Cornbury 2010 Sunday Pt 2

The infamous Cornbury rain kept off for the festival, and the feeble little drizzle that did start evaporated in the face of Raghu Dixit’s whirlwind of bouncy positivity. T shirts describe it as “Indo-World folk rock”, and whilst we’re not sure “Indo-World” makes any more sense than “Anglo-Oxonian”, the “folk” bit is fair enough, and the “rock” bit is beyond discussion. Dixit’s voice is keening and powerful enough to knock you back on your seat even as the funky fusion rhythms make you want to get up and dance as though David Gray were a distant memory. The band is fantastic, varying the tone with fizzing violin, snaky bass and Dire Straits guitar. At one point they sound like a carnatic Levellers, and at another they build up a chunky rhythm like a Bollywood Los Lobos, but at the heart of the music is a warmth and exuberance you won’t often find. Normally when we describe an act as “a good festival band” it’s a back-handed compliment, for Raghu Dixit it’s a golden commendation. Simply joyous.

Were we implying earlier that sound engineers are childish? Well, here’s Flash Harry PA mainman and outstanding engineer Tony Jezzard with Reservoir Cats who definitely aren’t children: they play proper grown up blues with big boys’ growly-wowly vocals, clever twiddly-widdly guitar solos and sophisticated lyrics about women with whom they might have had sexy-wexy. Genre assassination aside, they’re actually a good group, having plenty of fun onstage, boasting a reliably sturdy rhythm section and, God help us, some of those wailing guitar solos sound pretty decent. Plus we know that nothing we say will change this band one fraction, and that in itself is worthy of respect.

Folk: is it music by the people, music about the people, or music for the people? For Oxford Folk Festival star booking Seth Lakeman you have to feel it’s the latter two definitions that count, as he is keen to ground each song in real events in his introductions, often celebrating people otherwise off history’s radar, and because his music has a simple, easily apprehended structure. Forthcoming album title track “Hearts And Minds” is a crowd rousing song, but in the sense of “Let’s all believe the same thing”, rather than “Let’s get some cudgels and duff up the ruling classes”. It’s a performance of egalitarian, humanitarian music, spiced with his fluid fiddle playing and outstanding double bass. It wasn’t our favourite show of the weekend, but it did demonstrate that there is plenty of excitement to be found in mainstream music, and that Cornbury’s conservative roster can provide all the elation, surprise and fun as experimental or obscure music. It also reminded us that no music is more boring and enraging as music that is professionally boring and unadventurously enraging, so we’re not complete converts to the Cornbury ethos just yet.

Last Of The Summary Whines

And with this I have no more reviews to post. Maybe it will spur me on to finish the Vileswarm review I've had on my pile for about a month. Review of last week's Truck is looking good (or long, which is the same thing nowadays), but you'll have to wait till Nightshift is out before I post that. However, you can buy this week's Oxford Times and read their scintillating review, which mentions all of four acts, and very nearly comes close to making a critical judgement on one of them; plus they've got a huge snap of Marc West from BBC Oxford grinning like a village idiot disguised as Rusell Brand, which is so much better than a well framed portrait of one of the performers. I aspire to reach that journalistic level one day, once my prentice work is through.


CORNBURY, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10

Sonny Liston (FKA Dear Landlord, which was a much better name) won the BBC Oxford Introducing competition to open the Second Stage on Sunday, and worthy winners they were. Their songs are uber-perky folk-indie strums, with lots of vibrant trumpet and literate lyrics about Charles de Gualle, generally sounding a bit like Belle & Sebastian rewrites of “Summer Holiday”, which is a lovely way to start the day. With two great vocalists who can deliver even wordy lyrics convincingly whilst keeping the summery pop melodies afloat, we could be hearing from Sonny Liston again before too long.

Jon Allen maintains our relaxed bouyant mood. He may come from Devon, but his songs all have a laidback pseudo-country singer songwriter waft that we like. To be frank, his songs all sound like Bob Dylan circa Desire, but that will do for now.

The Lucinda Belle Orchestra entice us at first, because they have a harp in a leading role, which is especially welcome as Sonny Liston left theirs behind, but you strictly need more than five people for an orchestra, right? Belle has an excellent voice, but one can ruin the effect by milking it, right? “My Voice & My 45 Strings” is a top tune, but a standard harp actually has 47 strings, right? AOR cafe jazz with a contemporary radio sound is very nice, but we’ve heard it all before, right? So how was the set? Alright.

The Blockheads were always an odd proposition, pub rock passion mixed with punk sneers and funk chops, topped off by a tone deaf romantic/cynical poet obsessed by sex, ethics and Essex. Dury has of course sadly passed on now, but we’re glad the band have chosen to keep the unique vision alive, and if the set was a bit of a chicken-in-a-basket cabaret turn, you can bet that if Ian is looking down on us, he’d hate his memory to be enshrined too formally. Now, getting an impressionist to replace your lost vocalist is a dangerous ploy. It can work – as anyone who saw The Magic Band at The Zodiac can testify – but the cartoon character on the mike for The Blockheads just goes to show how much more there was to Dury’s performance than swearing and glottal stops. It’s a slightly 2D show, that sounds like the aging cast of Grange Hill jamming with Redox, or perhaps the Mighty Boosh hitcher joining Hall & Oates.

That’s the criticisms out of the way. On the plus side every musician on stage is simply astonishing and, what’s more, is still clearly having the time of their life. The band delivers a hits selection, but don’t shy away from original arrangements to keep things fresh, the sax solo on “Clever Trevor” being the greatest musical moment of the festival. Plus, they have a vault of cracking tunes so deep, they make Squeeze look like Milli Vanilli.

We dropped off during Danny & The Champions Of The World, which had more to do with our exhaustion than their music, though it’s still probably not a press cutting for the rehearsal room wall. In fact, we thank them for it, as our impromptu nap meant we missed Reef. We wake to the sounds of the last track by Harper Simon (another from the Taylor Dayne reject list?) on the Nero’s stage, and it sounds like nice jovial shiny drivetime pop, so good luck to her, but Fisherman’s Freinds are the real deal.

They are late middle aged men from Port Isaac who sing a capella shanties. They have some intelligent harmonies, but they aren’t precious about the performance, honking out the songs like nine Cornish vuvuzelas filled with navy rum. This is folk music with big balls and simple melodies (Middle eight? Never heard of one, chum) that cut straight to the heart and force even the most reticent tongues to shout along like eighteenth century street vendors. All this, plus oodles of camp innuendo between songs, what a simply brilliant band. They get a huge response from the healthy crowd, which does the soul good to witness. The surprise find of the festival.

And we had to bloody follow that with Brainchild, whose charmless, brash rock is like a cross between The Towers Of London and Evanescence at a greasy bike rally. There’s a girl singing in a disinfected raunchy style, some “Baker Street” saxophone, and a raddled looking specimen done up like a drunken cross between Alice Cooper and Screaming Lord Sutch at the front. All of them look and sound like they’re from different bands, each of which is equally atrocious. We last two numbers. Later, we return to find the sax player signing autographs for kids, and the front of house mixer telling us they were the best band of the weekend: either this tells us that they got better very quickly, or that you can’t trust engineers and children to choose your music for you.

But our revolt against Brainchild meant we got unexpectedly to see Newton Faulkner, who turns out to be a surprisingly decent showman. He quickly builds up a conversational rapport with the crowd, which is no mean feat on a big stage after a day and half of music, so that the set flashes by. He also has an agile voice, and an impressive array of extended guitar techniques. Pity that we didn’t care for his songs much - we could have sat and listened to him telling jokes and playing covers all afternoon, but his own tunes didn’t grab us. It’s a masterclass for boring acoustic strummers the world around, however: gig is a doing word, after all...

Cornbury 2010 - Saturday Pt 2

The employees at the adjacent Nero’s coffee tent seem to have been getting high off their own supply, dancing manically behind the counter to Staton’s set, so we stay to see what their tiny stage can offer. Edinburgh boy Alex Cornish has some Damien Rice style tunes and is backed by a useful trio. He’s just as good as some of the people on the big stages. Obviously there are two ways you could take that...

At a festival with a slightly more mature demographic, over 50% of those watching Ben Montague are under 20. Poshstock is all very well, but a festival’s not complete under you’ve seen some drunk kids (though we were less forgiving when they kept us awake all night). Anyway, what drew the youngsters to his rather likable Radio 2 pop, has he been on Hollyoaks or something? Whatever the story, he has a warm voice, and the band make a decent fist of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” alongside their own sprightly tunes. As the girls swoon over his tasty looks and the adults tap along to his decent acoustic everyman rock, it’s like the second coming of Craig McLachlan & Check 1-2.

After Montague has put a spring in our step, Imelda May knocks us off our feet. Her band play a turbo-rockabilly, all slapped double bass, Duane Eddy guitar, scorching trumpet and battered tambourine, over which May’s feisty Dublin voice wails with a sassy, gospel passion. The songs are relatively generic, but played with firy conviction, and even “I’m a creepy, sneaky freak” can sound like Byron if you sing it as viscerally as Imelda May does.

After these two, all Riverside have to do is keep the party going. And they give us David Gray. That’s like having ten minutes to score a hat trick, and bringing on Heskey. His set is just as tedious as you’d expect, and he doesn’t even interest us by being particularly awful. He does that “Babylon” one. He does that one that sounds like that other one. He does some we know and some we wish we didn’t. Then he does several million more. Everybody at Cornbury is watching this, or has had the sense to get out of the arena, so we have the odd experience of visiting a deserted toilet block at a crowded festival. Turns out that taking an echoey piss in an empty trailer housing 22 well used urinals is just like watching a David Gray gig.

Park Live

Say you were going to Pizza Express or something. I know you have more class than that, but just imagine. Say you went over the corner to look at their little touchscreen tills they create your bill on. At that point you'd notice how crappy the graphics on the tills are, how lame the marble effect on the individual "buttons" is and how unconvincing and unecessary the depth shadows are. You'd notice it looks like something from an Amiga game, like Bloodbowl. Why the hell do these till software designers make thier product look like the team selection screen from Kick Off 2? Why why why?

Some of this review featured in Nightshift recently, but a lot of it is "previously unreleased".

Cornbury, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10

SATURDAY

The shelves of WH Smith reveal that true confessions are big business nowadays, so here’s our addition to this literary slagpile: we’ve never liked the look of Cornbury. Probably this is because its mixture of safe tunefulness and fading stars make it look as though it was booked by the customers at the Waitrose deli counter after ten minutes looking at The Sunday Express Magazine and a copy of Q from 1991. But, although it’s easy to be dismissive of folding chairs, Pimms and falafel wraps, we’ve decided we actually prefer these to unpalatable energy drinks, bad hash and vomiting poi jugglers as our festival accoutrements. Yes, we admit it, we like Cornbury very much, and if the lineup isn’t our idea of musical nirvana, the best acts truly shine in a relaxed, well organised setting with excellent sound engineering on every stage.

What’s bad about Cornbury (aside from David Gray)? Apart from being kept awake till half past give a shit on Saturday morning by drunken revellers, which we thought Poshstock might be immune to, the towering ineptitude of the bar staff drives us to enforced sobriety: we’re sadly unsurprised that there are sixteen Carlsberg pumps to one tapped barrel of ale, but we’re more shocked that someone’s designed a bar where there’s not enough room for the legion of easily confused employees to pass when one of them is pouring a pint. Our other black mark is the assumption that everybody onsite wants to watch the main stage. There are long periods when there’s nothing on except the big acts, while at other times we’re torn between two enticing prospects happening simultaneously on the smaller stages. As if to reflect this the official programme not only offers no information about performers lower down the bill on the two central stages, but doesn’t even give any listings for the Riverside stage: essentially, we spent three quid on a little book to tell us who The Feeling are, when it’s the one fucking thing we’re trying to forget.

So, our weekend starts with pot luck, as we stumble across Dave Oates (who looks like a Riverside organisor, but is apparently not) introducing Volcanic Dash, who turn out to be pretty decent at playing Dad’s day off R ‘n’ B, spiced by good sax and a soulful female vocal. They end with a rattle through “Honky Tonk Women”, and seeing the singer shout “one more time” a bar before the song ends is rather heartwarming in a festival that can get too slick at times.

Taylor Dayne, an American minor popstrel in the late 80s, apparently chose her stage name because she thought it sounded British. Presumably Tiffany Page was one of the discarded options. She plays harmlessly perky pop, a little like P!nk without the brattish trailerpark attitude, and a little like Rachel Stevens without the dance routines, synths and glossy production. Her’s is a well-filleted version of guitar pop, a sort of musical chicken nugget – a guilty pleasure on occasion, but no replacement for the real thing.

Some festivalgoers don’t turn up to Cornbury until the big names start coming out, whilst others arrive for the day, but only shift from their little wagon circle in front of the main stage for toilet visits or emergency rosé replenishment. It means that some obscure acts get unfairly ignored, and there are fewer people evident at the start of an excellent set by Les Clochards than there were last time they played The Wheatsheaf. It doesn’t faze them any, and they deliver their trademark brand of lush Gallic cafe indie with the same stately grace as usual, a gorgeous “Démodé” being the highlight. Light airy music, but their background in vintage punk and indie bands gives the music a classically French stubborn defiance (in the sense of getting whipped on absinthe and inventing new art forms, not overpricing croques madames to tourists and bombing Greenpeace). Sad that their subtler moments lose out in a sound war with the nearby fun fair rides; “Criez si vous voulez aller plus vite!”

We catch the end of The New Forbidden who play a bluesy approachable rock that’s essentially Dr. Feel-Passable-Mustn’t-Grumble-Bit-Of-Gyp-From-The-Old-Back-And-The-Waterworks-Aren’t-What-They-Were-But-Worse-Things-Happen-At-Sea, and then it’s back to Riverside for Dead Jerichos, whom we love because they play every single gig as if it’s the last Friday night before the Pandorica opens. Rock energy so improbably infectious that it isn’t even punctured when a snare drum breaks and there’s a brief gap whilst another is located. Their music isn’t a startlingly original confection, being a rough mix of Jam basslines, The Edge’s guitar, Jimmy Pursey vocals and Buzzcocks drums, but each short invigorating shot of espresso pop is a joy to witness. Later, we couldn’t resist breaking the itinerary for a song and a half from Borderville, a band with the same passion and intensity as Dead Jerichos, but who have filtered it through Broadway excess rather than laddish euphoria.

A smidgen of the Jericho energy wouldn’t go amiss in Joshua Radin’s rootsy set. Like a Happy Shopper muesli bar, you feel as if it ought to be good for you to experience, but turns out to be dry and tasteless.

“Have you got soul, Cornbury?” shouts the MC. Well, look at us, and what do you think? A pasty, paunchy heartland morass whose idea of a sex machine is probably sitting on the lawnmower whilst it idles and who most likely probably phone Neighbourhood Watch if Bootsy Collins ever strolled down the street. So, Staxs is possibly the ideal act, a busman’s holiday affair wherein seasoned session players kick back with a bit of a soul revue. That’s soul as lingua franca for a good time night out rather than a narrative urban folk music, and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” has had all the melancholy and impotent anger squeezed out along the way. But they do make great music all the same, with a powerful vocal, and some fantastic brass players, who alternate between molten solos and horn stabs that punch like a rivet gun. This goes on for forty lovely minutes, until Kiki Dee comes on. She’s still in good voice but her songs are simply drab by comparison.

Relaxing with some homemade mint lemonade – you don’t get that at The Cellar – we catch Buddy Guy and his alligator blues; it hasn’t evolved since forever, but it has a deadly bite. The band is good, and play a solid big stage blues set, but when Buddy steps up the others just fade into the background, which is impressive as he’s about 800. His guitar sound is amazing, each acid-etched note drawing a line back to BB King, sideways to Albert Collins and forward to Jimi Hendrix. He plays “Hoochie Coochie Man” with such a perfect mix of soul baring emotion and carny roustabout repartee that we feel as if we’d never heard the song before, and if that ain’t a definition of raw innate talent, we don’t know what is.

We were hoping to get the same experience from Dr John, and at first it was promising: he has a battered organ and a baby grand, each topped with a human skull; he ambles onstage with the confident air of a mafia don who knows he owns us all; he wears a superbly sharp voodoo suit and looks like a child’s drawing of Orson Welles disguised as Bryan Ferry; he can sit at a keyboard better than most people can play it; he drawls raps drenched in the cartoon skullduggery that was so influential on Tom Waits. But for the first half of the set the music doesn’t really gel, and simply sounds like a competent bar band, an effect possibly not helped by the fact that an insufficiently audible trombone took the place of a stomping horn section. Things are just getting going when the band slips into a dirty funk chug and it’s suddenly all over. The conclusion is that whilst Buddy is happy with the elder statesman’s showcase on a festival stage, Dr John probably still only gets on top of his awesome game with a few hours in a dark sweaty room, not sixty polite minutes in the Cotswolds sun.

Squeeze, on the other hand, are so happy to trot their greatest hits out to the punters they probably have wristband blisters. Before the first track is even out they’re pointing the mike at the audience for a singalong, and, in fairness, a large percentage of the crowd are eager to take them up on the offer. All around us tipsy parents are reliving their 5th form disco whilst their kids cause havoc with bubble machines, and Squeeze get a grand reception, which is fully deserved. As with Crowded House, also on the heritage trail, it’s amazing that Glenn Tillbrook’s voice hasn’t aged at all, and still has the tuneful chumminess of their old hits. And what hits they are. Squeeze have got so many top notch pop songs in their arsenal you forget how great they are. Admittedly, we’re not sure this competent set adds anything to the tracks, but it’s never a bad time to hear them again.

Candi Staton knows her audience too, and you can’t blame her for giving them what they want. Impressively, her rich voice is just as strong as it was when we saw her a decade ago, and her set is a super-slick ball of fun, with a cantering romp through “Suspicious Minds” standing out, but most of the audience don’t get to their feet until “Young Hearts Run Free”, so she cleverly makes it last about fifteen minutes. With her sparkling dress and ballsy soul delivery Staton is a bit like an alternate universe Tina Turner who hadn’t erased all her character in post-production somewhere in the early 80s. Good solid entertainment.

Shrub Be Good To Me

I was told last night that most of the old OHMs are online, so you never know I may find an old review that slipped through the cracks. Imagine the joy. Sadly, the one I wrote where Alastair Tervit wrote a paragraph in the middle whilst I was in the loo was never used, and resides on a discarded hard drive. It's crazy what you could have had.


SEABUCKTHORN – A MANTRA PULLED APART


Seabuckthorn looks a bit like one of those posh old English names that have had all their syllables blanched out of them over the years, like Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondely. You can imagine an old monocled gent filling in the hotel reception book, wheezing, “It’s pronounced Seddon”. However, it turns out to be a sort of shrub, and this seems fitting because, although your actual seabuckthorn is found in Europe and Asia, this CD brings up images of empty American mesas, dusty scrub and hazy sundowns.

This is less a collection of compositions more a series of flourishes and echoes. There are plenty of Spanish guitar trills, but they arrive and drift away like farmsteads on the horizon on a Midwest train ride, instead of sitting in dramatic flamenco centre stage. If The Omega Man were remade on the set of The Good, The Bad & the Ugly this record could be the soundtrack, in which empty Western saloons reverberate to the tread of gunslinging ghosts, and louvre doors hang by one hinge. All of which means it’s a gorgeous listen, and Seabuckthorn (AKA Andy Cartwright) has created the record with precisely the right balance between the eerily spacious and the structured, the ambient and the encapsulating.

Which means that picking favourite tracks is academic, your best bet is to let the record wash over you whilst staring out of the window into the evening. (No, scrub that, we just tried it, and saw a hatchback, a courier’s van and a whippet, so it probably depends on where you live). Still, we like the plucked strings on “Illumination” that are swirling and mysterious like a Nazca earthwork, and “Strange Dreams In The Wilderness Again” in which stalking wolves of static warily eye guitars plucked on the edge of oblivion. Elsewhere we get little flavours of Slint, Fushitsusha, Seefeel and locals Hretha, one of whom guests on the CD.

Perhaps “Abyss Eyes” could be excised, but there isn’t a moment from this record that is a let down, and there are some gorgeous fragments of song hidden in the bleak expanses of the album. Our choicest moment is on “Painted Wolf Howl”, where a forcefully plucked guitar with a vast delay is suddenly shadowed by a glockenspiel to play a lopsided motif that sounds like a mix between “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and the theme from Crossroads. It’s a sparse and perhaps forbidding album, maybe, but certainly not an empty or ill thought out one.

Heart Of Gloss

No time to chat, crit. kittens, I have to leave for Truck in 20 minutes.

THE GRACEFUL SLICKS – Demo

The Graceful Slicks amused a few people recently by asking Nightshift’s online community for an experienced tambourine player. You had to assume this was either a collective of such intricate musical complexity they had crafted challenging parts for hand percussion, or a bunch of skunked monkeys who had no idea. In truth, the demo is neither of these, it’s not the work of musicians striking out for new and adventurous sonic territories, but it does show a band with a strong vision, and a laudable control of their elementary resources.

The opener ushers us in quietly at a nice unhurried lope, all strummed guitar, shrugged drums and submerged vocals. The track has an untroubled, smiling demeanour and immediately brings to mind slackerdelic ne’er-do-wells The Brian Jonestown Massacre, without the paranoia or internecine warfare. It’s a simple but attractive ditty that could have been busked from the back of a VW van by a teenaged Evan Dando. It goes on for weeks, but never gets boring.

Track two is arguably even simpler and less dramatic, a sing-song seesaw of a tune that brings to mind Syd Barrett’s nursery rhyme efforts, such as “Terrapin”. Aside from a very slow build at the start, and an unnecessary guitar solo at the end, the song does nothing. It’s not hypnotic in a trance or kraut fashion, mind, just sort of static. Cryogenic rock, maybe. The lyrics are sheer guff, but are luckily barely audible, so we can hope fervently that the song doesn’t actually mostly consist of “water’s always cold”. The eerie lead guitar line ambles back and forth across the whole song like the harmonica in Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In The West soundtrack, much beloved of Fields Of The Nephilim and, of course, The Orb.

The last track (no titles provided – they’d probably rather name their tracks after different joss stick aromas) is the slowest yet, a Spiritualized indie hymnal effort that dribbles along as slowly as stewed prunes strained through a colander. Bafflingly, it’s very dull, where the other two tracks were immersive and endearing, even though they didn’t appear to do anything too different. Suddenly a pleasing miasma becomes a dreary pall.

We can’t solve the mystery, but it does show that The Graceful Slicks – do we adore or abhor that ridiculous pun? – are a band doesn’t quite have control of its palette yet, which is what you’d expect from a first, budget demo (and one without a dedicated tambourine operative at that), and yet they clearly have a strong idea of where they want to go, and the evidence suggests it’ll a pleasant place to follow them into. A good start, in short.

Apologies if this review isn’t up to scratch: we’ve tried everywhere to find a pencil sharpening technician to complete the team...

Charlbury Switchblade

And here's part 2. Nothing much more to say tonight, I'm tired; winning the pub quiz by a record margin was nice, but I shoudln't have had that victory pint. In bed with the prom, I suspect.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 20/6/10

“Please welcome Slantay,” yelps the main stage MC as Sunday kicks off. Well, it’s written Slainte, but pronounced “slawncheh”, meaning “health” or, colloquially, “cheers”; a tough word for an Anglophone, perhaps, but surely if your job basically boiled down to saying the names of bands before they played, you might make the effort to work out what the words sounded like, no? Not as bad as the announcer later on who introduced Redox by telling us they played “one of” his weddings (classy), and yet still laboured under the misapprehension they were called Reedox.

After a slightly scratchy opening Slainte, who are a Gaelic folk act (get away), build to a great head of steam, leavening the predicted foot tapping reels with “La Partida”, a luminescent harp showcase.

Apparently, gents think of the Alphabet Backwards if they’re trying to stave off, shall we say, a particular moment of intimacy. Funny, then, that the band is a huge explosion of pure energetic release. The beauty of the band is that they balance their Sunny Delight exuberance with some excellent song writing, not to mention the fantastically ornate and playful synth lines, that are like being wined and dined by a sexually predatory Ms PacMan. My God, Sunday has started well.

And it doesn’t stop there. Sonny Black is a white haired chap playing acoustic blues, and although we sometimes feel we’ve heard enough white haired chaps playing acoustic blues in provincial music events to last us until the day the lost chord is unearthed, Black really is worth a listen. Not only does he have some effortless bottleneck technique and a great little bucolic melody in the lovely “North Of The Border”, but he can also celebrate Mississippi John Hurt’s “easy-kickin’ fingerpickin’” in an English accent without sounding like a dick. There’s a quiet grace about him and his music, and he should have been higher up the bill with a few more train loads of listeners to greet him.

Lee Christian’s Prohibition Smokers Club are a loose-limbed latin pop jam band, looking like a mushroom ingesting cult pretending to be Kid Creole & The Coconuts. The horns are punchy, and the set is pitched as a little interlude of fun, but still we felt it didn’t quite come together, and a cover of The Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” drove us to the bar. Everybody else in the whole of Charlbury seemed to love it, though, so what do we know?

“Think Maroon 5 meets Beverley Knight combined creatively with early Red Hot Chili Peppers,” says the programme’s write up of Alyse In Wonderband. Jesus, if we had thoughts like that we’d turn ourselves in to the nearest police station for the good of the nation. Actually, they’re not bad at all, a youngish band who have a natural control of their pop-funk, and perform it with plenty of vim, Alyse Kimsey’s voice working well above fluent keys. “Creep” in particular (no, not that one) has a groove that even cuts through our professional cynicism.

As is the case every year, billypure make like The Levellers to cheer up the revellers, and if it isn’t a revolutionary leap from their previous sets, they do a good job, as ever, and the James cover is an interesting arrangement. The violin sounds horribly scratchy though – get a new pickup!

The Shakellers make a big-boned chirpy rock racket, something like The Bluetones pepped up on MSG and barndance cider, but The Black Hats do the perky guitar bit far better, their new wave ditties as excitable as a friendly puppy – and, oh look, there’s Lee Christina on guest vocals, with some of that sneering chutzpah we missed from the PSC set. However, it’s Von Braun that really win us over, making a good grungy early Muhhoney noise with drums, two guitars and a frankly buggered mike lead. At times the songs lift off into surreally wired mantras approaching The Pixies at their effervescent best. A great discovery.

You have to wonder how some of the acts find themselves on the Riverside bill, and what they think of it when they get there. Take Dead Like Harry, who have travelled all the way from Sheffield and who have recently toured with Scouting For Girls, do they think “finally, back to the roots”, or “disembowel the agent” when they roll up onto Mill Field? Not to mention all the stall holders selling dayglo dope leaf hoodies and all that crud, who look as though they make about three sales all weekend, do they feel swizzed? Well, fuck ‘em, the Riverside crowd is too sensible for that rubbish – the wacky hats are left to wilt in the sun whilst the home made cakes stall does a justifiably roaring trade.

Dead Like Harry are, of course, awful, but they don’t enrage us as much as we expected, even though they sound like Keane played by Hothouse Flowers. In fact, they come across as a likable bunch, and their piano-flecked pop is easy to tune out whilst finishing the crossword.

Phyal have been warmly welcomed back for a few reunion gigs, and Riverside is exactly the sort of place their approachable rock romps make sense. “Crude” doesn’t quite hit the spot, but after some drumkit surgery and a few swigs of lemon squash – oh, Kevin Eldon, if only you’d been there – “Daisy” flies out of the traps, setting the clattering tone for the next thirty minutes. A superb set but, it must be said, after three reunion gigs Phyal need to stop with the nostalgia and make some new recordings, or shut up!

Nah, only joking, they’re always good value, as are The Mighty Redox. They are a truly under-rated band outside of the furry fraternity in which they move. Nick Clack and Graham Barlow, aside from looking like shiftless dropouts from some Restart scheme for unemployed wizards, are an outstanding rhythm section, but they certainly know their place, leaving the lion’s share of the stage to Phil Freizinger’s fuzzy guitar and the frankly loopy Sue Smith’s acid-sauteed vocal wailing. Set highlight “Eternity” sounds like Gong freaking out in a banshee wife swapping party, until the world is fed through Freizinger’s giant phase pedal, which probably has its own generator backstage.

The weekend finished with The Quiet Men, who aren’t the band aging scenesters will remember, but an Irish folk rock band, with a big line in Pogues songs. Well, that’s OK, we all like The Pogues, right? Crowdpleasing, we suppose, but a disappointingly unadventurous end to the weekend. But then again, the beauty of Riverside is that it can entertain old West Oxfordshire boozers, sun-drenched children, well-heeled salmon sandwich picnickers as well as miserable musical zealots like ourselves. And, the real miracle is not that they’ve managed to put on a festival for free that aims to please so many people, but that they actually succeed. We’ll definitely be back for more next year.

Slantay.

Riverside 2010 Saturday Pt 2

Huck & The Handsome Fee are very good, if a little one-paced, and Tamara Parsons-Baker vocals really shine in this unabashed ‘50s throwback. The Roundheels’ trad rocking is less intense, a bit of a light, fluffy country meringue, but is pleasant enough. The Delta Frequency make out that they’re all about the aggressive, subversive rock, but what we hear is like The Foo Fighters playing over a tinny old Front 242 LP. Ho hum.

Undersmile amuse us, not least because their name sounds like coy slang for a fanny. They supply a thick, dense grunge sound that just trudges on slowly forever, like a man ploughing treacle. The twin vocals detract from the Babes In Toyland effect a little, sounding like two girls who don’t want to eat their sprouts, but that aside they’re a fun new band.

Far more fun than Charlie Coombes & The New Breed, despite the fact they’re several squillion times more experienced. Actually, he’s not that bad, and has a very smooth voice, like a 70s sit com vicar having a crack at Nik Heyward, but the songs just aren’t there. He only needs one great Crowded House style pop hit and we’d love him, but for now we’re bored enough to consider going for a quick game of chess with the guy from the Mexican food stand.

With flagging energy levels, Riverside keep back three excellent acts to round off the day. The Family Machine still have the chirpiest pop songs in Oxford concealing sharpest barbs, but they feel distant on the big stage. Beard Of Zeuss make a sort of bang bang bang noise for a while and it sounds bloody great; by the end we’re not only unsure whether it is wrong to spell Zeus with two esses, but we’re wondering whether a few more might not go amiss.

Borderville synthesise the twin poles of the sometimes mystifying Riverside booking policy. They play “proper” music, with choruses and schoolroom keyboard technique and a respect for rock classics, yet they also throw it together with such calculatedly wild abandon and desperate drama that the gig becomes almost aggressively experimental. They start with a string quartet, which is over-amped and out of tune, but sets the tone of faded glamour from which the set springs in all its camp glory. This is what Glee would be like if Roxy Music sat on Mount Olympus and Pete Townshend carried amps down Mount Sinai. Improbably excellent music.

Riverside Babylon

The giant monkey fun of Truck is coming this weekend, and I shall be there with a biro, some ripped notepaper and a rucksack filled with cheap bitter. To get you in the festival mood, today and Friday I'll post my review of the smaller, freer and, let's be honest, not really as good but bloody great fun all the same, Riverside festival. Lots of people thought this review was too harsh, because the event was free, but I - naturally - disagree. What's the value of giving a band a good review at a free event and a stinker a week later when the gig costs a fiver? And is there a sliding scale in the middle? "£3.50? Hmmm, let's pretend the bass was in time, even though we'll admit the guitar was out of tune". Poppy, and indeed, cock.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 19-20/6/10

A work colleague has a mug reading “A bad day fishing beats a good day working”. Hardly Kierkegaard, but bear it in mind when reading this review: although we saw very few acts that really inspired us (on Saturday at least), we’d rather spend a weekend watching disappointing music at Riverside than a night with decent bands at The Academy. It’s something to do with the delightful landscape, the excellent Marsh Gibbon ales, the friendly atmosphere and the knowledge that some people have gone to a lot of effort to create a weekend out for us all, and not asked for a penny.

Deer Chicago are a decent opener to the festival, constructing large scale edifices of ever-so-slightly angular rock with a sturdy, emotional voice spread over the top. All very Fell City Girl, though Jonny Payne’s voice doesn’t have the natural power of Phil McMinn’s. The odd Jam interlude works surprisingly well.

At first Alan Fraser & The Resignation Orchestra offer flat jazz with Tom Waits Gruffalo growling from festival organisor Dave Oates. Diverting, but not much else. However, after a minute or two they start to warm up, and Fraser’s soprano sax solos become more interesting and contrast with some excellent honks and bubbles from Tony Bevan’s bass baritone, which is roughly the size of a hatchback.

Music For Pleasure entertain us as ever. Their mixture of spicy mid-reign R.E.M. melody and pre-leyline Julian Cope energy is always fun, even if it lacks the character of their day job bands (Harry Angel and The Unbelievable Truth). It’s like many of long term local trier Mark Cobb’s bands, but with bigger balls.

The Black Dog Emporium sadly sound nothing like techno trailblazers The Black Dog, nor much like Black Sabbath, despite the programme’s allegations. Instead they play a tedious brand of lightly funky 70s rock. The word “Reef” came to mind, and not least because it felt as though we were grounded inextricably in musical shallows. The drummer made things mildly interesting with some carbonated fills, but the vocals were honked out as if by a bingo caller trying to communicate across a Swiss valley.

More foghorn vocal subtlety from Crackerdummy. They’re a capable post-grunge trio who remind us of average Irish act Mundy. They playing is good, and it’s all well put together, but only in the way a small brick wall is. A small wall where you were hoping to find a bouncy castle and bourbon jacuzzi.

Remember David Oates’ functional blues growling? It starts to feel like a halcyon era once Stuart Turner starts his rubbish gravelly groaning. It sounds as though he’s trying to scare an errant toddler, not entertain adults. Pity, as The Flat Earth Society are a good band, spinning a nice sticky rockabilly web, and capable of a John Lee Hooker style boogie chug. We live in a frustrating world in which most post-rock instrumental bands sound half finished, but where most blues bands are ruined by duff singers.

Last year Diplomat’s Coffee kept us awake for the weekend. Sadly, this year we’re forced to buy our brew from a drunk man selling Mexican food, who was frankly fortunate not to have burnt his fingers off or inadvertently stabbed himself with a potato wedge at any point over the weekend. On one visit he mumbled something impenetrable about Mary Whitehouse and pronounced “hot chocolate” with one syllable, and at the next he blessed our coffee, even though we doubt he’s taken holy orders.

If Music For Pleasure hark back to R.E.M.’s Green, David Celia immediately reminds us of Around The Sun. Wrong choice, Dave. But we give him a chance and although the music is a little grown up for us, he has some a warm voice with decent Neil Young flourishes and some nice delicate keyboard parts, so we’ll give him the thumbs up.

4AD A1 CD

Oh dear. I've listened to too much music today, and eaten too many cruisps and Haribos, so I've gone a bit funny. Still, I'm druinking mint tea and spinning some Szymanowski in an attempt to calm my jangly mind.

Anwyay, chilli con carne, that's a funny one, eh? It means "chilli with meat", I'd imagine, yet most chilli has meat, and in my experiecne what it really means is "chilli with kidney beans". Babelfish tells me this would be chilli con las habas de riñón, but I suspect that's not idiomatic. Ho hum.


STORNOWAY – BEACHCOMBER’S WINDOWSILL (4AD)

Always, the guilt comes. Nibbling the conscience, a small internal voice insidiously queries our sense of proportion: are the local acts we love fully deserving of praise, or is our shelf lined with rose tinted CD cases? In short, do we hope for greatness so hard, we begin to imagine it?

Well, we’ve listened to this new Stornoway LP repeatedly, and although we want them to succeed because they’re local heroes and delightful boys to boot, the fact is that this record is astonishing, doubtlessly the most exciting collection of cerebral English joy-pop since The Divine Comedy’s Promenade. Take that, paranoid interior monologue! Most of the songs will be familiar to locals, but the recordings are perfect, beautifully constructed, yet never overegged, making Stornoway superior to Mumford & Sons, the act with whom they’re most often compared. Like some of the best pop, Beachcomber’s Windowsill is epic and intimate simultaneously.

And with that the review can only become a list of favourite moments. The melancholic life story of “Fuel Up”; the lush porch song ambience of “We Are The Battery Human”, like Charlie Poole rewritten by The Daintees; the opening of “On The Rocks”, in which Simon & Garfunkel get lost in a strawberry mist before being lifted away on God’s own cymbals; “Long-Distance Lullaby”’s ultra-clean horn section that make us think of Tanita Tikaram for no reason we can fathom.

This is a world class collection of songs deliciously presented. Of course there are tiny imperfections. Despite the high esteem in which it’s held, we’ve never really been excited by “The End Of The Movie”, at least until the wistful conclusion. Also, the lyrics to “The Coldharbour Road” are somewhat clunky – can you really defend the schoolboy clumsiness of “I am a seabird, you are the Arctic Ocean”? Oh, and we’re not convinced you can really have an exclamation mark after an ellipsis, which counts against “Here Comes The Blackout...!”. Can you tell we’re grasping at straws here? We bloody love this record, and to balance these minor peccadilloes we have wonderfully subtle touches in the arrangements, especially the mournful pier end organ on “Fuel Up” or “Zorbing”’s Red Army Choir backing vocals.

The tagline on Stornoway’s Myspace has been “A living breathing Mark Twain novel” for quite some time, but we don’t hear the blustery, satirical, knockabout carnival of Samuel Clemens on this album, we prefer to think of the band as a hushed yet hopeful British poem, the introspective halfsmile of Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop”, perhaps. The record ends with a tale of waking up someone just for a tipsily emotional phone call, and the chance to say “Goodnight, soulmate”. Companionship, honesty, pop music: Stornoway certainly know what the good things in life are.

Lavitate

Hmm, I fear I may have over sold the Cowley Lavatory Story, so please bear in mind that after you've read this, there's a really dumb pun I thought of at the end. No peeking ahead, now.

Recently I had one of those experiences that everybody has, no matter how urbane and sophisticated they feel they are. My bowels rebelled, and half way through a thirty minute walk, I realised strange things were afoot. It's a terrible feeling, packing a turtle's head when you know you have another ten minutes of walking until you reach your destination, all you can do is hope you've got the stamina. Sadly, my destination was a bus stop, at which I'd catch a bus for a 15 minute or so journey. So, I reached my port, and had there been a bus arriving I would have got on. I would probably have survived. But there was no bus, and the little electronic screen that looks like the one that provided the football scores on Saturday afternoons in the 80s claimed it would be eight minutes befoere the next one came. Eight minutes! Normally I wait about two. Oh my God, God, God, what to do. Right, I can't wait.

So, I hobbled a little further down the road and used a public toilet, adjacent to Manzil Way, in Oxford. I can't tell you how many hundreds, nay thousands of times I've walked past this little building without really paying it any mind, but stepping into it was an eye opener. Here was a building that clearly missed a meeting, a few square feet that must have mislaid the memo about the whole Dreaming Spires thing.

The urinal was aromatic, but I had no time to pay it any mind. I bundled into a cubicle and slammed the huge institution green reinforced door and slid home the cast iron bolt behind it. Hang on a mo, what? Am I in prison? Honestly, this huge bolt was like something from a nineteenth century remand house, not a convenience in a celebrated town in 2o1o. The cubicle walls didn't reach the ceiling, there was about a foot left for ventiliation, which was filled with serious looking bars.

The toilet itself was something I've never seen the like of. There was nothing so elegant as a separate cistern, and no sniff of anything as decadent as porcelain. What I got was a huge, aluminium block of a thing with no seat; a big old indominable, undamagable hunk of metal with a hole in it, in other words. There was, of course, no paper, but luckily I had some random packet of tissues in my bag. There was, however, more unpainted metal in the form of a box in which to put your used needles or, apparently, safety pins. How do you inject heroin with a safety pin, anyway? Do you just prick a vein and sort of drop the brown stuff over the tiny hole, like someone crumbling an Oxo cube into a pipette?

After the unpleasant business was done (and I don't recall ever having hovered above a toilet bowl like a prim dowager in a 50s theatre, but I did this time), I pressed the flush. "Flush" is right, the small unmarked metal button was set into the top of the giant metal lav-chunk, and I didn't see it for a few seconds. Presumably people would steal an actual flush and sell it for safety pin money. It was then that I realised that the toilet felt like something from an interstellar shuttle. Some sort of space jail for rogue asteroid miners, perhaps.

But, once the pressing issues of the afternoon had been dispensed with, I had a look at the grafitti. It was mostly pencil sketches of dark skinned lads getting intimate with one another, along with some times and dates one might meet the artist (not the day on which I was there, I'm happy to report). I suddenly realised how very long it had been since I had seen pictures like this; I think I came across some in public loos in my youth, but there was something improbably reassuring about them; yeah, of course there are any number of big willies and "call to suck me off" messages scrawled on pub bogs in Oxford, but nothing like this. There was almost a sort of melancholy about the whole thing. It was like coming across a traditional wheelwright, or one of those sweet shops with racks of old fashioned confectionary to be weighed into quarters for boys in school caps. It fucking stank, though, so I didn't linger to admire .

Guess whether there was any soap.

And that's the Cowley Lavatory Story; now here's a pun.

I just went to the bookshop for a beginner's guide to Japanese culture. It's called What Part Of Noh Don't You Understand?

BEAR IN THE AIR – BIPOLAR EP (demo)


Well, this is a pleasant surprise.

We’ve seen Bear In The Air live twice over the past few years, and been left resolutely uninspired both times, but this recording is a pretty enjoyable experience. “Put On Your Travelling Shoes” opens with tastefully reverby keyboard tinkles that aren’t a million miles away from something on the American Beauty soundtrack. A few seconds later the band comes in with a hazy fuzzy version of 60s rock recreated in the guise of 90s indie, and a frantically catchy, breathy vocal line about “drinking wine straight from the bottle” hooks its claws deep into that odd nodule of the brain that exists solely to hang onto fragments of pop melody and random lines from ancient adverts (“Clifford is quite the bon viveur”). Whilst the medulla hauntologica is being entranced, the conscious part of our mind is coming to a conclusion: that Stefan Archer’s keyboards get flattened and distorted through small PAs, and that Kane Chamberlain’s vocals can be charmingly tuneful, even though they’re clearly too weak to cut it on a noisy stage. There are definitely some very strong elements to this band that we’d entirely missed in concert.

“Unnatural” reinforces the feeling that this is a studio band – no shame in that – by washing us down with a tinny High Street shoegaze sound that might not excite the purists, but again tickles the ears of anyone with an interest in well made pop music. In fact, it reminds us an awful lot of “Dreams” by The Cranberries, and it might come as a shock to anyone who’s only come across the ugly punchdrunk politicising of “Zombie” that they were a decent band on their first album. Cloyingly sugary perhaps, but these two tracks are worth a listen.

“Have A Happy Life” is slightly less successful, but it’s still built around a jaunty little melody that takes us by the hand for a quick dance down a petal-strewn path; trouble is Archer keeps trying to trip us up into a fetid pool of schmaltzy mid-80s sax along the hourney. Get back on the keyboards, man! Something about the clean rock ‘n’ roll rhythms remind us of Aztec Camera just after they’d ceased to matter. It’s a decent enough song, but doesn’t really hit the heights.

There are some lovely icy little drum machine interjections on “Skywriting”, but for the most part it’s smothered beneath a thick blanket of pseudo-strings. The lyrics talk about being “underneath a landslide/ Swimming in the riptide”, but the music is so safe it’s more the sonic equivalent of sitting quietly on the little train at Blenheim Palace, with members of Keane riding the throttle making sure the journey doesn’t get too exciting.

We look forward to hearing the Bears’ next recording, as this one has honestly blown away our expectations. We hope that they can capitalise on the airy melodicism of the best music here, and leave the nods towards landfill indie behind. We’d like them to leave the sensibly cosy ground behind and start to sound a lot more bi-polar, but for now this is a CD we can fully support.

Bossa No, Ta

I had to go to work today. On a Saturday, I ask you. Still, time and a half, eh? This, coupled with the fact I have to retype this review - which is the very last from the ancient archives - means I don't have time to tell the Cowley Lavatory Story. Remind me to do it Tuesday.

MOTIV, Bossaphonik, The Cellar 20/1/06

It's something of a truism that most rock bands are better live than on record, and that songs breathe a little more easily in the vibrant atmosphere of a performance than they do in the strict confines of the studio. Oddly, the new breed of hip hop influenced club jazz bands seem to crank out fluent, funky nuggets on record, but onstage they descend into stadium rock bombast and sluggish clumsiness. I'd heard an EP by London-based seven-piece Motiv, a few years ago, and been impressed. Firy horn solos were bounced on elastic basslines whilst jazzy keyboards rumbled in the middle distance and insistent rhythms punched the whole thing along. What was most intriguing about the recording was the way they kept hold of that dancefloor staple, a rich and constant groove, while allowing the saxophonist space to take his solos to far more exciting places than most club jazzers would dare.

Stuff them onstage in The Cellar, however, and this attention to detail goes out the window. They don't play too baldy, but it all feels hollow and unconvincing - they sound less like they're playing together, and more like they happen to be playing near each other. The drummer is frankly excellent, but nobody seems to be overly concerned with playing off his springy rhythms. Listen, in funk the beat has to be exact if you want it to work: the downbeat has got to be a singularity, not a quantum packet.

It's a tragedy that Motiv can't seem to fall in line, as there's so much individual talent on display. The saxophonist still boasts an impressive technical range, from angular Maceo lines to abstract Coltrane squiggles, whilst the trumpet and flugelhorn player has a neatly contrasting melancholic tone, something like Clifford Brown on occasion. But too often the brass are approximating the requirements of the music, sawing when they should be stabbing. Similarly, occasional rapper The Cheshire Cat and a female vocalist are pretty adept on the mike, if slightly too content to shout, "Are you alright, Oxford?" between every tune. As a friend of mine put it, "It's hard to see whatr this band is doing wrong...except the gig".

All in all Motiv seem to be coasting, content to let their musical funky footsoldiers turn into shambling zombies, content to shout "Power to the people!" instead of making any meaningful connection. Yes, the majority of the audience are very appreciative, but stick anything approaching dance music on at midnight on a Friday in a licensed venue and people are guaranteed to go ape. Motiv could still be a very good band, if they could just find a little passion and precision. James Brown once sang "Get up! Get into it! Get involved!". Well, there are worse mantras a band can adopt...

Manny 911

I hardly ever play computer games, I'm not really best placed to judge this sort of thing, but why spoil a facile review intro? This is from way back in October 05.

Chinese Fingertrap - Grim Fandango

Drifting into Extreme Geek Mode for a moment, Grim Fandango is on of the wittiest computer games ever, right up there with Elite and Zelda:Ocarina Of Time. It concerns Manny Calavera and his noirish trawls through the dark underbelly of the Land of the Dead, discovering layer upon layer of dark intrigue. It's a strained link, I'll admit, but this Grim Fandango isn't dissimilar, as a few listens throws up more than is normally apparent in the staid realm of melodic metal.

In addition to the straight-up sing vs growl clusters that are "Time Gentlemen Please" and "Paint By Numbers", we find a more yearning tone in "If You Knew What Was Good For You" that recalls Day Of Grace and even a cavernouisly abstract hip hop sound on the brief title track (imagine the heavier corners of the Macro Dub Infection compilations or the silty bottom of a Cypress Hill tune). By keeping the tracks - and the cueing times between them - brief, Chinese Fingertrap manage to make the record varied and surprising, without losing any of the punch.

"Shake Your Moneymaker" might have resulted in numerous fines if CFT were James Brown's backing band, but what it lacks in funk action it gains in pure wallop. Only "Everyone's Going To The Party Baby!" fails to ignite, a stumpy teenage plod leaving an unpleasant Kid Rock aftertaste. It may not be the most original music released in Oxford this year, but Grim Fandango is well thought out, well recorded, well performed and should be played well loud,

Sleepy, Hollow

I recently became the World Handjob Champion. I had to beat off stiff competition.

Sorry.


THE EMPTY VESSELS/ SAMUEL ZASADA/ NUMBERNINE – Moshka, Bully, 9/4/10


Numbernine have been away for a few years, but they still peddle a perky, carbonated britpop that is immensely enjoyable, if slightly hackneyed. In their time away from the stage, they’ve had a slight shuffle and Alex Horwill now plays drums (although it may be him on the somewhat superfluous samples and backing tracks), and he has a natural bounce that suits the songs even if a couple of golden clunkers tell of a lack of rehearsal. The bass is still the best thing about the band, supple and springy yet capable of building some pretty solid rock edifices on occasion. It s only the lead vocals that are mild let down: plenty of pep, but they do tend to shove falsetto in place of melodic invention.

The songs are of a high calibre, even if most of them sound as though they’re being beamed in from 1994. “My New Mantra” tries to stretch the envelope with a proggy Eastern flavour, but ends up feeling dyspeptically like Gene playing Zepellin, and the band are happiest with tracks like “London”, reeking of Camden market and redolent of NME inky fingers gripping pints in The Good Mixer. All in all, it’s good to have Numbernine back, they make a great unpretentious pop noise, and have a couple of cracking tunes, not least “Talk”, a melodic barnstormer that still reminds us happily of The Longpigs at their best, five years since we first heard it.

Samuel Zasada’s first number has fantastic folky intricacy and rectilinear motorik groove mashed together like Pentangle through the square window. Later, gorgeous three-part harmonies wash over a scuzzy tale of saying “’Fuck you’ to The Man”, as if Lou Barlow had started writing for Peter, Paul & Mary. Last time we saw Samuel, his voice knocked us back, but that was pretty much all there was to like; since then he has placed himself in the middle of an excellent trio and thought very intelligently about arrangements, concocting a dense sonic fug that truly suits his rich, gothic voice, but that doesn’t obscure some sprightly melodies. Samuel hasn’t been content to strum a few chords in flyblown open mics, letting his impressive voice do all the work, he’s clearly been honing his music into something a little bit special. The work is paying off.

Speaking of good singers, get an earful of Matt Greenham from The Empty Vessels, who has a cracking pair of lungs and a love of wide-straddling rawk howling that’s only a set of leather kecks and a three figure a day drug habit away from the glory days of MTV. The band is well-drilled, and unrepentantly retrospective, happy in the warm, yet shallow, pools of classic rock. This is refreshingly honest, and feels like coming back to homegrown veg after too long with the polished, perfectly shaped carrots in Tesco’s: you know, tasty and caked in mud and, quite possibly, shaped like a willy.

And that’s all great of course, but only for about fifteen minutes. By twenty not even a kickass flailing limb-o-matic drummer can stop the attention wandering (we realised, from staring vacuously at the guitarist’s T shirt, that the Os in The Doors’ logo look a lot like coffee beans, for example). An interesting noise like a rat gnawing a modem turned out to be a faulty pedal, and we began to realise, as another identical song started chugging along, that old school was rapidly becoming old hat. All of which feels pretty hard on The Empty Vessels, who are clearly having a blast and probably don’t want to change the musical world any, but this didn’t alter the fact that we weren’t really young enough, drunk enough, or from Wantage enough to fully enjoy these threadbare rock archaisms. This is a very good band, but one that doesn’t stand up to criticism very well; if you’re enjoying the music, it’s probably not because you’re thinking about it in any great detail, or thinking about anything whatsoever except the advisability of a ninth pint or whether you’ve got a chance with the one over there with the black jeans.

As their forebears Reef might have asked mid-song, “Alright now?”. Yes, we are alright, thanks. Alright, but not, you know, ecstatic.

May To Play

Three sad facts. 1) KK don't run Bank Holiday weekenders any longer, or any big events for that matter 2) The X has been a curry house for a couple of years now - a tasty one, mind 3) Somehow I just don't have the time to watch snooker, or indeed any sport, anymore. I don't like most sport, as it happens, but don't let that stop a good bit of self-pity.


MAYDAY FESTIVAL, The X, 1/5/05

Jump off a bloody bridge if you want to, but for me the May Bank Holiday has two great traditions: one is the snooker final, and the other is the Kakofanney weekender. I found myself there for the whole of Sunday.

Glenda & Sam kick things off. She is better known as the hair-swinging leader of metallers Phyal and he is the drummer from oddball punks Fork, so it's unexpected to see them play some quiet folk songs, with plenty of bodhran and flute. Diverting, if lightweight.

Can you lot really not think of names for your acts? Mauro & David turns out to be Mauro and David from Inflatable Buddha (well, be honest, whcih Mauro did you think it would be?), playing hurdy-gurdy and percussion respectively. Some of you will already know that Mauro can make his odd screechy instrument song, and David turns out to be a dab hand (pardon the pun) as an accompanist, which almost excuses the fact that he's wearing some mangy old purple curtains.

I find the winning simplicity fo Jeremy Hughes' playing quite delightful, especially on a sunny day. However, if you find the idea of Gandalf's beard double wibbling out an instrumental called "Rainbow" a turn off, steer well clear.

Laima Bite proves once again that she has one of the best vocal deliveries in Oxford, with a relaxed set. If I don't think she's as outstanding a talent as some local writers, it's less a criticism of her, and more a celebration of our local acoustic musicians.

Frei Zinger (flute) & Chris Hills (tabla) are both superb musicians, but their set sadly made no impression on me whatsoever. Unlike the first beer of the day.

Trip hop without the hip hop? It's odd, but it's Stem. Emma's voice, backed by acoustic guitar, is wonderfully weary and emotive, recalling Portishead or early Lamb, but the percussion is a clunky beast and keeps the set from taking off. Pity.

Clearly, getting the fun-loving but less than vocally dextrous landlady of the pub to sing some cheesy show tunes should be an embarassment, but luckily Condom (yes, that's really the band's name) have such an unpretentious vivacity that it's almost impossible to dislike them; hardly a highlight, but a bit of Bank Holiday larking about never hurt anybody.

With their relaxed AOR songwriting and West Coast sax solos, Veda Park will never be one to make the heart beat faster. Still, they're such natural ensemble players and the whole show is so incredibly tight you have to go with them. Especially after another beer.

Trip hop without the - hang on, I've done that one. But, for different reasons, Drift deserve the description as much as Stem. The vocals have a similar torch song yearning to them, but whilst the drum machine and bass are laying down dubby grooves, the guitarist is on an entirely unrelated psychedelic mission. Every time the neat arrangements make some sonic space, it's filled with an FX-laden guitar part whcih defeats the point somewhat. The again, the ring modulation solo is scorching so maybe...

The night really starts with the arrival of Harry Angel in all their goth-punk glory. Taut, angular Bauhaus style rackets led by a great tall chap leaning over the mike like the speed freak son of the Twin Peaks giant: time for a celebratory beer.

A keening and forceful North African vocal suddenly fills the pub, covered in reverb and synth pads. It sounds pretty powerful, but when the drum and bass kicks in great things start to happen. That's live drums played with brushes and a double bass, by the way, but they still have the punch of a Moving Shadow classic. We've just witnesses the debut gig by Tunsi. I hope we witness many more.

I've seen The Epstein many times. I saw them at The Zodiac on Friday. Yet here I am again front and centre. That's all you need to know. Still the best of the (inexplicably large number of) country bands in Oxford.

There's alwasy a sneaking suspicion that I shouldn't like a sprawling ska punk band that calls itself The Druqsquad, singing songs about washing machines and fat fish. but when they play, I forget all that and just enjoy the volume, the exuberance and the extremely sily keyboard noises. A fitting end.

So, it was fun. So, it was Bank Holiday Sunday. So, I may have let my critical faculties off the leash for a bit (did I mention the beer?), but that seems to be the right approach to one of these big Exeter Hall events. We've just had over nine hours of music in a warm atmosphere for less than a fiver, and I can't really think of anything I'd rather be doing with myself, which is ultimately the only important thing.

One Fruit In The Rave

In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king.

Rubbish. Monarchy isn't based upon specious opthalmic meritocracy, is it? If so, the Queen of England (a country that is, with a tiny percentage of exceptions, fully sighted), would have to have super x-ray vision, or something. Maybe she does, I wouldn't know.

Remind me never to play cards with the Windsors.


STRAWBERRY NIGHTMARES – CONFUSION/ILLUSION (demo)


Every artist makes a choice about their boundaries. Some classical performers confine themselves to period instruments. Some folkies insist on making their own fiddle bows or curing their own bodhran skins. Some beergutted provincial blues players decide at the outset to remove any trace of original thought, character or taste from their life’s work. Strawberry Nightmares, along with a fair clump of current musicians, have confined themselves to the stark flat palette of early computer game music and home synthesiser voices. It’s not quite the 8 Bit Gameboy sound of DJ Scotch Egg or the Chip Tune glitter of Unicorn Kid, but it exists in a world of cheap dynamics and 2D sounds with minimal attack and delay.

Some of which sounds are, let’s be honest, absolutely wonderful. The synthesised cuica at the opening of “hit” (it’s been played on 6 Music) “My Owl is Broken”, for example, is very pleasing, as is a whole gamut of electronic bleeps and tinkles that pop up throughout “Complex Gift”, or the Yello-a-like robot horn consort on “Stellar Soldier”. All very nice, but sadly the tracks display very few compositional merits: there are no interesting rhythms, no great melodies or motifs to latch on to, and certainly the concept of developing ideas seems to be anathema to the digital simplicity of the style. By far the best tracks are “Pipe Speed” (here in two versions), with its Mario references, and “Monster Milkshake”, with a crystalline synth line that loosely recalls Yellow Magic Orchestra, and some slightly more cohesive drum programming.

However, for the most part, this CD is unsatisfying. It goes out of its way to show us that it is based on the sounds of 1985, but gets nowhere near emulating the qualities of electronic music from this period that’s actually any good. It’s like a man recounting exactly how he laughed, without telling you the joke. There are memories from my childhood in this music, but it’s like Hauntology without being haunting. In fact, the whole LP feels like the musical equivalent of one of those terrible I Love 1983 shows that were all the rage a few years back, with some no mark like John Robb saying, “Oh, oh, I fell off my Chopper and spilt Vimto on my Etch-A-Sketch” for an audience of mindless inebriates whose lives are slipping away from them as they gaze mindlessly backwards. The 80s throwback tone of this LP might well function as a doorway back to a prelapsarian innocence for somebody frustrated by the contemporary technical world; it might be a good get out for composers who have no harmonic or rhythmic ideas; it might be a giggle for a band of Sugar Ape trendies, who think that recognising something is the same as understanding it; for us, it’s proof that music usually needs more than nice noises.