Steventones

Most of this stuff is in the latest Nutshaft.  There are a few dashed off dismissive criticisms that were cut, to make the review more positive.  It was a good festival, I enjoyed it more than last eyar, but by God, there was a lot of incredibly average music on the bill (and a lot of people going non-average mental for it, inexplicably).

Funny how awful I found Ady Suleiman this year, last time I saw him I thought he was at least acceptable.

TRUCK, Hill Farm, Steventon, 15-17/7/16

“We’re running two hours behind,” says the engineer at the Gorwelion Horizons stage, “and twenty minutes ahead”.  Oh, thanks, that’s – wait, what?  Have we entered some sort of South Oxfordshire Twilight Zone where normal rules don’t apply?  Is Didcot power station, the slow dismantling of which continues with a controlled explosion partway through the festival, some sort of mystical key that keeps the laws of logic and science in place?  Looks like it, fellow Truck travellers, looks like it.  How else do we explain the fact that there are 2500 more people here than in 2015, and yet the site feels open and uncluttered, and there are very few queues?  That the ecstasy of a crowd’s response over the weekend seems inversely related to our ability to remember the music?  That the amount we can enjoy the event doesn’t really seem to be linked to the quality of the line-up?  That a pint of Hobgoblin is about the same price as it is on George Street, and Truck still allows you to bring your own drinks, whilst other festivals claim they need to charge six quid a pop?  Is everything topsy-turvy in this field?

Even getting in confuses us, as we have to come past the main stage, but then walk the entire length of the site before doubling back, meaning that most of our experience of Puma Rosa comes drifting on the breeze.  It’s good stuff, though, like a chunked up Candy Says with a brief trip into The Sugarcubes’ witchy scarepop.  The charming chaps at Retro-bution Gaming, who are offering Truckers the chance to relive some classic console fun over the weekend, are surprised by our knowledge of the Neo Geo and that our definition of “retro” means Chuckie Egg and text adventures, so before we can feel any older, we sneak across to the BBC Introducing Virgins stage for some less contentious classic japes from Kancho!  Their two man rock laced with exhortative vocals brings up a marriage between departed locals 50ft Panda and Days Of Grace, but such retro-referencing is unimportant.  What’s important is the fat riffs stomping over the field like corned beef golems with murderous intent.

Monarks don’t manage to kick things into gear nearly as well, resembling an emoier Six. By Seven.  There’s nothing wrong with their set, but it’s unconvincing, like getting a telegram reading “Rock the fuck out” delivered on a silver platter by an aging asthmatic royal retainer.

The main stage seems to be home to some pretty shocking nonsense at this year’s festival, and indeed, the younger clued-up audience seems to treat the Market stage as the place to be, but Ady Suleiman has got to be about the most egregious offender, with his cruddy unplugged Jamiraquoid reggae soul fluff fouling up the air.  On this evidence it wasn’t Curiosity Killed The Cat.  It was shame.  Still, at least Ady has some songs and only stays onstage for thirty minutes, whereas at the other end of the field there’s a great big trailer full of Boss salespeople in which a man in a stupid patchwork cap plays inane blues licks constantly for the entire weekend.  If Nightshift were rich we would have just strolled up, bought every piece of mojo artillery in the place, and then smashed it up, set it on fire and used it to cook marshmallows for the Rotary Club volunteers.

They may have trouble understanding numbers, but once again the BBC Cymru Gorwelion Horizons tent hides some of the festival’s gems.  Not only do Cut Ribbons provide a lovely antidote to the fretwank fraternity – “I don’t think this guitar can go in E, let’s do a different song” – but they play percolated pop laced with melody that resembles Stereolab without the krautrock, or the glory days of Alphabet Backwards when they were all about sherbet and heartache.  Cool Michael Nesmith/Benny from Crossroads woolly hat, too.

We take a quick visit to the kids’ tent, where we find a man dressed as a sheriff sitting in the dirt and singing a very slow, dirge version of “I Get A Kick Out Of You”, like a clown having a break-down, and we decide that the very young have far more taste than any of us, especially anyone aged 16-22, who should be setting the world aflame with music.  Take Homeplanetearth, a not entirely unpleasant but far from weighty young crusty-pop ensemble who make us think of Back To The Planet.  And we’ve not thought of Back To The Planet since 1993.  How blissful those 23 years have been.  Bastards.

Amazons are like The Presidents Of The USA via Then Jericho, except crapper, so we make a trip into The Barn, which now seems to be pretty much sidelined as a stage and which is generally empty all weekend – although perhaps nobody can stand to run the gauntlet past Big Billy Twiddlebollocks and his Boss Box of Bad Blues.  Forty Four Hours weren’t strictly worth the effort, but they are at least interesting, the two of them dressed in black and ranting politely over wistful piano chords and thin drum machines like Richard Clayderman’s audition to join Atari teenage Riot.  Then we notice the boys are twins, and so we’re left with the image of Jedward: The Rehab Years.

People are not walking, they are running towards the Market tent for The Magic Gang, cramming in and dancing like it’s 1999 and it’s going out of fashion and nobody’s watching and there’s no tomorrow.  We’ve seriously not seen this many people crammed into a space since we went to the coffee stall: there are 8 of them stuffed behind that table, but we still have to ask 4 times to get a cuppa?  Is it a test? 

Truck used to be a huge proponent of metal, and whilst Brighton’s Black Peaks don’t signal a return to past interests, they are the only decent heavy band we’ve seen at Hill Farm for about 3 years.  They take the most acceptable parts of noughties metal and weld them firmly to a thrash chassis before spraying it all with the sort Kerrangular post-post-rock we hear a lot of nowadays, and that’s all just fine, but it’s Will Gardner’s vocals that floor us.  His harried screams and guttural growls are like a vortex of crows, and he inspires a proper old-fashioned mosh pit in the packed Nest tent from old-school metallers and members of The Club That Cannot Be Shamed.

The local presence is strong at this year’s festival, but Lucy Leave possibly take the crown.  Their crazing paving pop brings together prog, psych and punk with Blur’s sense of a good tune, whilst the drumming is astonishingly frenetic and jazzy, like Gene Krupa squashing ants for money.   If you wondered what it would sound like if Stump, Tiger, Neu! and Hawkwind got together down the pub for a pint of mild and a game of astronomy dominoes, Lucy Leave’s “40 Years” will give you an inkling.

As if they’ve been playing too much Tekken at the Retro-bution tent, two bands in succession take us back to the early 90s.  Glitched give us politics, anger and syndrums in a way that should make Forty Four Hours hang their heads in shame if they’re still backstage at the Barn, and DMAs relive that brief moment before Oasis became a tedious brand, when they were still an intriguing mixture of influences culled from diverse sources like the Roses, shoegaze, The Who and Flowered Up.  Except, in place of The Beatles DMAs seem to have venerated Simple Minds and The Housemartins.  That’s odd and not always successful, but they make a good case for themselves, and everyone in the tent seems to know the words, so fair enough.  Plus, the acoustic guitarist looks as though he’s got everyone else’s coats on, perhaps he lost a bet.

Truckadero

Here's the Saturday review from this year's Truck festival.  I've since discovered that Haula is a local artist, persumably from Wantage, but her website still claims she comes from London so I've left that bit in.  

Musically, Sunday starts slowly, but then perhaps Sundays always should.  Wallflower are a sonically muscular emoid bunch, let down by some kidney-rippingly bad vocals; Fox Chapel make pleasant enough pop, that might have forgettably inaugurated some T4 all-dayer a few years ago; Safe To Swim are rhythmically very strong, all rubbery goth indie that closely resembles Placebo, which is fine so long as you don’t mind things that sound like Placebo.  To stave off boredom we invent the game Gaffer Tape Vs. Jaffa Cake, the rules to which we sadly can’t tell you until you get a special tattoo and give us your house.

So, it’s back to the reliable Gorwelion Horizons stage, who keep delivering strong acts on Saturday, although they seem to have cheated and sneaked a few non-Welsh musicians in, such as London-based Ugandan Haula. She has an outstanding contemporary soul voice and a commanding but not over-egged stage presence, which makes her set a pleasure.  Musically she leans on R ‘n’ B, both in its contemporary sense, and the original coinage: there’s a tasty moment when the band drop into a Chickenshack type blues glide that really suits her delivery.  Sometimes the backing gets sterile and sessiony, and the lyrics tend towards the platitudinous, but it’s a strong showing all the same.  Closing song “Freedom” gets a glorious main stage singalong reaction from the crowd (apparently she has a following in Wantage, somewhat oddly).

According to our notebook we listen to Decovo at this point, but it clearly makes no impact on us.  Allusondrugs, however, are a different proposition.  Their messy potage of Mudhoney riffs, twitchy Biffy Clyro vocals, windswept guitar lines and half-inched Blur tunes is fun, but we love the fact that at any one point one of them is going off on a freakout, but at no point all of them are.  They’re simply intriguing.  “I like herpes more than I like Irn Bru”, they announce unexpectedly, which is a thousand times more worth saying than, “Truck fest, how ya doing?”, you have to admit.

Walking past the Veterans stage (no Virgins left after the first day, which is how all good festivals should be), we intend to skip The Shapes, but are drawn in by the magnetic power of their classic pop, which is grown up without being washed out.  We then go and see The Magic Gang just in case they sound like The Magic Band, which is the sort of logic you end up with having decided to skip lunch due to queues and fall back on beer.  They don’t.  In fact, they sound like The Housemartins, Weezer and very, very well-behaved young men.  We rather enjoy it, but they’re hardly kicking out the jams; in fact, they’d probably be considered limp by the WI who made the jams.

Veterans Flowers Of Hell endear themselves to us immediately by being notably relaxed and sounding like The Velvet Underground with extra fiddle and trumpet, and then they prove us right by playing a really great cover of “Heroin” with extra fiddle and trumpet.  And then they honour Czech dissident freaks Plastic People Of The Universe, which should happen more often.  And, all this whilst the engineer has left a vintage soul CD playing on the PA throughout.  They probably thought it was messages from the ether.

Yet again Gorwelion comes up trumps, with ultra-super-mega-perky indie pop outfit Seazoo, who are blessed with an infections sense of fun, a knowledge of how catchy tunes work, relentlessly bouncy basslines, and a synth made out of a doll’s head that goes whoodly-wheep in a seemingly random fashion. They do a song which sounds like Free’s “Alright Now” played by excited Care Bears. They are superb.  Oxford promoters Swiss Concrete should be brought back for one night, just to book this colour-saturated joy of a band, where they could raise many a flagon of speed-laced Tizer; hell, play them loud enough, they could raise the spectre of John Peel, his Ooberman T-shirt barely creased by the afterlife.

After this food beckons.  Having tried to support the ethical vegetarian hippy stall, we get frustrated by their inability to actually have any food (“You could come back in about an hour”), so we visit the Dalicious stall, which we work out is named after the fact that it sells some rather tasty lentil dal, and not because it sells floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew (note to self: set up business to sell floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew).

Hoping to strike gold twice, we return to Gorwelion for Violet Skies.  She shares some ground with Haula, not least an impressive larynx, but her electronic torch songs are just too studio-smooth and her onstage drama the stuff of Eurovision heats.  If she stopped trying so desperately to affect, she could be someone to watch, though.

It’s funny to think of Alphabet Backwards being classed as Veterans, because they still act like naughty kids, leaping around the stage and trying to get people to wind up the security guy.  This is pop, not as youthful rebellion, but as childish fun, like The Red Hand Gang getting hopped up on tartrazine.  All this, and their playing is inch perfect too, never missing the opportunity for maximum bounciness.  The keyboards are a wee bit too quiet, but this is balanced by Steph’s flowing Sandie Shaw dress.  They are ten times more fun than Summer Camp, whom we’d just watched briefly, not to mention summerier and camper.

“Who likes Saint Raymond?” asks the visibly refreshed singer of soft-centred hardcore Leeds lads Brawlers.  “I mean, we’ve never heard of them, and we only ask because we just stole their fucking beer”.   He then proceeds to share said bevvies with the crowd.  Now accessories to the crime, we have no choice but to give up and enjoy the band, which despite being musclier and much louder and far far more tattoed is actually a good analogue to Alphabet Backwards: they are working very hard for you to have a good time, and are not worried a wet fart about anything else.  Pop music, in other words.

Peasants King finish off the Gorwelion stage.  Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in that name somewhere?  Hell, don’t bother answering, we gave up after finding no fewer than 19 errors on the first page of the Truck programme alone.  Plus the cover looks like it could be the 1985 catalogue from Clockhouse at C&A, so it’s best left under lock and key.  Peasants King make a decent Britrock sound, but it all feels a bit old hat, from the guy playing a separate floor tom - so 2008 - on up.  Perhaps at the other end of the festival we’d have got more from them, but on the home straight we need more to grab us.