Truck 2015 Saturday pt 2

The Loose Salute looks like part of a cryptic crossword clue (is “EU salt” a thing?), but is actually a laid-back Americana outfit.  Truck ain’t short of them, of course – there are probably more dobros than bleeding toilets onsite this year – but the band stands out with some ace sleepy, syrupy vocals and lap steel lines arcing across the songs like distant flares in a winter sky.

We’ve never been that excited by their Ghostbox For Dummies schtick, but we have to say that Public Service Broadcasting do have a knack for programming a good 1989 drum and sample pattern and adding stadium krautrock moves.  The expansion to a quartet makes this a more satisfying set than last year’s Audioscope headline, and we leave cautiously in favour.

Tellingly, Bo Ningen is the only act for whom the programme compiler couldn’t find any other bands to reference. Perhaps we shouldn’t compare them to musicians, but to forces of nature.  With arcane hand gestures, manically garbled lyrics and streaming hair entangled in fretboards, the quartet resemble demon witches, the bassist and vocalist particularly looking like someone has shoved some haunted coathangers into a black windsock.  Although they start somewhat tentatively, they soon explode, and the set concludes with waves of coruscating noise and a bass wielded like a sacramental axe.  The silly fake snow machines that have been infuriating us all day in the Barn are left off for the entirety of the set: fun time is over, mortals, taste the ritual.

We drop in on Temples, but really they can’t complete with the psych punk noise still ringing in our ears, so we grab another pint or two and head back to the Market stage for Peter Cook & The Light.  Now, Joy Division are one of the truly great British bands, New Order are not short of a classic or two, and Peter Hook’s aggressively melodic bass playing was a big component of these, but sadly his voice is just rubbish, in the least interesting way possible.  We only keep from dropping off by imagining that we’re watching Peter Cook & The Light (“She’s lost control again, Dud”.  “Bloody Greta Garbo!”).  This music deserves celebrating, but a slightly moribund trot through the back catalogue isn’t the best method of doing so.

A far more welcome hors d’ouevre to the headline set comes from Truck favourite Piney Gir, in a sugary whirlwind of pirouetting skeletons and lollipop percussion and a polka dot frock and kids onstage and a bumblebee costume and synchronised tambourines and girlpop and fieldmice and grins and the glorious “Greetings, Salutations, Goodbye” and not enough synths.

Basement Jaxx are billed as Truck’s “first festival headliner”, which seems like splitting hairs and evidence of one contract clause too many, but blimey, they don’t half bring things to a conclusion.  The band has taken the concept of a “soul revue”, and run with it to create a “house panto”.  There are guys in gorilla suits and a couple of girls done up like the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of soul sisterhood, and a huge woman with a huge voice getting all gospel pop on us whilst looking uncannily like the fortune teller from Monkey Island.  The single segue of a show contains hits and equally interesting connecting material, reliably banging beats, an interestingly stripped back “Romeo” and even a timbales solo.  The band never revisited on the dense layered intrigue of their debut LP - in a reminder how experimental they were, The Wire listed Remedy in their top 20 releases of 1999, just above Captain Beefheart and The Fall! – and we never expected anything other than crowd-pleasing from this set, but it is still a beautifully put together show and a barrelful of fun.  What else should we have expected from the people who had psychotic monkeys run amok over Gary Numan riffs and now have a video featuring a twerkbot?  First festival headliner?  Job most emphatically done.

And with that we head off into the night: ha, press parking, eat dust, suckers!  It has been a very enjoyable Truck, full of classic moves and exciting new ideas.  Some people will doubtless say that Basement Jaxx were too commercial, but frankly we’ve yawned through enough worthy country acts and third tier indie warhorses over the years to welcome a bit of showmanship.  This was the busiest Truck to date, which is great, but frankly it also sometimes felt like it: nobody should have to miss a whole set to have a piddle.  Truck has always treated people well, and not as cash-haemorrhaging cattle, as witnessed by the reasonable catering prices, the fact that a lot of the trading positions are given to charities when doubtless more revenue could be raised elsewhere, and the fact that we walked in with a bag stuffed with beers.  There’s talk of the festival getting bigger in 2016.  That sounds interesting, but the organisors must make sure that they retain the respect for artists and customers that Truck has always been synonymous with.  Otherwise, if they’re not careful, one day we might be pinpointing the moment Truck died – and unlike Paul McCartney, it won’t be a paranoid fantasy. 

Truck 2013 Friday Pt 2

Frankie & The Heartstrings play on the main stage on Friday.  We literally cannot tell you anything about them.  The programme mentions The Smiths, Orange Juice and Dexy’s, but we’ve already seen how accurate that thing is.  Instead of writing notes, our we draw a picture in our notebook of a local musician who’s walking past, which says everything about how interesting The Heartstrings are.  It’s not even a very good picture.

We were talking to someone earlier in the day about how wide a range of customers festivals now get, embracing a greater variety of age and social background than in the distant past.  Sadly, though, they still attract the stupid.  A girl in a portaloo next to us is shouting to her friend outside: “Oh my God!  It stinks in here!  It smells like...it smells like...shit!”.  If that’s a surprise, it begs the question what she was planning on doing in there if not the passing of human effluent.  Hopefully she couldn’t work out how to unlock the door.

Kudos to the Virgins stage for booking a couple of the more unusual acts of the festival, even if they’re well known to Oxford gig goers, not least a favourite of ours, King Of Cats.  Max Levy’s tortured rodent screech and his allusive – or perhaps, elusive – lyrics won’t be garnering fans as swiftly as Ady Suleiman, but he has a small, appreciative following, probably because underneath the awkward swagger, he can actually write songs.  He’s playing with a rhythm section today, although the solo songs work best, possibly because his music is intimate and idiosyncratic, or possibly because his timing’s so wayward the band sounds weird, one of the two.  We fervently hope a Trucker or two got their “I won’t forget this!” moment from Max, and are currently telling baffled friends about his geeky intensity.  “He’s like a beat poet Rick Moranis.  No, he’s like Kurt Cobain if he’d never left the D&D Club.  Oh, I can’t explain, you have to go see him”.

What’s worse?  Bands like The Joy Formidable who make a “come hither” gesture as soon as they’re onstage, or punters who actually move closer?  Performers, stop worrying about a few measly feet of space, and listeners, if you want to jump about having a good time, don’t wait for a formal invitation, it’s a fucking rock festival not the Jane Austen Re-enactment Society.  That rant aside, the band is rather good, throwing out graceful, melodic pop songs with a nice punchy rhythm and choruses people can hoof beachballs into the heavens to.  Plus, we like it when drummers sit side on at the front of the stage, it’s like showing your workings: The Joy Formidable, the Pompidou Centre of rock and roll.

Bo Ningen is a very good band, at times a great band.  They take the ultra-scuzzy garage burn that Japanese bands seem to do so well – Guitar Wolf springs to mind – and add some untamed freakout sections, as well as a mystical rock vibe which sort of reminds us of Steppenwolf, and then play it all in a manner that suggests someone said Didcot power station will explode if they ever drop below maximum intensity.  Which is great, but as it’s in the Barn we can’t hear most of it, just a sort of rhythmic hum, so we buy a CD.  If we throw the stereo down a well and sit in a cowpat, it’ll be just like being there all over again.

We don’t like Ash, but we drop in on the main stage and see that lots of people do, so we nip out in case we stop being miserable, and it all goes a bit Christmas Carol.  The Ghost of Indie Discos Past is certainly in attendance, any road.  And just to prove we don’t mind music that revisits the past we’ve come direct from the Saloon, where an uncredited white haired gent is chiming out Dylan and Byrds covers on his Rickenbacker, and we rather enjoy it.  Then the Bennett brothers get up to join him.  If Betfred had a kiosk on site, we’d have put good money on that happening.

We really like Beta Blocker & The Body Clock’s music, it’s like a Benylin-woozy Dinosaur Jr with the odd new romantic synthetic flourish.  Sadly, the vocals let them down, sounding like petulant children who won’t do their homework, and with so much charmless reverb over the top you have to assume they really wanted to play the Barn.

We should have gone for a wee when they were on, because afterwards we lose our sweet spot in the Saloon to answer the old call of nature (no aroma surprise reports from next door, this time), and when we return The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band are in full swing, and the building is impossible to get into.  From what we can hear from outside the group is killing it as usual, the shouts and screams coming through the swing doors tell us that there’s not much difference between the Rabbits’ raucous jazz riot and a proper western bar brawl: bodies fly about the place, the noise is intense, and the piano never stops playing.