Cornbury 2010 Sunday Pt 2

The infamous Cornbury rain kept off for the festival, and the feeble little drizzle that did start evaporated in the face of Raghu Dixit’s whirlwind of bouncy positivity. T shirts describe it as “Indo-World folk rock”, and whilst we’re not sure “Indo-World” makes any more sense than “Anglo-Oxonian”, the “folk” bit is fair enough, and the “rock” bit is beyond discussion. Dixit’s voice is keening and powerful enough to knock you back on your seat even as the funky fusion rhythms make you want to get up and dance as though David Gray were a distant memory. The band is fantastic, varying the tone with fizzing violin, snaky bass and Dire Straits guitar. At one point they sound like a carnatic Levellers, and at another they build up a chunky rhythm like a Bollywood Los Lobos, but at the heart of the music is a warmth and exuberance you won’t often find. Normally when we describe an act as “a good festival band” it’s a back-handed compliment, for Raghu Dixit it’s a golden commendation. Simply joyous.

Were we implying earlier that sound engineers are childish? Well, here’s Flash Harry PA mainman and outstanding engineer Tony Jezzard with Reservoir Cats who definitely aren’t children: they play proper grown up blues with big boys’ growly-wowly vocals, clever twiddly-widdly guitar solos and sophisticated lyrics about women with whom they might have had sexy-wexy. Genre assassination aside, they’re actually a good group, having plenty of fun onstage, boasting a reliably sturdy rhythm section and, God help us, some of those wailing guitar solos sound pretty decent. Plus we know that nothing we say will change this band one fraction, and that in itself is worthy of respect.

Folk: is it music by the people, music about the people, or music for the people? For Oxford Folk Festival star booking Seth Lakeman you have to feel it’s the latter two definitions that count, as he is keen to ground each song in real events in his introductions, often celebrating people otherwise off history’s radar, and because his music has a simple, easily apprehended structure. Forthcoming album title track “Hearts And Minds” is a crowd rousing song, but in the sense of “Let’s all believe the same thing”, rather than “Let’s get some cudgels and duff up the ruling classes”. It’s a performance of egalitarian, humanitarian music, spiced with his fluid fiddle playing and outstanding double bass. It wasn’t our favourite show of the weekend, but it did demonstrate that there is plenty of excitement to be found in mainstream music, and that Cornbury’s conservative roster can provide all the elation, surprise and fun as experimental or obscure music. It also reminded us that no music is more boring and enraging as music that is professionally boring and unadventurously enraging, so we’re not complete converts to the Cornbury ethos just yet.

Last Of The Summary Whines

And with this I have no more reviews to post. Maybe it will spur me on to finish the Vileswarm review I've had on my pile for about a month. Review of last week's Truck is looking good (or long, which is the same thing nowadays), but you'll have to wait till Nightshift is out before I post that. However, you can buy this week's Oxford Times and read their scintillating review, which mentions all of four acts, and very nearly comes close to making a critical judgement on one of them; plus they've got a huge snap of Marc West from BBC Oxford grinning like a village idiot disguised as Rusell Brand, which is so much better than a well framed portrait of one of the performers. I aspire to reach that journalistic level one day, once my prentice work is through.


CORNBURY, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10

Sonny Liston (FKA Dear Landlord, which was a much better name) won the BBC Oxford Introducing competition to open the Second Stage on Sunday, and worthy winners they were. Their songs are uber-perky folk-indie strums, with lots of vibrant trumpet and literate lyrics about Charles de Gualle, generally sounding a bit like Belle & Sebastian rewrites of “Summer Holiday”, which is a lovely way to start the day. With two great vocalists who can deliver even wordy lyrics convincingly whilst keeping the summery pop melodies afloat, we could be hearing from Sonny Liston again before too long.

Jon Allen maintains our relaxed bouyant mood. He may come from Devon, but his songs all have a laidback pseudo-country singer songwriter waft that we like. To be frank, his songs all sound like Bob Dylan circa Desire, but that will do for now.

The Lucinda Belle Orchestra entice us at first, because they have a harp in a leading role, which is especially welcome as Sonny Liston left theirs behind, but you strictly need more than five people for an orchestra, right? Belle has an excellent voice, but one can ruin the effect by milking it, right? “My Voice & My 45 Strings” is a top tune, but a standard harp actually has 47 strings, right? AOR cafe jazz with a contemporary radio sound is very nice, but we’ve heard it all before, right? So how was the set? Alright.

The Blockheads were always an odd proposition, pub rock passion mixed with punk sneers and funk chops, topped off by a tone deaf romantic/cynical poet obsessed by sex, ethics and Essex. Dury has of course sadly passed on now, but we’re glad the band have chosen to keep the unique vision alive, and if the set was a bit of a chicken-in-a-basket cabaret turn, you can bet that if Ian is looking down on us, he’d hate his memory to be enshrined too formally. Now, getting an impressionist to replace your lost vocalist is a dangerous ploy. It can work – as anyone who saw The Magic Band at The Zodiac can testify – but the cartoon character on the mike for The Blockheads just goes to show how much more there was to Dury’s performance than swearing and glottal stops. It’s a slightly 2D show, that sounds like the aging cast of Grange Hill jamming with Redox, or perhaps the Mighty Boosh hitcher joining Hall & Oates.

That’s the criticisms out of the way. On the plus side every musician on stage is simply astonishing and, what’s more, is still clearly having the time of their life. The band delivers a hits selection, but don’t shy away from original arrangements to keep things fresh, the sax solo on “Clever Trevor” being the greatest musical moment of the festival. Plus, they have a vault of cracking tunes so deep, they make Squeeze look like Milli Vanilli.

We dropped off during Danny & The Champions Of The World, which had more to do with our exhaustion than their music, though it’s still probably not a press cutting for the rehearsal room wall. In fact, we thank them for it, as our impromptu nap meant we missed Reef. We wake to the sounds of the last track by Harper Simon (another from the Taylor Dayne reject list?) on the Nero’s stage, and it sounds like nice jovial shiny drivetime pop, so good luck to her, but Fisherman’s Freinds are the real deal.

They are late middle aged men from Port Isaac who sing a capella shanties. They have some intelligent harmonies, but they aren’t precious about the performance, honking out the songs like nine Cornish vuvuzelas filled with navy rum. This is folk music with big balls and simple melodies (Middle eight? Never heard of one, chum) that cut straight to the heart and force even the most reticent tongues to shout along like eighteenth century street vendors. All this, plus oodles of camp innuendo between songs, what a simply brilliant band. They get a huge response from the healthy crowd, which does the soul good to witness. The surprise find of the festival.

And we had to bloody follow that with Brainchild, whose charmless, brash rock is like a cross between The Towers Of London and Evanescence at a greasy bike rally. There’s a girl singing in a disinfected raunchy style, some “Baker Street” saxophone, and a raddled looking specimen done up like a drunken cross between Alice Cooper and Screaming Lord Sutch at the front. All of them look and sound like they’re from different bands, each of which is equally atrocious. We last two numbers. Later, we return to find the sax player signing autographs for kids, and the front of house mixer telling us they were the best band of the weekend: either this tells us that they got better very quickly, or that you can’t trust engineers and children to choose your music for you.

But our revolt against Brainchild meant we got unexpectedly to see Newton Faulkner, who turns out to be a surprisingly decent showman. He quickly builds up a conversational rapport with the crowd, which is no mean feat on a big stage after a day and half of music, so that the set flashes by. He also has an agile voice, and an impressive array of extended guitar techniques. Pity that we didn’t care for his songs much - we could have sat and listened to him telling jokes and playing covers all afternoon, but his own tunes didn’t grab us. It’s a masterclass for boring acoustic strummers the world around, however: gig is a doing word, after all...

Cornbury 2010 - Saturday Pt 2

The employees at the adjacent Nero’s coffee tent seem to have been getting high off their own supply, dancing manically behind the counter to Staton’s set, so we stay to see what their tiny stage can offer. Edinburgh boy Alex Cornish has some Damien Rice style tunes and is backed by a useful trio. He’s just as good as some of the people on the big stages. Obviously there are two ways you could take that...

At a festival with a slightly more mature demographic, over 50% of those watching Ben Montague are under 20. Poshstock is all very well, but a festival’s not complete under you’ve seen some drunk kids (though we were less forgiving when they kept us awake all night). Anyway, what drew the youngsters to his rather likable Radio 2 pop, has he been on Hollyoaks or something? Whatever the story, he has a warm voice, and the band make a decent fist of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” alongside their own sprightly tunes. As the girls swoon over his tasty looks and the adults tap along to his decent acoustic everyman rock, it’s like the second coming of Craig McLachlan & Check 1-2.

After Montague has put a spring in our step, Imelda May knocks us off our feet. Her band play a turbo-rockabilly, all slapped double bass, Duane Eddy guitar, scorching trumpet and battered tambourine, over which May’s feisty Dublin voice wails with a sassy, gospel passion. The songs are relatively generic, but played with firy conviction, and even “I’m a creepy, sneaky freak” can sound like Byron if you sing it as viscerally as Imelda May does.

After these two, all Riverside have to do is keep the party going. And they give us David Gray. That’s like having ten minutes to score a hat trick, and bringing on Heskey. His set is just as tedious as you’d expect, and he doesn’t even interest us by being particularly awful. He does that “Babylon” one. He does that one that sounds like that other one. He does some we know and some we wish we didn’t. Then he does several million more. Everybody at Cornbury is watching this, or has had the sense to get out of the arena, so we have the odd experience of visiting a deserted toilet block at a crowded festival. Turns out that taking an echoey piss in an empty trailer housing 22 well used urinals is just like watching a David Gray gig.

Park Live

Say you were going to Pizza Express or something. I know you have more class than that, but just imagine. Say you went over the corner to look at their little touchscreen tills they create your bill on. At that point you'd notice how crappy the graphics on the tills are, how lame the marble effect on the individual "buttons" is and how unconvincing and unecessary the depth shadows are. You'd notice it looks like something from an Amiga game, like Bloodbowl. Why the hell do these till software designers make thier product look like the team selection screen from Kick Off 2? Why why why?

Some of this review featured in Nightshift recently, but a lot of it is "previously unreleased".

Cornbury, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10

SATURDAY

The shelves of WH Smith reveal that true confessions are big business nowadays, so here’s our addition to this literary slagpile: we’ve never liked the look of Cornbury. Probably this is because its mixture of safe tunefulness and fading stars make it look as though it was booked by the customers at the Waitrose deli counter after ten minutes looking at The Sunday Express Magazine and a copy of Q from 1991. But, although it’s easy to be dismissive of folding chairs, Pimms and falafel wraps, we’ve decided we actually prefer these to unpalatable energy drinks, bad hash and vomiting poi jugglers as our festival accoutrements. Yes, we admit it, we like Cornbury very much, and if the lineup isn’t our idea of musical nirvana, the best acts truly shine in a relaxed, well organised setting with excellent sound engineering on every stage.

What’s bad about Cornbury (aside from David Gray)? Apart from being kept awake till half past give a shit on Saturday morning by drunken revellers, which we thought Poshstock might be immune to, the towering ineptitude of the bar staff drives us to enforced sobriety: we’re sadly unsurprised that there are sixteen Carlsberg pumps to one tapped barrel of ale, but we’re more shocked that someone’s designed a bar where there’s not enough room for the legion of easily confused employees to pass when one of them is pouring a pint. Our other black mark is the assumption that everybody onsite wants to watch the main stage. There are long periods when there’s nothing on except the big acts, while at other times we’re torn between two enticing prospects happening simultaneously on the smaller stages. As if to reflect this the official programme not only offers no information about performers lower down the bill on the two central stages, but doesn’t even give any listings for the Riverside stage: essentially, we spent three quid on a little book to tell us who The Feeling are, when it’s the one fucking thing we’re trying to forget.

So, our weekend starts with pot luck, as we stumble across Dave Oates (who looks like a Riverside organisor, but is apparently not) introducing Volcanic Dash, who turn out to be pretty decent at playing Dad’s day off R ‘n’ B, spiced by good sax and a soulful female vocal. They end with a rattle through “Honky Tonk Women”, and seeing the singer shout “one more time” a bar before the song ends is rather heartwarming in a festival that can get too slick at times.

Taylor Dayne, an American minor popstrel in the late 80s, apparently chose her stage name because she thought it sounded British. Presumably Tiffany Page was one of the discarded options. She plays harmlessly perky pop, a little like P!nk without the brattish trailerpark attitude, and a little like Rachel Stevens without the dance routines, synths and glossy production. Her’s is a well-filleted version of guitar pop, a sort of musical chicken nugget – a guilty pleasure on occasion, but no replacement for the real thing.

Some festivalgoers don’t turn up to Cornbury until the big names start coming out, whilst others arrive for the day, but only shift from their little wagon circle in front of the main stage for toilet visits or emergency rosé replenishment. It means that some obscure acts get unfairly ignored, and there are fewer people evident at the start of an excellent set by Les Clochards than there were last time they played The Wheatsheaf. It doesn’t faze them any, and they deliver their trademark brand of lush Gallic cafe indie with the same stately grace as usual, a gorgeous “Démodé” being the highlight. Light airy music, but their background in vintage punk and indie bands gives the music a classically French stubborn defiance (in the sense of getting whipped on absinthe and inventing new art forms, not overpricing croques madames to tourists and bombing Greenpeace). Sad that their subtler moments lose out in a sound war with the nearby fun fair rides; “Criez si vous voulez aller plus vite!”

We catch the end of The New Forbidden who play a bluesy approachable rock that’s essentially Dr. Feel-Passable-Mustn’t-Grumble-Bit-Of-Gyp-From-The-Old-Back-And-The-Waterworks-Aren’t-What-They-Were-But-Worse-Things-Happen-At-Sea, and then it’s back to Riverside for Dead Jerichos, whom we love because they play every single gig as if it’s the last Friday night before the Pandorica opens. Rock energy so improbably infectious that it isn’t even punctured when a snare drum breaks and there’s a brief gap whilst another is located. Their music isn’t a startlingly original confection, being a rough mix of Jam basslines, The Edge’s guitar, Jimmy Pursey vocals and Buzzcocks drums, but each short invigorating shot of espresso pop is a joy to witness. Later, we couldn’t resist breaking the itinerary for a song and a half from Borderville, a band with the same passion and intensity as Dead Jerichos, but who have filtered it through Broadway excess rather than laddish euphoria.

A smidgen of the Jericho energy wouldn’t go amiss in Joshua Radin’s rootsy set. Like a Happy Shopper muesli bar, you feel as if it ought to be good for you to experience, but turns out to be dry and tasteless.

“Have you got soul, Cornbury?” shouts the MC. Well, look at us, and what do you think? A pasty, paunchy heartland morass whose idea of a sex machine is probably sitting on the lawnmower whilst it idles and who most likely probably phone Neighbourhood Watch if Bootsy Collins ever strolled down the street. So, Staxs is possibly the ideal act, a busman’s holiday affair wherein seasoned session players kick back with a bit of a soul revue. That’s soul as lingua franca for a good time night out rather than a narrative urban folk music, and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” has had all the melancholy and impotent anger squeezed out along the way. But they do make great music all the same, with a powerful vocal, and some fantastic brass players, who alternate between molten solos and horn stabs that punch like a rivet gun. This goes on for forty lovely minutes, until Kiki Dee comes on. She’s still in good voice but her songs are simply drab by comparison.

Relaxing with some homemade mint lemonade – you don’t get that at The Cellar – we catch Buddy Guy and his alligator blues; it hasn’t evolved since forever, but it has a deadly bite. The band is good, and play a solid big stage blues set, but when Buddy steps up the others just fade into the background, which is impressive as he’s about 800. His guitar sound is amazing, each acid-etched note drawing a line back to BB King, sideways to Albert Collins and forward to Jimi Hendrix. He plays “Hoochie Coochie Man” with such a perfect mix of soul baring emotion and carny roustabout repartee that we feel as if we’d never heard the song before, and if that ain’t a definition of raw innate talent, we don’t know what is.

We were hoping to get the same experience from Dr John, and at first it was promising: he has a battered organ and a baby grand, each topped with a human skull; he ambles onstage with the confident air of a mafia don who knows he owns us all; he wears a superbly sharp voodoo suit and looks like a child’s drawing of Orson Welles disguised as Bryan Ferry; he can sit at a keyboard better than most people can play it; he drawls raps drenched in the cartoon skullduggery that was so influential on Tom Waits. But for the first half of the set the music doesn’t really gel, and simply sounds like a competent bar band, an effect possibly not helped by the fact that an insufficiently audible trombone took the place of a stomping horn section. Things are just getting going when the band slips into a dirty funk chug and it’s suddenly all over. The conclusion is that whilst Buddy is happy with the elder statesman’s showcase on a festival stage, Dr John probably still only gets on top of his awesome game with a few hours in a dark sweaty room, not sixty polite minutes in the Cotswolds sun.

Squeeze, on the other hand, are so happy to trot their greatest hits out to the punters they probably have wristband blisters. Before the first track is even out they’re pointing the mike at the audience for a singalong, and, in fairness, a large percentage of the crowd are eager to take them up on the offer. All around us tipsy parents are reliving their 5th form disco whilst their kids cause havoc with bubble machines, and Squeeze get a grand reception, which is fully deserved. As with Crowded House, also on the heritage trail, it’s amazing that Glenn Tillbrook’s voice hasn’t aged at all, and still has the tuneful chumminess of their old hits. And what hits they are. Squeeze have got so many top notch pop songs in their arsenal you forget how great they are. Admittedly, we’re not sure this competent set adds anything to the tracks, but it’s never a bad time to hear them again.

Candi Staton knows her audience too, and you can’t blame her for giving them what they want. Impressively, her rich voice is just as strong as it was when we saw her a decade ago, and her set is a super-slick ball of fun, with a cantering romp through “Suspicious Minds” standing out, but most of the audience don’t get to their feet until “Young Hearts Run Free”, so she cleverly makes it last about fifteen minutes. With her sparkling dress and ballsy soul delivery Staton is a bit like an alternate universe Tina Turner who hadn’t erased all her character in post-production somewhere in the early 80s. Good solid entertainment.