, just in case they started up with “I Lost Control Of My 18-Wheeler And Ran Over My Dog”.

At the Barracks Square, there was a band called Billy Dre and the Poor Boys playing.

They certainly lived up to their name because “Poor” was exactly the word, although there was a spelling mistake in the leader’s name – there was an “I” missing.

This was punk rock at its worst and I do not understand how the organisers of the Festival had let these people (I refuse to use the term “musicians”) onstage at all.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like their music, the singer/guitzrist had in my humble … "humble?" – ed … little technical capability and the bassist even less. I reckoned that this was bringing the Festival into disrepute.

Back in the Hoodoo House (to which I had fled) The Record Company, from Los Angeles, took the stage.

Another power trio, and another excellent power trio too. While they were not as technically efficient as Steve Strongman and his band, they certainly knew how to move a crowd and their performance was thoroughly enjoyable.

And so heading back to my campsite in the torrential rain, I mused on how I had seen that evening two of the best bands that I had seen for ages, and also musing on the fact that how a band like Billy Dre and the Poor Boys could pack them into a tent whereas Steve Strongman and The Record Company didn’t even have 250 spectators.

And all of this just goes to show that my opinion counts for nothing in moments like these when it comes to personal taste in music.