Truck-A-Doodle-Done

Hand a bit better, but still twinging.  Who heard Belshazzar's Feast at the Prom two nights ago?  Kicked arse, my friends, kicked arse.



Truck 2012, Saturday

Saturday morning rolls around, and everyone’s sipping tea, eating bacon and peering through sunglasses.  In the old days, couldn’t you get a nice healthy pasta salad at Truck?  Now, it’s all pizza, curry, doughnuts and burgers.  Oh, come on, we can’t eat a burger for yet another meal.  We absolutely refuse.  Oh, go on then.  And stick some bacon and a fried egg in it too, whilst you’re there.

The See See start our non-cholesterol day with laddish indie psychedelia strung between Cast and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.  There’s quite a lot musically to recommend them, but the effect is spoilt by a desperate, shopworn swagger onstage.  Watching them is like idly flicking through a 90s copy of Loaded in the STD clinic waiting room.  We imagine.  Opening the main stage, Yellow Fever are proving that real stage presence comes naturally to a lucky few, even if they’re barely old enough to get into venues.  With a vast gaggle of young fans crowding the stage, and some rubbery, twitchy little tunes, the band remind us a little of the early days of The Dead Jerichos.  Impressive though the set is, they’re still finding their feet musically – some of the twiddly guitars clearly shoot for Foals but come up nearer to Level 42 – but when a band improves this much between every gig we see, we know it won’t be long before they write a track we can adore.

Banbury’s Pixel Fix, mind you, make Yellow Fever look ancient.  They put in a most commendable effort, but could do with coming out from The Arctic Monkeys’ shadow and developing the electronic elements.  If they hung around at the Second Stage they might have seen Toliesel, and picked up a few tips.  Their references might not be revolutionary – there’s a lot of the Americana with table manners we used to hear from The Epstein, and a little of Aztec Camera’s well-bred pop music in the mix – but they show that quality songwriters and musicians will always be worth listening to.

Plenty of experience in Flights Of Helios too, a band that grew from The Braindead Collective, and who have been in roughly ten trillion great Oxford acts.  Each.  They make windswept, open-ended pathos-pop, that moves between the dubby warmth of ambient popsters like Another Fine Day, and a darker shoegazing paranoia (with bits of The Dark Side Of The Moon laying about in between). Oddly for a band who developed from an improv project, there are a couple of moments that feel too formal – a disco hi-hat rhythm sounds slightly gratuitous at one point – but this is neverthelessone of the sets of the weekend, bursting with ideas.  The best moments feature Chris Beard’s fragile, melismatic vocal lines floating liturgically over hissing keyboards and fizzing guitar.  A man next to us explains how one track brought a tear to his eye, and that hadn’t happened since Babe II: Pig In The City.  He tells us all about his favourite scenes, too.  Lucky us.

We’re impressed by just how unreconstructed Kill It Kid’s priapic blues and scuzzy cock rock is.  They have good, honest heavy rock structures, and not one but two excellently coarse vocalists.  One Zeppelinised howl from either sex, nice touch.  However, when the chemical toilets are emptied during their set, and a vicious stench wafts across the crowd just as they sing “dirty water tastes so sweet”, we have to make an exit, in case cosmic irony starts playing more dangerous tricks.

The Last Republic are very boring.  Their light synth rock could be from the closing credits to an old brat pack movie, and even whilst you try to listen your brain keeps drifting onto other topics, no matter how idiotic.  So, anyway, apparently in Babe II there’s a really good slow-motion fire scene with clowns, and a part where “Mafia dogs turn the pig into a kind of Jesus”.

Jesus, time for a pint.  We’re ecstatic to see that this year the bars only serve organic ale and cider on tap, instead of pissy High Street lager; if Truck can find someone next year to sell us an espresso and a bottle of good claret, we might be really on to something.  Outside the bar we find some other journalists taking refuge from The Last Republic.  Hilariously, a snapper from a publication that shall remain nameless misunderstood the request for a security photo this year, and sent in a shot of The Skatalites to prove he was a music photographer.  If you saw a white man in his 30s trying to get backstage with an ID photo of an aging black ska musician, we know who it was.

Right, enough of this chatting, we need to go and see Crash Of Rhinos.  Their post-hardcore sound is definitely enticing, although they have too many subtle, thoughtful passages when what they really need is more...well, more rhino.  Over at Jamalot nothing much is happening, except for some little kids busting some funkily awful moves and three lubricated lads pulling off the tricky Three-Way Chest Bump manouevre, who jovially tell us to “fuck off” for reading the paper whilst dance music is playing.  Fair point, we concede...but we bet they never finished the Guardian cryptic crossword. 

We’ve enjoyed Emmy The Great a lot in the past, as a solo performer.  With a backing band her songs seem to have had the edges sheared off, and the lyrics lose some of their bite, and the whole thing comes off prettily quirky, like The Juliana Hatfield 3, so we go back to the Second Stage to see Man Like Me.  This proves to be one of the better decisions we’ve made in recent times.  What we find is three cheeky London lads shouting, throwing shapes and climbing up the tent rigging whilst the backing track plays what we suppose we should call post-grime, but actually sounds like Village People pastiches knocked up on some kid’s iPhone on the way over.  It’s terrible.  It’s brilliant.  It’s a euphoric mixture of early Beastie Boys, The Streets and some half-arsed entry into a T4 roadshow talent competition.  It’s truly brilliant.  It’s truly terrible.  As pop music should be.

65 Days Of Static are a band whom we’ve admired, but never quite understood before, but perhaps on a Man Like Me high, we find their crescendo-happy set deeply invigorating.  Synths buzz and massed percussion is crashed, like a Stomp cover of “Mentasm”.  It’s a set of pure gall and energy and we’re sudden – and  incredibly late - converts.

Lucy Rose makes some quite lovely and delicate music.  So far as we can tell.  Can’t get in to the tent, you see, so good for her.  Luckily, Mackating are at Jamalot making The Heavy Dexters look like amateurs by going on a full ninety minutes late, and with half the band missing.  So, OK, not a set for the annals, but the interplay between the buoyant dancehall delivery of Fireocious and Ilodica’s sweet Horace Andy quaver is delicious.  It’s also great when Fireocious stops the band mid-song, warning “Put some pace in it, bloodclot!”, like we’re witnessing a reggae Totale’s Turns.

Truck 2006 pt 2

Of course, the upside is that we get to catch the end of Luke Smith’s set, and the Truck without Luke would be like Christmas without It’s Wonderful Life. As ever he’s heartwarming, hilarious and cosy, even with his new rock (ahem) trio, but the best part is watching the joyous faces of Smith neophytes. You can almost see them thinking, “a cross between Richard Stillgoe and Eddie Izzard with his Dad on drums, who’d have thought that would work?”.

Chris TT has been described as the indie Luke Smith, but he has weightier subjects to pursue than tea and girlfriends, touching on ecology and politics in simple acoustic thrashes. If you can envisage an English Hammell On Trial you may have the right idea – the tunes aren’t quite as good, but he manages to attack his songs with the same vigour, and throw in serious issues without coming off as a facile rock preacher. It’s no mystery why Chris is a Truck mainstay.

It says a lot about the eclecticism of Truck that we can rush from one festival favourite in the form of Chris, to another in the shape of nervous_testpilot. Truck without Paul Taylor would be like Christmas without “It’s a Wonderful Life”, played backwards in Satan’s breakcore bass palace. This year he’s married the thumping beats of last year with the sample heavy gabba mash up of previous incarnations, into a surprisingly coherent half hour. Truly wonderful, but are we the only ones to slightly miss the elegiac melodies of his first …Module… album? Checking the mosh happy Trailerpark, we guess the answer’s yes.

Dancing of a different sort over at The Epstein’s place. Getting more elaborate and noisier with each gig they do (this set features The Drugsquad’s Stef on guitar/mandolin/banjo and a searing mariachi brass section) they still manage to retain the untroubled country lope at the heart of the songs. They rightly go down a storm, bringing the crowd to a rousing finish with a great country tune called “Dance The Night Away”. Well, it makes up for the rubbish one, doesn’t it?

Had we known it was one of their last ever gigs we might have pushed to the front for Suitable Case For Treatment’s set, but instead we give up on the crowds and pop along to see Trademark. Whilst their new album is an adventurous step forward, the songs don’t come across so immediately in a live setting (excepting the monster that is “Over And Over”), so it’s the older tunes that fare the best. But no two Trademark gigs are really the same, and this one ends with a massed choir and an inexplicable Genesis cover.

SUNDAY

Since Mackating sadly lost their lead singer they’ve turned into a bit of a reggae revue, with featured vocalists of different styles on every tune. Whilst this can make for a bit of a mish mash it keeps things chugging along nicely. Best track in today's tasty set is a dancehall tinged tirade, apparently aimed at Fifty Cent, advising “don’t be a gangster, be a revolutionary”. Sage advice, but it’s Sunday morning, so you’ll understand if we just pass on both options for now.

It’s easy to be critical of performance poetry: 2D politics, bad gags and consonants lots in the sound of spit flecking against a mic. But, we haven’t given up on punk rock just because loads of bands are rubbish, have we? Oh no. Hammer & Tongue have done wonders in Oxford – come on, a spoken word gig at The Zodiac that gets better crowds than most bands, who’s not just a little impressed? – and we’re happy to come and support them briefly over at the Performance Tent. Today’s prize really goes to Sofia Blackwell, who’s always had a little more poise than some of the verbal cowboys, who rounds things off with a neat little piece about how she’ll never write a love poem, which of course turns out to be a beautifully honest little love poem.

This year has really been the coming of age for the acoustic tent, now bigger, better and rebranded The Market Stage. Proof of this is the enormous, attentive crowd for Emmy The Great, which is so big they have to take some of the walls down to let people see. As she snaps at each line like a tiger tearing meat from a carcase (albeit an ever so slightly cutesy tiger) many in this crushed tent decide they’re seeing one of the best shows of the festival quietly unfurl. There are any number of lovely images, but one sticks in our head, “You’re an animated anvil/ I’m an animated duck,” not least because it reminds us of an old Prefab Sprout lyric, “God’s a proud thundercloud/ We are cartoon cats”, and Paddy Macaloon is one of the 80s most under-rated lyricists. Oh yes he is.

Rachel Dadd has a wonderful folk voice, and is ably accompanied by two of her old Whalebone Polly pals, but her set doesn’t seem to have the assurance or character of Emmy’s. It’s mostly pleasant, with everything good and bad that this term conjures up.

When we first saw Captive State, a few Trucks ago, they were a firy jazz hip hop ensemble. Sadly, they soon decomposed into a benefit gig rap band: worthy, summery and mildly funky. Thankfully, they seem to have regrouped somewhat, and have come back fighting. The new material actually seems a bit Massive Attack, with paranoiac queasy bass synths cutting through neat vocal melodies and old fangled dance rhythms. Even the older tunes seem to have been tidied up, and are looking leaner than they have for years. A warm welcome back, though we do think that they could do with a proper singer for the melodic parts, excellent though the frontman is as an MC…oh, and a load of trombone solos.

If Thomas Truax looks a tiny bit tired today, his mechanical bandmate Sister Spinster must have been partying in the Barn till the wee hours, as she sputters, wobbles and eventually cuts out. It may not be the best set he’s ever turned in, but with his homemade instruments and downhome narratives he still holds the crowd in his skinny hands. He’s even commanding enough to do a number unplugged. We don’t mean acoustic, we mean literally unplugged from the PA and wandering around outside the tent. Admit it, we wouldn’t sit there patiently waiting for many other performers, now would we?

Since we last saw Piney Gir she’s inexplicably started looking like Brix Smith and playing light hearted Ernest Tubbs style country. It may not be a very challenging proposition, but her breezy vocal can carry anything – even a duet with charming but tone deaf Truck organiser Edmund, who brought us to tears of laughter with one misplaced “Shoobydoowop”.

Every Truck throws up something wonderful and unexpected. Maybe it’sthe direct sunlight, but this year we find ourselves falling for something that we feel ought to be terrible, in the shape of Babar Luck. He’s a Pakistani Eastender with a line in simple acoustic punk reggae with a “heal the world” type bent, which is the sort of thing we’d normally find painfully trite but Babar’s delivery is so perfect we actually start to believe we can change society with a song. We recommend this heartily, but we’ll never be able to explain what was so good about it. And he has cool mad eyes too. My God, we must be getting old, we’re hanging out at the acoustic stage (oh, alright, we couldn’t be bothered to queue for Chicks On Speed).

A Good Hard Rogeting

Two points of interest about this review:

1) I don't know of whom I was thinking at the time, but having since heard a decent amount of The Sensational Alex harvey Band, I reckon they're pretty ace.
2) My ex-editor at BBC Oxford disliked this review so much he parodied it in an online review of Foxes! a few weeks later: "There was no chicanery here, it was just three bonhomie types all coeval physically and mentally. They peeled back the patina of the night and enticed the salmagundi of striplings to take their caution and defenestrate it. The lead singer may have been a hobbledehoy - there was something of that about the whole band - but I still found it daedal and not in the slightest rebarbative. Sorry if I've been a little fustian but they deserve the effort". Absolutely wonderful stuff, I was proper chuffed (although "bonhomie" isn't an adjective, and you can't really peel back a patina, if you're reading, Tim).

EMMY THE GREAT/FOXES!, My Analogue, Port Mahon, 6/06


It was once said of Clinic that they make the music that might spring up if The Beatles were wiped from the musical annals, reference points leaping from scratchy blues and lush Phil Spectorisms to Velvet Underground chug and new wave irascibility. A similar thing could be said of newish local act, Foxes! Their set is a rough mix of lindyhopping naivete, ebullient garage bash and no wave loft experiment as performed by local oddballs at some fleabitten village fete. In other words, hugely entertaining, if a tiny bit messy round the edges, with a surprising ear for a tune in evidence, too. John, Paul, George and who?

If ever there was a frustrating genre moniker, it’s “anti-folk”. Coined in earnest, we dare say, but generally read by gig-goers nowadays as “acoustic performer with minimal vocal ability and possible funny trousers”. Despite a couple of breathy quirks in the vocals we’re pleased to announce that London’s Emmy The Great is a long way from this deadening bunch, and is really a straightforward and enormously talented poetic singer-songwriter, who manages to keep a tired and parboiled Port audience in rapt attention. There are a few oddities in the subject matter, but the structure and delivery is as traditionally intimate as any old folkie’s. Imagine a cubist Michelle Shocked.

Admittedly, lines like “a million shadows will all become pregnant or diseased” are more intriguing than they are, err, good, but the majority of Emmy’s compositions are lucid and lovable, and she pulls off the golden songwriter’s trick of sounding completely original and universally relevant at the same time. It’s often patronising to call a performer “charming”, especially if they’re female, but Emmy’s charming set was less like a performance and more like a friendly musical chat in which one participant just happened to stand at the front of the room. Unlike The Sensational Alex Harvey Band or The Legendary Pete Fryer, Emmy The Great has picked up an adjective that we’re not arguing with at all.

Abingdon's Starting To Happen

Most of this review was used in Nightshift's 4 page report on the festival, but some of it has never been seen before. Be still, my beating heart.

TRUCK 2008, Hill Farm, Steventon

After last year’s festival, we really thought Truck had jumped the shark. Naturally, rescheduling was out of their control, but the general feeling was that the lineup was predictable and uninspired, and that Truck had been gradually ossifying into a noisy convalescent home for tedious country musicians. This year, however, turned out to be the best Truck for a long time. The lineup was pruned of some of the incumbents, but there was still a pleasant smattering of Truck favourites on offer; the site had been rethought but still kept to the familiar blueprint; and, most importantly, the atmosphere was wonderful. It’s so gladdening to see people going rubber-limb loopy in The Beat Hive before eating doughnuts and then sitting quietly to enjoy something acoustic at the Market Stage. More than anything else this year we got the impression that Truckers were open to all manner of different performances, and this was reflected in some surprising, but refreshing thematic booking policies, such as Crossword Records’ abstract hip-hop showcase, or the Sonic Cathedral shoegazing celebration. It was the sort of weekend to make anyone wax lyrical…anyone apart from Evan Dando, anyway…

Implausibly, our festival begins with a band from Hong Kong. DP is a guitar and drums scuzz riffing concotion, who make a great noise, but essentially feel like half of a good rock band. AC without the DC.

Vacuous Pop’s well received line-up begins with Load.Click.Shoot whose bandy-legged disco pop sends hordes of kids in horrible plastic shades, who look like extras from Weird Science, into a dancing frenzy. Is this because the band are good (which they are, with their snotty take on Foals-esque puzzle pop and excellent naughty schoolboy keyboards), or because these guys have been cocked for some day-glo musical fun all morning? Load, click, shoot indeed.

Hey, the naughty schoolboy has been doing his homework. Alphabet Backwards’ keyboard player shares a cheeky Korg buzz with the previous band, but plays it spiced with nonchalantly adept arpeggios and Herbie Hancock twiddles. The two singers may look like a cut-budget children’s presenters (Magpie, not Blue Peter; Look In, not Smash Hits), but they play impossibly, gorgeously, heart-burstingly jolly acoustic-led pop that would sound as at home in the Top 40 as it would at a drunken barndance.

A spot of lunch later The European Union provides our first visit to The Market Stage, once again the most comfy part of Truck, with the most reliable sound. Sadly, although European Union were billed as sounding like Nirvana we turn up to a minimal folk pop song played by sleepy robots. Thereafter they step up into a trudge down The Band’s avenue, good ol’ boys chord progressions overlaid with hammered elementary piano and drawled self-conscious vocals. Passable.

Admittedly it’s not our dream of a collaboration between Bellowhead and Fuck Buttons, but Buttonhead’s set starts incredibly, a repeated wordless three note vocal motif over some complex pomp rock that sounds like Philip Glass’ Einsten On The Beach played by Magma. Except that it also sounds like Godspeed You! Black Emperor played by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Amazing. However, after a while the focus gets lost somewhere to the left of the kitchen sink, and the show becomes a valiant, but ultimately unsatisfying mashup; we would have stuck it out to the end anyway, of the falsetto vocals weren’t so tooth-pullingly terrible.

In diametric opposition to their look-at-me name, Holton’s Opulent Oog supply us with an untroubled, unobtrusive country lope. Pliant and friendly, perhaps, but with all the chutzpah of a shy 7 year old forced to recite in Sunday school. Of course, complaining about country pop at Truck is like shouting for “Born To be Wild” at Glyndebourne, so we’ll just edge away, quietly.

Over on the main stage, Little Fish are winning a small army of new fans. Aside from being musically spotless, Juju and Nez are rare in looking as though they were born to be onstage – even on the main stage, it’s rare to see an act that you can’t tear your eyes from. But, would it be terribly party-pooping of us to suggest that they write some more songs? There’s some padding in their repertoire, and the world doesn’t need another rock twopiece unless they’re very, very good. Worries for another day, perhaps, for now it’s another Fish victory.

There’s nothing precisely wrong with Green As A Primary’s melding of Mogwai and Prefuse 73, but this downtempo mood music is so fussily exact that it reminds us of bad cappuccino, polished foyers, overpriced theatre bars and aging bachelors trying to look urban and sophisticated in Stoke Newington. Could well sell millions, then…

“Who’s ready for some ramshackle, drunken, atonal, clueless, shambolic, dated indie, then?!” Perhaps it’s a good thing they don’t really go for MCs at Truck, as there’d be no real way of introducing “pop legends” The Television Personalities and their agonising set. Imagine a bad Go Betweens rip off encoded, bounced off the surface of Mars, and then reassembled in a brewery with half the data missing or corrupt. “Embarrasing” is the only word that serves.

Having found ourselves caught between two randomly scurrying children who appear to be demonstrating Brownian Motion for the deaf on the way back from the tea tent, we return to the main stage for Emmy The Great, who was a highlight of Truck 06. Sadly her music’s become more polite and tidy in the interim and this set turns into a nondescript wash of general pleasantness. Still, she’s retained an ear-catching literacy in her lyrics, and a delivery that seems to be intelligently hectoring and monstrously cute simultaneously, rather like losing a theological debate to a Care Bear.