So I need to talk to five thousand people about a folk song and I have never used PowerPoint in my life.
That's where we are. That's the situation.
My niece Aoife came over on Saturday to help me with the slides. She took one look at my "talk notes" — which were three pages of handwritten scribbles on the back of an ESB bill — and said, "Seamus, we need to start from scratch." She's seventeen. She speaks to me like I'm the child.
The talk is called "Revival and Resonance: How Folk Songs Stay Alive in the Digital Age." Which sounds VERY impressive and scholarly, except I didn't come up with the title. The festival organisers did. I would have called it "How I Accidentally Made a Song Famous Again by Running a Terrible Website." More honest, that.
I rang Mick for advice. His entire contribution was: "Just play the song, lad." I said, "Mick, it's a TALK. With SLIDES. In a TENT." He said, "Grand, play the song in the tent." Then he hung up.
Aoife has been showing me how to add images to slides. Did you know you can make text appear with ANIMATIONS? Like it flies in from the side? She said I shouldn't use that feature. She said it "gives 2005 energy." I said I AM 2005 energy. She didn't argue.
The actual content I'm not too worried about. I can talk about the song for hours — that's literally what this website proves. It's the STANDING IN FRONT OF PEOPLE part. In a field. With a microphone. Where they can SEE me.
I keep reminding myself: these are folk music people. They're sound. They're not going to throw things. (They're not going to throw things, right?)
If you're at Electric Picnic and you see a man backstage having a quiet panic attack, please buy him a cup of tea.
Slan go foill, BogLord2002
P.S. — Aoife put a photo of Rattlin' on the title slide. It's the best slide in the whole presentation.