There are inevitably a handful of things that don’t quite land. Reciprocate’s plaintive US alt-rock style doesn’t excite, coming off like a wheedling petulant Pavement, and - it pains us to say - Nightshift, whose buzzy mantric tunes have potential, but whose performance seems tentative. Oh, and we’re also invited to climb over a stile, go into the wood, and look at a blue polystyrene cow (and then to go straight back, because there’s really not much to do once you get there). But to balance this there’s always something inexplicable and intriguing, like LDSN/Yakki Da!, who play melodica and make wonky loops from fragments of a story about going on holiday we can never quite decode, like a child’s summer holiday project being sucked into a black hole, or The Tuna Raffle (not a band or an artwork, but a raffle for a shitload of canned tuna; no, us neither).
The final live set of the weekend is Birmingham electronica legend Surgeon, whose relentless clanging techno set is a joy, and also a masterclass in how to make something endlessly fascinating from minimal means. In a way, this is a great metaphor for the whole festival, which is a Sellotape and sawdust affair run on hope and good will rather than wodges of cash or corporate sponsorship partners, but which manages to surprise and delight with every iteration, constantly feeling new by never losing its core identity. Asking whether Supernormal is a good festival is like asking whether manna is good fast food, it’s so far ahead of the competition in Oxfordshire (and probably the universe) that the question is utterly meaningless. So here’s our final judgment: smashing.
SIDEBAR
“Mum, can we go see Taskmaster?”
“No need, we have Taskmaster at home.”
Molly is “Taskmaster at home”, running around the miniscule Colour Out Of Space stage, florid and flustered, attempting to achieve 30 one-minute tasks with no particular resources, before a klaxon announces that she’s (almost certainly) failed. It’s stupidly entertaining, and typical of a strain of clowning that runs through this year’s festival. An act like Secluded Bronte, including films criticising the cameras they’ve been shot with, is witty, but Taylor & Luck are flat-out hilarious, dreaming up a preposterous Abingdon ghost story with accompaniment that is half free improv, half Foley. There’s a lofi comic absurdity to so many of this weekend’s sets they could have been taken to Ipsden or Edinburgh with equal justification, from the brilliantly named Run The Bath, which is essentially “Emo Philips plays Ivor Cutler on V/Vm Test Records”, to Fluxus plumbers Usurper, the Mario/Chuckle Brothers mash-up we never knew we needed. The absolute monarchs, though, are The Slipshod Ramblers, a duo in what might be homemade albino Womble outfits playing bleak, Beckettian folk songs, and getting them exactly wrong: “Death, she knocks for us all” they intone, but probably only because we died laughing.
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