When I Punt My Masterpiece

This morning I really like Sleaford Mods and Georg Philipp Telemann.

PUNT FESTIVAL, Purple Turtle/ Cellar/ Wheatsheaf/ White Rabbit/ Turl Street Kitchen, 14/5/14

The Punt is an endurance test of pop music and beer, it helps to line the stomach first.  We’ve just finished a big bowl of salt and carbs in a noodle bar, and are cracking open our fortune cookie, to find the legend “Soon one of your dreams will come true”.  Hey, that’s remarkably similar to the sign-off on our handy Punt guide, “may all your musical dreams come true”.  This looks to be a cosmically blessed event, quite possibly the greatest night in cultural history; and, look, we didn’t even get any sauce on our shirt.

The Purple Turtle brings us crashing back to mundane reality, starting 20 minutes late, whilst bits of the PA are hastily tinkered with.  This means we only get to see about 15 minutes of Hot Hooves – which is about 7 songs, of course.  Although he’ll doubtless hate us for saying so, their lead vocalist seems to be slowly morphing into Mac E Smith, drawling and chewing his way through acerbic songs over taut and unvarnished pub punk, and spending most of the space between tracks shouting about the venue’s lighting: plus can anyone really deliver lines like “attitude adjuster plan” and not sound a little bit MES?  Unlike their well-turned records, the songs in this set are almost smothered by their own energy, “This Disco” especially is reduced to a heavy thrum through which Pete Momtchiloff’s vocals barely penetrate.  Pop will erase itself, perhaps, but it sounds bloody good whilst it does so.

Down the alleyway at the Cellar, another slightly more mature band is showing the youngsters how it’s done, although in a quieter, more introspective fashion.  Only Trophy Cabinet amongst tonight’s acts would introduce a song called “Rant” and then drift away on an airy zephyr of dreamy “ba ba ba”s.  Their classic, refined indie owes a little to James, a smidgen to A House, and a lot to that band from 1986...oh, you know the ones...we can’t recall the name, but we can just visualise the exact shade of lilac vinyl their 7 inch came in.  Sometimes the band keeps everything a little too reined in, when a bit of pop fizz might enliven the show, but they can certainly write some cracking little tunes.

Whilst our Eastern dessert oracle thinks that our dreams are coming true, Aidan Canaday is possibly still asleep.  Looking surprisingly like comedian Tim Key he slurs somnambulistically through lyrics that rarely seem to develop beyond slackly repeated phrases.  This might be quite intriguing, in its way, but doesn’t fit well with the polite salon folk pop the rest of The Cooling Pearls is producing.  And the polite salon folk pop ain’t great.

Neon Violets are an object lesson in why live music in a decent venue is irreplaceable.  We’re just chatting to some old friends at the top of the Cellar’s stairway (The Punt acting like a sort of school reunion for aging pasty-faced scenesters), and we nearly don’t go down: “Sounds alright from here, it’ll only be a bit louder inside”.  Well, that’s where we were wrong, because in close proximity, what sounded like pleasingly chunky blues rock, a la Blue Cheer, becomes a glorious, immersive experience, huge drums ushering you down dark corridors of fuzzy guitar overtones.  The material is relatively simple, but the sound is deep enough to get lost in.  From the doorway, we’d never have dreamed it.

One downside to The Punt is all the bloody people turning up at venues, when we’re used to seeing local acts in a tiny knot of regular faces.  So, although we are in The White Rabbit whilst Salvation Bill is playing, all we can hear from the back of a truly packed bar are occasional bloopy drum machine loops, and tinny fragments of guitar and tremulous vocal.  It sounds as if someone is playing a Plaid remix of Radiohead on a small boombox.  This is actually quite a pleasing sound, but not precisely what Ollie Thomas was shooting for, we suspect.

Hannah Bruce is the only completely unknown name to us on this year’s bill, so we make the effort to watch the entirety of her set.  Having got a little lost in The Turl Street Kitchen, and ended up trying to enter a room in which people were having a quiet meeting (it might have been anything from a divorcees’ book club to the Botley Church Of Satan), we find the clean white space, and settle down on the stripped floorboards for some acoustic balladry – which feels odd as back in the day The Punt would always start with stuff like this, not irascible bald rockers moaning about gobos.  Bruce has some strong songs, but tends to mar them a little by delivering them in a world-weary, battle-scarred voice that droops in exhaustion at the end of phrases, and seems to have eradicated all vowels as excess baggage.  At times this works, the songs like melancholic spectres evaporating from the ramparts as the cock crows, but at other times it all feels kind of half-baked.  One track, in its recorded form, sounds like The Wu-Tang Clan, Hannah observes; forgive us for wishing that we’d heard that, and not another sombre strum.

During some embarrassing joke interviews in this year’s Eurovision broadcast, Graham Norton filled a bit of awkward dead air with the wry observation, “You know, there are 180 million people watching this”.  At 9.30 on Punt night this sort of happens in reverse: Lee Riley performs what is comfortably the most challenging, experimental set of the evening, and for 15 minutes he is the only performer onstage across all 5 venues.  This sort of thing should definitely be encouraged.  As he coaxes sheets of rich hum and harsh feedback from a guitar, people either rush for the exit with a grimace, or stand with their eyes closed looking beatific. This brief drone and noise set may have made some people’s dreams come true, and could feasibly haunt the nightmares of others for decades to come.

Without meaning to, we end up shuttling between the White Rabbit and The Turl Street Kitchen for the last 6 acts on our itinerary.  At the latter, Rawz is reminding us of the frustrating dilemma of live hip hop: you can’t have huge booming beats and clear, comprehensible lyrics simultaneously, not unless you have a lot of time and high end equipment.  So, the backing for this set, whilst nicely put together, is relegated to time-keeper not sonic womb, a tinny metronome and not much more.  This is only a minor concern, though, as it allows us to hear every syllable of Rawz’ relaxed but tightly controlled raps.  Previously we’d picked up some of MF Doom’s bug-eyed cut-up logic in the Rawz recording we’d heard, but tonight his delivery brings to mind the understated and thoughtfully clipped style of De La Soul circa Art Official Intelligence.  Seeing Jada Pearl, a talented singer whom we’ve not come across for absolutely years, guesting on one track was bonus, too.

Perhaps it was the fact that he followed Lee Riley, but Kid Kin’s set at The White Rabbit mostly dispenses with this occasionally overly pretty bedroom mood music style, and supplies some crisp, kicking electronica.  The first number is a slow whirlpool of piano chords and clear, forehead rapping drum machine patterns, that reminds us a little of Orbital’s “Belfast”, before some burnished bronze noise overwhelms everything.  The next piece takes a vintage Black Dog beat and adds tidy post-rock guitar, and the set continues in a strong and varied vein.

Juliana Meijer is also expanding the sonic palette in Turl Street, using two guitars and some curlew call synth sounds (courtesy of Seb Reynolds, who has already played once tonight in Flights Of Helios).  The breathy vocals are winning, and remind us a little of Edie Brickell, albeit without the forced chirpiness.  There’s a delightful airiness to the set, but it never becomes mere background music, even if it does briefly skirt cocktail territory at times.

Vienna Ditto is a band in hiding.  They consist of a guitarist, who seems to hate guitar histrionics, keeping his Bo Diddley and Duane Eddy stylings low in the mix, and a torch singer who shies away from the spotlight.  They play electronic music, but tie themselves down to looping most of the drums live, as if in terror of quantised purity.  They play the blues, but are seemingly wary of appearing overly sincere.  They make wonderful, uplifiting pop songs, but tend to obscure them with walls of acidic synth squelch.  They make charming stage banter, but rarely on the mike, so only a handful of the audience ever hear them.  Perhaps this refusal to ever resolve their own paradoxes is the reason we love them, but whatever the reason, they are the perfect conclusion to a very successful Punt, with the talent to fill vast auditoriums, but the love of playing techno gospel burners in the corner of a cramped, sweaty pub on a Wednesday night.  You think this ramshackle duo isn't the best band in Oxfordshire at the moment?  Dream on.