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.

Postcode Rock

One of many festival reviews that I'll be posting from the archives in the next couple of weeks. Elements from this were used in Nightshift, but the tone of the printed review was rather different. I'm more cynical, essentially. But that's how you like it, you slavering dogs. Oh, happy new year, by the way.

OX4 (You! Me! Dancing! & Truck), Various venues, 10/10/09

When picking up our tickets, we ask whom to seek out. “Dalek.” Uh-huh. “Or The Big Pink”. So much for “a celebration of the artistic talents of OX4”, then. Later, The Scholars (who were very impressive, though we cruelly dub them The Sub-Editors) ask “Have you all seen loads of bands today?” to a response of awkward silence. Yes, we might wish our scene were a huge healthy exploratory organism, lapping up different sorts of music, but the truth is that people generally stick to what they know, and you need big names to get a big crowd. Still, if there was minimal cross-fertilisation between the evening audience and the Folk Festival's afternoon crew, the latter did book some excellent acts, highlights being The Reveranzas’ caffeinated singsong, and The Selenites’ attentive and surprisingly Victorian sounding parlour string arrangements.

Anther good find were The Dead Jerichos, who spice their Fred Perried lad garage with the bits they like from Foals (disco hi-hat, rubbery bass) whilst completely ignoring the bits they don’t (preening, reading books). At an unusually busy Bully Stricken City make with the 80s chant pop, a little like The Sugarcubes and a lot like Bow Wow Wow without the wow, and at a weirdly empty Academy Charlie Coombes doles out chirpy 70s pop, which is fun aside from one Stilton John piano ballad. Mr Fogg’s subtle show is the surprise of the day, balancing trombone, harp and electronics to sound like “Hunter” era Bjork played by Peter Gabriel and Radiohead – a long way from the stadium bombast we saw last month.

Action Beat bring four drummers and four guitarists. Start. Chug. Crash. Stop. Joyous. The Big Pink pull the healthiest audience, and sound like The Jesus & Mary Chain covering Ultravox; they’re decent, but Baby Gravy’s mess of strip-lit mall pop and new wave fuzz is more enticing. Dalek’s muffled set sounds like Ice Cube jamming with Neubaten, which would be good if it didn’t sound as if they were playing next door. It’s left to local evergreens Witches and Mr Shaodow to play our night out in style.

OX4 was a huge success, so congratulations all round. However, it seemed to have a Lamacq/Barfly air of “Isn’t music just great?”. Well, yes, of course, but it can also be petrifying, delicate, mysterious and downright hilarious, and we didn't find any evidence of that. We look forward to next year’s OX4, but our local festival would involve giving a single venue to Kakofanney, The Spin, The Famous Monday Blues and Off-Field and making them wrestle until they’d come up with a line-up. For that, we’d pay any money they asked.