Cowley The Beast

A review of a pretty bad day out. Mind you, they're all bad days out now aren't they?


OX4, various venues, 9/10/10


Throughout the afternoon, passersby are enticed up to the doorway of Cafe Tarifa by the music the Oxford Folk Festival has booked, only to turn away after discovering the £5 entry fee, yet the vast majority of those who have spent twenty quid on an OX4 wristband don’t venture out to see anything until the sun has set. Somewhere in this paradox is the promoter’s eternal frustration, and the problem couched at the heart of OX4. You can go on all you like about “Oxford’s Creative Quarter” and musical diversity, but whilst this festival may superficially resemble The Punt, OX4 is more like a touring gig writ large: there are a handful of big acts (all from outside the county, if not the country), and the rest of the multifaceted day is like one long local support act that nobody goes to see. We visit the open mike at the new INevents space, to find the host begging for participants – it seems a musical community, like music itself, just can’t be forced.

But good music there is, and it’s OX4’s secret victory that all the best acts we see are homegrown. The Folk Festival stage is strong, with highlights from Bellowhead’s John Spiers, and Huffenpuff, a duo of accordion and soprano sax/flute, which blithely skips through the glade of musical history grabbing fragments of Breton, klezmer and jazz like so many falling blossoms. Hretha build intricate yet reserved instrumentals that are full of delicate mystery, and construct their arrangements with clockwork precision when most post-rockers rely on sketchy dynamics. Despite taking far longer to set up than one man with a keyboard has any right, Chad Valley make a quietly euphoric music that isn’t far from late 80s Scritti Politti or a sun-bleached Beloved, and once you’ve forgiven the fact that the vocal sounds like Tony Hadley with hiccoughs the set is strong.

Some days it feels as though every band in the world can be defined with reference to The Beach Boys. In that sense Fixers fall somewhere between the approaches of Animal Collective and The High Llamas, but more importantly they play the set of the day. The smooth, AM sound beneath the soaring falsetto serenades is as much Dennis Wilson as it is Brian, and intrigues those of us who feel that Surf’s Up is at least as good as Pet Sounds. The pastel-tinted songs are also dusted with mid-80s synth tones and Phil Spector drum patterns, yet manage to retain a cohesive and individual air.

Fixers are proof that music can be retro and still feel fresh, but the lesson has been lost on most of the larger acts. Everything Everything offer a stilted ersatz funk that could make Arthur Russell spin in his tragically early grave, and Glitches are the same but worse, a Wanky Goes To Hollywood melange of syn drums, stupid hair and ineffectual yelping. Jesus, we love the 80s and these two acts are making us sound like we write for Proper Music Pub Rock Weekly by their sheer lack of vision. Dog Is Dead are a tight band with some decent tunes, if you can battle past the fact they sound like Level 42, and Willy Mason is impressive in holding a large audience with just an acoustic and some slow paeans, but does remind us queasily of an unhoned Springsteen. More reference grabbing from Abe Vigoda, who make a passable swipe at Talking Heads artfunk and Devo japery without having the character to equal either.

The hipster homogeneity of the name acts, with influences stretching from Now 5 to Now 8, takes the edge off the event, but as with all art, the gems are there for the dedicated. Our final act is the excellent Mr Shaodow, for whom half the room sadly leaves within minutes, but who energises the remainder with pure expertise, originality and intelligence. As someone who has lived in London, China and Oxford, he could tell you that good musicians are united by hard graft and talent, not their postcode.