Truck Or Treat

Hello.

It's been a while, sorry about that. I'm as busy as can be over here. I shall get this blog back on track hopefully in the enar future. Anway, here's the 1st part of my Truck review, elements of which appear in the current Nightshift.


TRUCK, Hill Farm, Steventon, 24-5/7/10

SATURDAY
In recent years Truck has been all over the national press, popping up in The Independent Magazine or The Guardian’s guide to festivals, but whilst this may be deserved none of these culture jamborees seem to capture what we think is good about Truck. Forget your indie cred and girls in fifty quid wellies, we adore the vicar frying donuts, the Round Tablers serving reasonably priced tea, the slightly makeshift feel of most of the stages, and – in short – the fact that it doesn’t look like something that’s ever likely to excite the staff at The Guardian. The other great thing about Truck, which is perhaps true of all good festivals, is that it always surprises you with great unknown acts. Openers Meursault aren’t a bad little group to stumble upon, volleying melodic laptop rock into the balmy afternoon. Their inherent drama reminds us of Witches, and our only criticism is that they come across as desperately earnest, as if they were pleading before a medieval ducking stool.

Something Beginning With L are a new name to us as well, and if their woozy cover of Whitney Houton’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” marks them out as hypnagogic trendies, the majority of the set is just good old guitar and keyboard rock music, finished off with a gorgeous plangent voice. At times they remind us of Texas – even down to the cowboy hat – but not in a way that is infuriating. “Lovely” begins with L.

It’s the same every year, we want to like the cabaret tent but never find anything good. We’re desperate to enjoy Jim Davies, who seems like he’d be a great man to share a few pints with, and who has a natural humour about him, but who must have left his punchlines behind in the rush to get packed. Sadly his tales of working as an advertising copywriter are good, but don’t really connect; it does, however, give us an excuse to pepper this review with idiotic promotional slogans.

In a swirl of NASA suits, bubble machines, theremin and stylophone Spaceships Are Cool prepare for takeoff. Their wonderfully tuneful music is akin to something on the Duophonic label minus the furrowed brows, and at least three tracks sound like White Town’s bedroom wonder “Your Woman” covered by a cheery Glaswegian indie band. They’re one of the best acts of the weekend, but if they have a Smile-Off with members of Alphabet Backwards stand well back, you might get caught in some hideous chirpiness crossfire. Put the freshness back.

They also give out tiny origami space shuttles to the crowd, which we find scattered around throughout the day; is subliminal craft merch a new sales concept? God knows Atlantic Pacific could do with some of that subtlety, they play a very dull yet not upsetting set, which is only interesting because it provides the first glimpse of a Bennett brother onstage. What do we win?

We were fervently hoping Thomas Tantrum in The Barn would be Thomas Truax going ape because all his machines had gone wrong, but sadly not. Nothing else about them is a let down, though. Get past the ultra-contemporary pared guitar sounds, and you find pop gold something like The Cardigans, or perhaps even The Cowboy Junkies, if they were cooked in a cutely effervescent pixie pie. It’s musically spotless and hugely enjoyable, at times reminding us of pretty 90s popstrels Tsunami (not the later Oxford band of the same name). Swiss Concrete don’t make shit smelling barns, but if they did...

The programme tells us “Luke Smith hasn’t missed a Truck Festival since he first played ten (??? citation needed) years ago”. How sweet, he’s so much a part of the scenery, they don’t even bother proof reading his write up. And as such criticising him would be like visiting Wiltshire and giving Stonehenge a bad review, but luckily we adore him anyway. We could ramble on about his intelligent lyrics and adept piano, the excellent growling John Harle tone of the soprano sax or the warm comic humanity of his delivery, but all you really need to know is that throughout the set the sound engineers were grinning like loons, and they’re a notoriously surly bunch. Smith is somewhere between Betjeman and Stillgoe, and is an English eccentric to be valued...and he does make exceedingly good tunes.

Active Child plays some lovely harp, but spoils it by covering the music with horrible Eurhythmics drum programming. The he stops playing the harp. Then we leave.

Boat To Row are likened in the programme to Stornoway and Bert Jansch, which is phenomenally generous and puts us off their folky pop at first, but eventually we warm to them, and we mentally file them alongside Sonny Liston as pleasing acoustic troubadours. Still, nothing here to get the pulse racing, so we let our fingers do the walking and pick something at random from the programme.

Fucking fingers. We’re back at the Cabaret tent, where two men (who may be Bishop & Douche, but we’re not certain) are playing the introductions to cheesy records to inexplicable applause. God, how we hate the Nathan Barley world we live in, sometimes, that equates recognising something with understanding it, and thinks quoting something is the same as criticising it. This is desperately unfunny and makes Boat To Row seem like a halcyon age, so we leave ASAP. Because we’re worth it.

Luckily it means we catch some of Mr Shaodow’s set from the door of a packed Beathive. Only a few years ago he was fumbling his way through a Punt set whereas now he (and battle brother LeeN, amongst others) has the crowd by the scruff of the neck, and is sending it, frankly, loopy. The only down point is the overlong freestyle section, where Shaodow starts asking for suggestions from the audience like a hip hop Josie Lawrence. The improv raps are good, but why try to impress on the fly when you’ve already written such astounding rhymes?

We think that Y was on our bus, trying to impress some 15 years olds and telling a dizzy girl she was psychic; on Sunday he’s refusing to leave the tiny Rapture Records stage whilst he slurs non-sequiturs and plays fudged arpeggios on a weeny keyboard, like a horrific cross between Suicide and John Shuttleworth. Somewhere in the middle of this embarrassment, though, he put a tiger in his tank and churned out a steaming wall of psych rock noise, along with an ace jamming band (double Bennett score!). Imagine all the great sounds that influenced Spacemen 3, and then put them together replacing the narcotic mope with a Watney’s Party 7 barrel of fun, and you get a set that might not be complex, but is exactly what is needed as the afternoon tails away. Some toddlers are also going nuts for it, alternately dancing crazy and running their fingers through the pebbles in the Village Pub tent like people on their first acid trip. “Dude, my hands are so big. For a three year old”.