Truck 2008 Pt 4

We wait for a while for Cats In Paris. Presumably they’re still there, as after ten minutes there’s not even mike or lead brought onstage. Good DJs and amusingly wrecked dancers to entertain us, luckily.

Pete Kember, AKA Sonic Boom is one of the big names of the festival, and has made some of the most amazing psychedelic music we own. He begins his performance as part of Spectrum with a slow simple keyboard piece, underpinned by elementary drum machine. It actually sounds rather like Jean-Michel Jarre, in a good way, and draws us into a head nodding state of bliss. Once his rhythm section get onstage, they start doing something that sounds like The Shadows in a wind tunnel, with some slightly unconvincing vocals. Seeing as our indie legends quota hasn’t been good this weekend, we quit while we’re ahead and nip off to see Thomas Truax.

Five years ago we saw Truax play to handful of bemused listeners on this very spot, but now he’s one of the most popular acts on the bill. Thirty minutes isn’t really long enough to get to grips with his Tom Waits on The Great Egg Race marriage of American grotesquerie and homemade instruments, but it’s interesting that one of the biggest cheers is for the bitter sweet “The Butterfly & The Entomologist”, played with a handheld battery fan and a guitar, showing that Truax has songwriting abilities to back up his post-industrial carny routines.

Following some tent dismantling operations, we arrive halfway through YACHT’s set, where two people are taking a bizarre Q&A session. Thankfully this is dispensed with forthwith in favour of a sort of new wave disco rock that sounds like a contemporary electro take on Arthur Russell, overtopped with ranting vocals that remind us of Talking Heads in the way disconnected comments are pushed together to make implausible sense. The statements “I married a doctor”, “It’s better than awkward silence” and “I used to live a in a psychic city” linger in the mind after the show, as if to be decoded like arcane jottings. We’ve seen a million bands who do live vocals over backing tracks, but YACHT are the first act in a long time to marry compositional ability to stage performance successfully: seriously, the robot Pan’s People interpretations of the programmed sounds are beautifully controlled, and probably just as hard to perform as actually playing the music would be. So we go home feeling we’ve seen one of the festival’s best and most unexpected sets.

Which is of course what Truck’s all about. The overall music quality this year was phenomenally high, and the ambience was always friendly and tolerant. Yes, the ticket price has gone up, but it’s still peanuts compared to the huge cost of Weakstock, for example – and it has a vicar serving ice cream instead of a giant energy drink logo, which would you prefer? We’re sorry we doubted you, Truck; see you next year.