Luke Smith can be found in our
record collection between Jimmy Smith and Mark E. Smith, which seems pretty
fair as a) he’s pretty useful on the old keys, and b) he’s resolutely English, a
deeply acquired taste, and has changed a band member every time we see him. His lovable Stillgoe meets Betjeman schtick
is much as it always was, even after a few Trucks away from the bill, although
the addition of young female vocalist has turned set stalwart “Please Be My
Girlfriend” into a sort of tea room version of The Smiths’ “Girl Afraid”.
Crash Of Rhinos are epic and wired
and excited, but like lots of angular emotional rock there doesn’t seem to be
much underneath it all worth being epic, wired or excited about. They’re like getting Gielgud all dressed up
in his Richard III costume, then making him recite excerpts from Teen Wolf.
Now,
LA duo The Bots on the other hand
are properly gigantic, a vicious mess of feral guitar and pummelled drums that
takes in Sabbath riffs, Hendrix via Last Exit solos, punk vocals and more pummelled
drums. It’s irreverently witty, too, and
our favourite moment is when one of them breaks off from caustic guitar
screeches to stop and play three notes on a farty synth repeatedly for about
two minutes. The other one, in case you’re
wondering, was pummelling the drums at the time.
And So I Watch You
From Afar
are on the main stage. It’s almost too
easy. They might as well be called, And
So I Nip Off To The Bar. Which isn’t to
say they’re rubbish, but their twiddly posty-rocky thingy is not as interesting
as watching kids climb over the giant CD sculpture, or trying to explain
cryptic crosswords to a Swede (partial success). Fight
Like Apes are better, not least because their singer is dressed like
Siouxsie and if they are overly fond of a repeated singalong vocal line, they
know when to kick in enough energy to take a song home.
The
timetable says the Jamalot stage should host The Fridge & Bungle Experience
now, but it looks a lot like Ilodica
to us. You have to love the way that he
just plays his relaxed roots whilst members of the organisation set up the
stage around him, laying down airy melodic lines and singing in a style
equidistant between Max Romeo and Horace Andy as if he is lost in his own
musical world. He’s a proper ragamuffin
too – we mean that in the original sense, his scruffy martial jacket makes him
look like a disciple of The Libertines gone dread. He jams out a track with Pieman, who is next on the bill, which is rather a sweet way to treat
set changeovers. Pieman is not, as you
might expect, a Headcount tribute act, but a beatboxer of some frightening
ability, who is incredibly adept at replicating dubstep wubs and scratchadelic
curlicues as well as the traditional drum sounds. And he can rap, it turns out. The bastard.
Our only criticism is that his show is a crowd-pleasing diversion, we’d
like to see him doing something more substantial one day, or perhaps a set of
collaborations.
When
The Subways run onstage, fists
aloft, like second rate telethon presenters, or clueless youth workers, we fear
for our teeth, which can only take so much grinding of a weekend. But they’re actually - whisper it – good fun. They know their way from one end of a tune to
another, they look as though they are sincerely having a ball onstage, and
their set does actually make us a smile, even whilst we fail to recall any of
their music mere seconds after it has finished.
Plus, it’s endearing that their stage moves are a vindication for clumsy
wedding dad dancing the world over.
The
only thing that annoys us about Dan Le
Sac Vs Scroobius Pip is the “Vs”.
Considering they’re a laptop twiddler with a taste for 8 bit squiggles
and late 90s breakbeat wrangling, and a beardy spoken word artist with a love
for classic hip hop and Detroit hardcore, their music is a surprisingly
cohesive collaboration. We can, on the
other hand, talk at great length about why we admire them, from the impossibly
infectious music to the erudite lyrics to the fact that they’re politically
engaged musicians who don’t resort to rabble-rousing simplifications. This 45 minute show is inevitably a bit of a
greatest hits workout, and we would have liked more time to explore their more
esoteric work – not to mention a clearer vocal mix – but seeing a packed tent
leap manically to a track we first saw Scroobius play solo to fewer than 20
people in The Zodiac, before the P.I.P. was a V.I.P., is pleasing. In fact, whilst this set is going on, other
stages were being headlined by ShaoDow
and Rolo Tomassi, two more acts Nightshift first discovered playing
blinding gigs to q tiny smattering of
listeners, and it’s truly heartwarming.
Or depressing, of course, depending on how you look at it.
After
that endorphin blast, The Horrors
can’t compete. We think they’re fairly
good on record, but the show is an anonymous parade of plodding drums and synth
washes, like karaoke backing for a mid-80s Simple Minds song everyone’s
forgotten. There are hints of an
atmospheric tune here and there, but after seeing Toy this is cruelly thin
broth to serve as the final course.
It
has been a thoroughly enjoyable festival, with the Saturday especially rich in
treats. On one of our visits to see the
ever-helpful Rapture Records stall, one of the staff announces, “It’s OK! Truck is complete, the Thomas Truax records have arrived!”. New York’s Meccano music maestro made a
welcome return to the Veterans stage this year, and our only concern for coming
events is how mavericks like him find a place on the bill, and get a chance to
earn their place as future veterans.
Once you felt the curatorial sway over Truck, from the Bennetts
themselves to Trailerpark’s PC, to Alan Day, and if this resulted in some
mystifying decisions, it also gave the festival a stamp of identity that
nowadays doesn’t seem to quite remain.
We saw some truly outstanding acts this weekend, but if you want to, you
can go and see most of them sharing bills at other festivals all the way
through the summer. As we said at the
outset, mix up the stages, and throw in some more adventurous act choices, and
Truck could easily be better now than it ever has been, but if it becomes just
one more identikit summer stop for the floral welly crew, then we’ll lose a
vital part of what always made it special, and all the volleyball nets in the
world will never buy that back.
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