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.