Charlbury 2011 Sunday

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RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, CHARLBURY, 19/6/11


As much fun as Saturday was, Sunday packed in a few more surprises for us, not least with Grey Children, the new project for Dave Griffiths, once of Eeebleee and Witches. As befits a first live performance of songs played by a scratch band, there are hesitant, uncertain moments in the set, but the material is very strong, with a muscular poeticism that’s something like a cross between Tindersticks and Sugar, with some excellent baroque curlicues from Benek Chylinski’s trumpet and Chris Fulton’s violin. Not a project we expect to see gracing the stage with great regularity, so it’s a real treat for those who turn up early.

After discovering him last year, we have to hang around to catch a bit of Sonny Black’s performance. You see so much hollow showboating in blues, it’s just great to see a relaxed, unhurried musician who lets his technique serve the music, and not the other way round. Hints of Davey Graham and John Renbourn abound, as well as the greats like Doc Watson. Sonny also plays some nice bottleneck national guitar, a gorgeous instrument which is only spoilt by the fact that just looking at the thing reminds us of Brothers In Arms.

A complete change of style at the other end of the festival, with thumping drum machines and squelching 303 basslines. We have an admission: we have no critical faculties in the face of acid house. None whatsoever. Honestly, just the sound of it immerses us in a wash of serotonin-drenched euphoria, taking us direct to cloud 909. So, for us to observe that Manacles Of Acid are very good indeed is probably meaningless, but they do a bang up job of reliving that wonderful space between Phuture and early Orbital. There’s a lovably ramshackle edge to the show, as lines come in at different volumes, and jack leads are swapped on the fly, but really if you do this music well, it always sounds good, you don’t have to rewrite the rulebook. So, not that dissimilar from Sonny Black after all.

Main stage engineer Jimmy Evil disappears at about this time, so we follow him over to the second stage to witness his progcore outfit Komrad. Since we last saw them, the tracks have been rearranged a little, and the music is less the unforgiving technical metal of old, and has a lighter, post-Zappa bounce: it’s not the all-out jape of Mike Patton’s more leftfield projects, but there is definite humour on display, not least in the genius song title “Parking Restrictions In Seaside Towns (Strongly Worded Letter To The Council)”. At moments the set is a little approximate – with intricate arrangements like these there’s nowhere to hide the odd fluff – but this is a band well worth watching.

People might look at Steamroller and call them dinosaurs. That would be forgetting, of course, that dinosaurs are COOL. An unreconstructed power blues trio will send some people into frothing excitement (especially those who remember the younger Steamroller from their Corn Dolly days), just as it will bore others to silent tears, but even the most vehement critic would have to admit that Steamroller have more than earned their place in Oxford music history, and that drummer Larry Reddington’s lyrics have a knowing humour: he could probably pen a witty lyric like “Back In Ten Minutes” whilst most of his peers were still trying to find a rhyme for “Cadillac”.

We’ve never quite managed to warm to Gunning For Tamar, for some reason. Their music is equidistant between Hretha and Spring Offensive, but for us they don’t have the rigorous elasticity of the former nor the emotive beauty of the latter. Solid, twitchy Oxford artpop, played very well, but not much else to our ears.

The Prohibition Smokers Club have developed in the past year from a random jam session to smooth, stadium soul party. Sort of a mixed blessing, as some of the set is too polite, but the highlights are excellent: “Graveyard Shift” is a smoky sketch of urban night owls, like a collaboration between Tom Waits and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, and the final track is a spicy open-ended funk workout. Really they’re the sort of groove revue that can only be judged after two 90 minute sets and a gallon of Long Island Iced Tea, it seems as though they’re just getting warmed up when the gig finishes.

One great thing about Riverside is all the children in attendance who seem to actually love the music. We saw a lad of about four moshing away to Gunning For Tamar, and by the time Alphabet Backwards come on, he’s rounded up a whole bunch of chums, all right in front of the stage. “Oh God,” observes an audience member to us, “they’re flocking. It’s like The Birds”. But then, Alphabet Backwards are a band for the unabashed child inside us all, an improbably joyous froth of pop melodies and chirpy keyboards. The closing track, new to us, sounds like a mixture of The Streets and Supertramp. Brilliant.

We thought Every Hippie’s Dream was world peace, with perhaps the chance to smoke a joint and look at a lady’s boobs taking a close second, but apparently what they like is 60s and 70s rock covers. So, look, when the sun’s out and someone’s playing “Foxy Lady” and they’re not completely rubbish the world can never seem an entirely awful place, but someone’s clearly been bogarting the originality round at EHD’s commune, as there isn’t much character to speak of on stage. They also seem to run out of steam a couple of numbers before the end of the set: if getting from one end to the other of “Sunshine Of Your Love” is a terrible chore, perhaps the covers circuit isn’t for you, lads.

Death Of Hifi give us instrumental hip hop next, which is a tribute to Riverside’s diversity. There are some nice mid-90s beats and some cheeky samples, plus decent scratching and guitar playing, but none of the tracks go anywhere. A rapper hops up to freestyle over one of the tracks, and whilst he’s not quite got the flow of Half Decent, who guested with Prohibition Smokers Club, his presence lifts the music from a moraine of unconnected ideas. A blueprint for future developments, perhaps.