It's just like a music festival on land except the rooms are clean and the weather is pleasant, says Andrew Mueller
'"Usually, I go where I want on stage," says John Prine, wobbling slightly, feeling for his footing. "Tonight, I'm going where the ship wants me to go."
It's Monday evening in the Stardust Theatre, the largest of several venues aboard the Norwegian Pearl. The vast liner left Miami the afternoon before, and it's a little bumpy out there. "Rough," according to the navigator's log on the screen back in my cabin, the Caribbean waves swelling to 4m in a force six wind. Between the ship's sheer heft and its ballast systems, it doesn't roll untowardly, but it's enough for Prine to occasionally end up singing further away from his microphone than he intended. He's in fine voice, though, waspish and wistful by turns, he and his band leafing gleefully through a superlative songbook: Spanish Pipedream, Grandpa Was a Carpenter, Aimless Love.
It's possible that, back in the 1970s, when Prine was rightly considered a peer of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, he had nightmares about nights like this, of spending his sixties rehearsing memories on a cruise ship. However, while the Norwegian Pearl is certainly a cruise ship, complete with waterslide, casino and dining room decorated ? inexplicably ? in the style of the Romanov court, this is not your average cruise. Prine is playing Cayamo, one of several music cruises operated by American operator Sixthman, and he's in distinguished company. Steve Earle played the same stage just before him, and Brandi Carlile is due on shortly afterwards (she also joins Prine for one song, filling in Iris DeMent's part on the duet In Spite Of Ourselves). Also on board are Richard Thompson, Indigo Girls, Loudon Wainwright III, Allison Moorer, Patty Griffin, Shawn Mullins, Colin Hay and Buddy Miller, among many others.
Somewhere off to starboard lurks Cuba. Prine finishes with Angel from Montgomery. The ship lurches throughout, but I suppose that as long as he isn't singing Abide With Me, all is probably well.
It is safe to assume that everybody aboard the Norwegian Pearl has contemplated a couple of stigmas prior to embarking. The artists are not the sort who'd have spent much time aspiring to become cruise ship entertainers. The passengers, at least if those I meet during a week at sea are representative, feel it is extremely important that any new acquaintance understands very quickly that they've never been on a cruise before, or that the only other cruise they've been on was a previous Cayamo.
For the first couple of days at least I find myself sharing this vague discomfort. I'd normally be reluctant to board a cruise ship even if it was the only available means of evacuation from some sort of disaster involving a volcano. But there's an irresistible logic to Sixthman's concept. For artists, it's like being on tour, playing three or four shows in a week, but without having to change hotels or sleep on a bus full of belching roadies.
The one potential difficulty ? the inescapable proximity of potentially over-enthusiastic fans ? seems to be ameliorated by that very inescapable proximity. People are perhaps less likely to gush at their idols if they're likely to bump into them at breakfast the next day, and so nobody appears all that bothered by the spectacle of, say, Steve Earle toting his baby son, Richard Thompson sightseeing, or a persistent but frustratingly unsubstantiated rumour of a liberally lubricated Colin Hay heckling joggers as they labour around the ship's running track.
From the fans' perspective, the idea is eventually, once you overcome your own snobbery, equally difficult to dislike. It's similar to being at a festival, aside from important respects in which it isn't. The rooms are comfortable and clean. (My cabin, though on the lowest of the passenger decks, is bigger than it looks, quieter than I anticipated, and has a porthole, of which I do not get tired.) The plumbing is indoors. The weather is bankably pleasant, and in the unlikely event that it does rain, you can go inside.
It's an older crowd than you'd find at an on-land rock festival, but possibly for that reason it's a much more affable one. (Sixthman employees who served on the cruise headlined by bemusingly popular redneck metal star Kid Rock impart their memories with trembling lips and faraway stares.)
The artists are divided among five primary venues. The headliners play the aforementioned Stardust. The next-biggest room is the Spinnaker Lounge, on the top deck at the front, which hosts a couple of the week's musical highlights: a stunning solo set by Allison Moorer, and two shows by Richard Thompson. The first of Thompson's gigs also prompts some nifty footwork by Sixthman. The non-Stardust shows are not ticketed, and it rapidly becomes clear that the English folk titan has a more ardent following than had been anticipated. An hour before he starts, the queue runs down six flights of stairs and out on to the promenade deck.
Everybody eventually gets in, though, and it is announced that a round of a hastily contrived new cocktail, the Spinnaker Staircase, is on Sixthman. Thompson, dressed as usual in a peculiar paramilitary getup that in this context makes him look like he just climbed aboard up a rope with a knife in his teeth, is astonishing as always. He'd be a much more influential guitarist if anyone else could keep up with him.
Towards the rear of the vessel is a cosy den called Bliss, decorated in the style of a 19th-century opium den, and incongruously endowed with four bowling lanes (bowling at sea is excellent fun, as gutter balls can be blamed on the waves).
There are other stages beneath the fibreglass stalactites in the main lobby, in the bar and on the pool deck. Yet further outbursts of music are provided by the passengers, at a couple of organised open-mic events ? a mixture of the heartbreakingly good and the heartstoppingly dreadful ? and at late-night sessions in the bars. These are a genuine joy ? music played well for the love of it. It's surprising how quickly a spontaneously arranged ensemble of six guitars, three fiddles, bass, accordion, mandolin, banjo and a drummer playing brushes against a violin case and a collection of beer glasses can conjure a coherent arrangement of Roger Miller's The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.
The Cayamo cruise stops at three locations. At each, passengers have the option of signing up, at additional cost, for Norwegian Cruise Line's snorkelling, para-sailing, off-roading and dolphin-bothering excursions.
Disembarking also necessitates staying alert enough to avoid having your picture taken with a crew member dressed as a parrot or a shark or something (these portraits are subsequently offered for sale).
The first port of call is Road Town, on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, the economy of which seems to revolve around the retail of souvenir tat linked to Pirates of the Caribbean. The second is Frederiksted on St Croix in the US Virgin Islands, another tourist ghetto that has the advantage of being a half-hour taxi ride from the downright pleasant and interesting town of Christiansted (18th-century Danish fort, seaplane terminal, a cool shop called Tesoro that sells weird contemporary art from around the region). The last is Great Stirrup Cay, a small island in the Bahamas owned privately by NCL. This is an opportunity to be charged $30 to rent snorkelling equipment, and is worth the ride on the tender from the Norwegian Pearl only to the extent that it enables you to claim that you've set foot in the Bahamas.
None of which matters as much as the opportunity to see Steve Earle and the Dukes three times in a week, all of them in walking distance of where you're staying. Earle stacks his sets with hits, leading off, at his second show, with Copperhead Road, Train A-Comin', Guitar Town and My Old Friend the Blues, but delivers them with an uncompromising (and possibly even over-compensating) level of ferocity.
Music aside, the best parts of the trip ? it may just be me ? are the days when the ship is properly at sea. During the day, there are sometimes things to be seen fleetingly ? other ships, seabirds, flying fish, distant landscapes ? but mostly there's an awesome and curiously inspiring emptiness. At night, when a full moon casts a silver beam across the sea, the ship feels like a toy caught in the torchlight of a searching giant.
Moments like that, when they happen as you walk to or from a great show, make you wonder why the floating rock festival doesn't happen more often. An empty horizon and a great song have much in common: both make you pause and see things differently; both enlarge your sense of what's possible.
? Cayamo 2012 (cayamo.com) will take place on 5-12 February. Prices from �980pp based on two sharing a cabin.
Travelbag (travelbag.co.uk) can arrange flights to Miami next February from Gatwick with US Airways from �479, if booked by 15 May
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