Truck 2016: Saturday

If Black Peaks recall The Club That Cannot Be Named, the Saloon stage is pure Bennett brothers Truck history.  Alt-country might boast the most inaccurate prefix in music history, but we won’t hold that against the late noughties style acts who fill this corrugated shed with sweet tones, not least the smooth-voiced Stevie Ray Latham who starts our Saturday.  Later we catch Samo Hurt & The Beatnik Messiahs, in which a man who amusingly resembles an occasional Nightshift scribe and Oxford promoter bashes out dirty Diddley country garage in the middle of the floor, like Carl Perkins pan-handling for pennies outside C&A

From The Alarm to Stereophonics, Wales seems to turn out a lot of big-boned melodic rock.  Fleur De Lys keep this tradition alive and whilst their clumpy tunes might not win any races, they could melt hearts with an impromptu break dance at the school prom – or perhaps we’ve been influenced by the sort of feelgood films on show in the cinema tent.  Do people pay nearly a hundred quid to come to a festival to watch The Goonies in a tiny hot enclosure?  Apparently so.  Probably more fun than checking out New Luna, in fairness, whose generic driving rock has a few tie dye guitar sounds, but is let down by growly vocals that seem to be trying desperately to puff the music up to stadium size.  They could have learnt a lot from Prohibition Smokers Club over the on the Veterans stage, where ex-Oxford boy Lee Christian is leading a rinsing P-funk Prince-flecked soul revue.  Each song is a sticky blast of glam rock and filth...rather like the dressing rooms from 70s Top Of The Pops must have been, we now suspect.

Anelog exist on the tuneful cusp between indie and MOR, and their set seems equidistant between Belle & Sebastian and Huey Lewis, which might not be the highlight of the day, but is a fuckmile better than Dagny, the experience of whom can be triangulated from Miley Cyrus, Icona Pop and the stale air in a balled up prawn cocktail crispbag.

Many of the best bands pull you in two directions at once, and Flights Of Helios make a big happy hippy haze into which Joy Division darkness and Chris Beard’s tarnished monk vocals swirl.  The placement of Horns Of Plenty amongst the crowd for “Dynah And Donalogue” is truly inspired. 

Brighton’s Thyla sound rather a lot like Belly, which is a very pleasant thing to do.  Nothing revolutionary here, but they’re a hell of lot more memorable than the next 3 acts we sit through, whose names we shall not dignify in print.  It’s up to Luke Smith & The Feelings to make us smile again with their existential Chas ‘N’ Dave schtick.  Luke is old Truck through and through, out of step with the prevailing ethos, nice, slightly bumbling, and well-loved by a vocal minority: perhaps he’s the Steventon Jeremy Corbyn.  Most surprisingly moving moment of the weekend comes from a rewrite of oldie “Luke’s National Anthem”, turning it into a lancet sharp anti-Ukip lament.

Luke may not be the epitome of cool, so we are inspired to check the fashion trends: it looks as though 2015’s dungarees and backwards caps are being taken over by crushed velvet crop tops and bumbags.  Yep, every tenth person on site has a bumbag, generally worn to the front, which means they should probably be rechristened cash mirkins.  The other popular look is “multicoloured wastrel”, as many people indulge in a giant paint fight on Saturday afternoon.  It looks as though the paint won.  Probably outwitted them.  Oh, and some girls seem to have come dressed as Magenta Devine, we won’t try to work out why on earth that should be.  Minecraft t-shirts still reign untroubled amongst the under 10s.

We naturally have to visit Afrocluster, in case they sound like Fela Kuti doing krautrock.  They don’t, inevitably, but they are a phenomenal rap/funk band, with a cracking frontman, a sashimi slicing horn section, and a rhythm section so far in the pocket they don’t know where to put their keys.  It’s an astonishing bubbling groove beast of a band, that is right up there as one of the best of the weekend: score another to Gorwelion Horizons.

Truck 2013 Saturday Pt 2

Luke Smith can be found in our record collection between Jimmy Smith and Mark E. Smith, which seems pretty fair as a) he’s pretty useful on the old keys, and b) he’s resolutely English, a deeply acquired taste, and has changed a band member every time we see him.  His lovable Stillgoe meets Betjeman schtick is much as it always was, even after a few Trucks away from the bill, although the addition of young female vocalist has turned set stalwart “Please Be My Girlfriend” into a sort of tea room version of The Smiths’ “Girl Afraid”.

Crash Of Rhinos are epic and wired and excited, but like lots of angular emotional rock there doesn’t seem to be much underneath it all worth being epic, wired or excited about.  They’re like getting Gielgud all dressed up in his Richard III costume, then making him recite excerpts from Teen Wolf.

Now, LA duo The Bots on the other hand are properly gigantic, a vicious mess of feral guitar and pummelled drums that takes in Sabbath riffs, Hendrix via Last Exit solos, punk vocals and more pummelled drums.  It’s irreverently witty, too, and our favourite moment is when one of them breaks off from caustic guitar screeches to stop and play three notes on a farty synth repeatedly for about two minutes.  The other one, in case you’re wondering, was pummelling the drums at the time.

And So I Watch You From Afar are on the main stage.  It’s almost too easy.  They might as well be called, And So I Nip Off To The Bar.  Which isn’t to say they’re rubbish, but their twiddly posty-rocky thingy is not as interesting as watching kids climb over the giant CD sculpture, or trying to explain cryptic crosswords to a Swede (partial success).  Fight Like Apes are better, not least because their singer is dressed like Siouxsie and if they are overly fond of a repeated singalong vocal line, they know when to kick in enough energy to take a song home.

The timetable says the Jamalot stage should host The Fridge & Bungle Experience now, but it looks a lot like Ilodica to us.  You have to love the way that he just plays his relaxed roots whilst members of the organisation set up the stage around him, laying down airy melodic lines and singing in a style equidistant between Max Romeo and Horace Andy as if he is lost in his own musical world.  He’s a proper ragamuffin too – we mean that in the original sense, his scruffy martial jacket makes him look like a disciple of The Libertines gone dread.  He jams out a track with Pieman, who is next on the bill, which is rather a sweet way to treat set changeovers.  Pieman is not, as you might expect, a Headcount tribute act, but a beatboxer of some frightening ability, who is incredibly adept at replicating dubstep wubs and scratchadelic curlicues as well as the traditional drum sounds.  And he can rap, it turns out.  The bastard.  Our only criticism is that his show is a crowd-pleasing diversion, we’d like to see him doing something more substantial one day, or perhaps a set of collaborations.

When The Subways run onstage, fists aloft, like second rate telethon presenters, or clueless youth workers, we fear for our teeth, which can only take so much grinding of a weekend.  But they’re actually  - whisper it – good fun.  They know their way from one end of a tune to another, they look as though they are sincerely having a ball onstage, and their set does actually make us a smile, even whilst we fail to recall any of their music mere seconds after it has finished.  Plus, it’s endearing that their stage moves are a vindication for clumsy wedding dad dancing the world over.

The only thing that annoys us about Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip is the “Vs”.  Considering they’re a laptop twiddler with a taste for 8 bit squiggles and late 90s breakbeat wrangling, and a beardy spoken word artist with a love for classic hip hop and Detroit hardcore, their music is a surprisingly cohesive collaboration.  We can, on the other hand, talk at great length about why we admire them, from the impossibly infectious music to the erudite lyrics to the fact that they’re politically engaged musicians who don’t resort to rabble-rousing simplifications.  This 45 minute show is inevitably a bit of a greatest hits workout, and we would have liked more time to explore their more esoteric work – not to mention a clearer vocal mix – but seeing a packed tent leap manically to a track we first saw Scroobius play solo to fewer than 20 people in The Zodiac, before the P.I.P. was a V.I.P., is pleasing.  In fact, whilst this set is going on, other stages were being headlined by ShaoDow and Rolo Tomassi, two more acts Nightshift first discovered playing blinding gigs  to q tiny smattering of listeners, and it’s truly heartwarming.  Or depressing, of course, depending on how you look at it.

After that endorphin blast, The Horrors can’t compete.  We think they’re fairly good on record, but the show is an anonymous parade of plodding drums and synth washes, like karaoke backing for a mid-80s Simple Minds song everyone’s forgotten.  There are hints of an atmospheric tune here and there, but after seeing Toy this is cruelly thin broth to serve as the final course.

It has been a thoroughly enjoyable festival, with the Saturday especially rich in treats.  On one of our visits to see the ever-helpful Rapture Records stall, one of the staff announces, “It’s OK!  Truck is complete, the Thomas Truax records have arrived!”.  New York’s Meccano music maestro made a welcome return to the Veterans stage this year, and our only concern for coming events is how mavericks like him find a place on the bill, and get a chance to earn their place as future veterans.  Once you felt the curatorial sway over Truck, from the Bennetts themselves to Trailerpark’s PC, to Alan Day, and if this resulted in some mystifying decisions, it also gave the festival a stamp of identity that nowadays doesn’t seem to quite remain.  We saw some truly outstanding acts this weekend, but if you want to, you can go and see most of them sharing bills at other festivals all the way through the summer.  As we said at the outset, mix up the stages, and throw in some more adventurous act choices, and Truck could easily be better now than it ever has been, but if it becomes just one more identikit summer stop for the floral welly crew, then we’ll lose a vital part of what always made it special, and all the volleyball nets in the world will never buy that back.

Truck Or Treat

Hello.

It's been a while, sorry about that. I'm as busy as can be over here. I shall get this blog back on track hopefully in the enar future. Anway, here's the 1st part of my Truck review, elements of which appear in the current Nightshift.


TRUCK, Hill Farm, Steventon, 24-5/7/10

SATURDAY
In recent years Truck has been all over the national press, popping up in The Independent Magazine or The Guardian’s guide to festivals, but whilst this may be deserved none of these culture jamborees seem to capture what we think is good about Truck. Forget your indie cred and girls in fifty quid wellies, we adore the vicar frying donuts, the Round Tablers serving reasonably priced tea, the slightly makeshift feel of most of the stages, and – in short – the fact that it doesn’t look like something that’s ever likely to excite the staff at The Guardian. The other great thing about Truck, which is perhaps true of all good festivals, is that it always surprises you with great unknown acts. Openers Meursault aren’t a bad little group to stumble upon, volleying melodic laptop rock into the balmy afternoon. Their inherent drama reminds us of Witches, and our only criticism is that they come across as desperately earnest, as if they were pleading before a medieval ducking stool.

Something Beginning With L are a new name to us as well, and if their woozy cover of Whitney Houton’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” marks them out as hypnagogic trendies, the majority of the set is just good old guitar and keyboard rock music, finished off with a gorgeous plangent voice. At times they remind us of Texas – even down to the cowboy hat – but not in a way that is infuriating. “Lovely” begins with L.

It’s the same every year, we want to like the cabaret tent but never find anything good. We’re desperate to enjoy Jim Davies, who seems like he’d be a great man to share a few pints with, and who has a natural humour about him, but who must have left his punchlines behind in the rush to get packed. Sadly his tales of working as an advertising copywriter are good, but don’t really connect; it does, however, give us an excuse to pepper this review with idiotic promotional slogans.

In a swirl of NASA suits, bubble machines, theremin and stylophone Spaceships Are Cool prepare for takeoff. Their wonderfully tuneful music is akin to something on the Duophonic label minus the furrowed brows, and at least three tracks sound like White Town’s bedroom wonder “Your Woman” covered by a cheery Glaswegian indie band. They’re one of the best acts of the weekend, but if they have a Smile-Off with members of Alphabet Backwards stand well back, you might get caught in some hideous chirpiness crossfire. Put the freshness back.

They also give out tiny origami space shuttles to the crowd, which we find scattered around throughout the day; is subliminal craft merch a new sales concept? God knows Atlantic Pacific could do with some of that subtlety, they play a very dull yet not upsetting set, which is only interesting because it provides the first glimpse of a Bennett brother onstage. What do we win?

We were fervently hoping Thomas Tantrum in The Barn would be Thomas Truax going ape because all his machines had gone wrong, but sadly not. Nothing else about them is a let down, though. Get past the ultra-contemporary pared guitar sounds, and you find pop gold something like The Cardigans, or perhaps even The Cowboy Junkies, if they were cooked in a cutely effervescent pixie pie. It’s musically spotless and hugely enjoyable, at times reminding us of pretty 90s popstrels Tsunami (not the later Oxford band of the same name). Swiss Concrete don’t make shit smelling barns, but if they did...

The programme tells us “Luke Smith hasn’t missed a Truck Festival since he first played ten (??? citation needed) years ago”. How sweet, he’s so much a part of the scenery, they don’t even bother proof reading his write up. And as such criticising him would be like visiting Wiltshire and giving Stonehenge a bad review, but luckily we adore him anyway. We could ramble on about his intelligent lyrics and adept piano, the excellent growling John Harle tone of the soprano sax or the warm comic humanity of his delivery, but all you really need to know is that throughout the set the sound engineers were grinning like loons, and they’re a notoriously surly bunch. Smith is somewhere between Betjeman and Stillgoe, and is an English eccentric to be valued...and he does make exceedingly good tunes.

Active Child plays some lovely harp, but spoils it by covering the music with horrible Eurhythmics drum programming. The he stops playing the harp. Then we leave.

Boat To Row are likened in the programme to Stornoway and Bert Jansch, which is phenomenally generous and puts us off their folky pop at first, but eventually we warm to them, and we mentally file them alongside Sonny Liston as pleasing acoustic troubadours. Still, nothing here to get the pulse racing, so we let our fingers do the walking and pick something at random from the programme.

Fucking fingers. We’re back at the Cabaret tent, where two men (who may be Bishop & Douche, but we’re not certain) are playing the introductions to cheesy records to inexplicable applause. God, how we hate the Nathan Barley world we live in, sometimes, that equates recognising something with understanding it, and thinks quoting something is the same as criticising it. This is desperately unfunny and makes Boat To Row seem like a halcyon age, so we leave ASAP. Because we’re worth it.

Luckily it means we catch some of Mr Shaodow’s set from the door of a packed Beathive. Only a few years ago he was fumbling his way through a Punt set whereas now he (and battle brother LeeN, amongst others) has the crowd by the scruff of the neck, and is sending it, frankly, loopy. The only down point is the overlong freestyle section, where Shaodow starts asking for suggestions from the audience like a hip hop Josie Lawrence. The improv raps are good, but why try to impress on the fly when you’ve already written such astounding rhymes?

We think that Y was on our bus, trying to impress some 15 years olds and telling a dizzy girl she was psychic; on Sunday he’s refusing to leave the tiny Rapture Records stage whilst he slurs non-sequiturs and plays fudged arpeggios on a weeny keyboard, like a horrific cross between Suicide and John Shuttleworth. Somewhere in the middle of this embarrassment, though, he put a tiger in his tank and churned out a steaming wall of psych rock noise, along with an ace jamming band (double Bennett score!). Imagine all the great sounds that influenced Spacemen 3, and then put them together replacing the narcotic mope with a Watney’s Party 7 barrel of fun, and you get a set that might not be complex, but is exactly what is needed as the afternoon tails away. Some toddlers are also going nuts for it, alternately dancing crazy and running their fingers through the pebbles in the Village Pub tent like people on their first acid trip. “Dude, my hands are so big. For a three year old”.

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).

Truck 2008 Pt 3

And onto Sunday...Oh, This Is Seb Clarke turned out to be anything but, but I never found out who they actually were, so I'm leaving that bit in.

Chefs will tell you that many different dishes can be created with the same base sauce. Mephisto Grande are like that. As a duo they’ve got the basic recipe down - free reed drones, brimstone Beefheart growls and bludgeoning rhythms – but today they’re augmented with skronking sax and members of The Oxford Gospel Choir for a dense slab of Pentecostal rock, featuring the best cover of “Frere Jacques” ever. If the vicar of Steventon had got on stage during this and announced we were all going to hell, the local church would have been filled with repentant sinners by tea time.

This Is Seb Clarke have some excellent burgundy Beatles suits, and create some decent straight up trio rock that’s a bit like half of The Hives, but the programme had promised us 12 piece horn driven heaven, so we slope off feeling hard done by.

If anyone wasn’t sure what a kora was, Jali Filli Cissokho explained it to us; he then explained how one plays it with four digits, just in case nobody was yet flawed by the man’s talents. The rippling cascades of notes he plucks from this African harplike instrument are as succulent as they are impressive, and can seem heartbeat simple or cortex complex depending on where one focuses. Perhaps his voice, though sweet, is a little limited, but then again as he comes from the story-telling griot tradition, maybe understanding the lyrics would have helped. It hardly matters when you can lose your Sunday afternoon exhaustion in this impeccable playing. If you saw anyone walking round Truck with their jaws dangling open, they probably hadn’t got over Cissokho’s set yet.

On Sunday the Pavilion was given over to Piney Gir. Not wanting to venture in between sets in case she makes us do cross stitch or dress up as a raccoon, we edge into a strange hinterland at the edge of the campsite, full of non-musical attractions, including craft demonstrations, a cycle powered entertainment system (sadly closed at the time) and a little hut where a frankly petrifying man attempted to draw us in for some lessons in “woooing” (sic) whilst scratchy easy listening played. We also get to see the large number of Truckers who like to hang out in the campsite all day, playing footie and strumming guitars: quite an expensive way to camp out with your mates, but each to their own. In search of another subset of Truckers, some children explain that the playbus is fun, but would be better if it drove around, and that Truck is a good festival because they “saw a tractor”.

We return in time for Bordervillle, who are excellently dressed as if they’ve come from a time travelling wedding, except Joe Swarbrick who looks like a boy band Edward Scissorhands. Dead Kids should be watching this outstanding set – this is how you do pastiche and genre melding. In some ways it’s a parody of 70s pomp bands like Queen, and Broadway musicals, but it’s also a celebration of what can be great about those things, presented with imagination and a well-rehearsed flow. The sort of arch and theatrical act that makes you want to describe them like a Victorian playbill: “A vaudevillian confection of sonorous majesty” it is, then.

Luke Smith’s set is delayed because of generator problems. Doesn’t matter, we’re happy just to stand and listen to him talk, seeing as he’s the most erudite and charming man at the festival. The music might well be somewhat derriere garde, stemming from music hall ditties and 70s MOR, but as an extension of Luke’s chummy personality it works perfectly. Nobody else here would pen a tune like “You’ll Never Stop People Being Gits”, ridicule their bassist, take the piss out of audience singalongs, and still come out looking like the nicest man in town.

We’ve always admired KTB, but never really been that excited by her. Good, therefore, to see her as part of the excellent folk quartet Little Sister, doling out melismatic harmonies, acoustic tapestries and hot Appalachian fiddle licks. They somehow manage to get some of the audience doing forward rolls round the field, which is no mean feat when we’re this tired.

Les Clochards are sadly not mentioned in the programme, and misadvertised outside the Pub Tent, so it’s not surprising they start playing to a mere scattering of listeners. Their tasty Gallic café indie sound soon draws in passers by, however, because nobody could resist that mix of syrupy vocal, French accordion and fluid bass. Also, that’s Peter Momtchiloff from Talulah Gosh and Heavenly on guitar, should you have your I Spy Book Of Jangle Pop on you.

“Come and see The Nuns tomorrow”, says a flier tout on Saturday. Your smug reviewer answers, “OK, as long as they’re an all female tribute to The Monks”. “Yes,” she replies, “yes they are.” Put us in our place, didn’t it? If you don’t know who The Monks are, you’re stupid. They are one of the finest alternative rock bands, and quite possibly the first. They started in Germany in the early 60s in an attempt to create an anti-matter Beatles, and they’ve influenced approximately everyone who’s any good, ever. They’re the only band better than The Fall, according to Mark E Smith, which is unprecedented praise. The Nuns’ set is good, but doesn’t quite capture the full distorted grandeur of the originals. A celebration of, rather than an alternative to, The Monks.

Neil Halstead, from Slowdive, feels somewhat guilty about playing acoustic guitar on the shoegazing bill. “I don’t even have a pedal,” he admits. No matter as he performs lovely smoky wisps of song that keeps the small crowd happy. Nothing onstage to explain why he’s held in reverence, perhaps, but something rather lovely all the same.

Scotland’s Camera Obscura are so twee and melodic, we imagine that Swiss Concrete are backstage with their diary open ready to catch them. At times they’re like The Sundays, but more twee, or like The Cowboy Junkies, but more twee. They’re good, but they’re really twee. There’s no synonym for “twee” so we’d better stop now.

Ulrich Schnauss fills the barn with delicious vox humana keyboard washes and synth squiggles, which are underpinned by drum parts, until he sounds like a cross between Klaus Schulze and 808 State. The trouble is that the beats sound kind of tired, especially in the Barn’s reverb, and it may have been better to let the drones do the talking.

Greatest living Canterburian

Here's an ancient one, to start things off, from BBC Oxford back in the day.

LUKE SMITH/ THE FOLK ORCHESTRA/ A SCHOLAR AND A PHYSICIAN, Trailerpark, The Cellar, 11/02.

Barry, the first act, doesn't show up. I don't know whether Barry is man, band or beast, but Barry's not here. So, at the last minute Olly, vocalist from local synthpoppers Trademark is drafted in to do strange things to a laptop. Various slices of pop cheese old and new (cf Beddingfield, Daniel; Hammer, MC) are scrunched and mashed in realtime. The experience - something akin to Manchester noiseniks V/Vm at an office party - is, surprisingly, rather good fun.

Folk Orchestra. Now there's an oxymoron. Orchestra: Huge dinner-jacketed embodiment of 19th Century opulence and emotive Romanticism; Gustav Mahler; Leonard bloody Bernstein.

Folk: Libertarian tradition of populist comunion, eschewing complexity and the strictures of the musical salon; Harry Smith; Joan bloody Baez.

How can these diametric opposuites be reconciled? Answer: they can't, at least not tonight. We get a six-piece folk-pop combo, which is a little bigger than most folk-pop combos I'll grant you, but hardly deserving of orchestra status. And it's pretty standard folk-pop combo fare too, at times mercurial and immediate, and times earnest and dull. They aren't helped by a muddy sound mix that destroys any chance of intimacy - the accordionist reached levels of volume for which most metal guitarists would sell their leathery souls.

Luke Smith sings at the piano, with his Dad on drums. As if this weren't reason enough to love him, he tinkles out an hour of wry, funny, sincere songs about his quiet Canterbury life, all infused with a nervous charm. Musically it's not complex, with echoes of music hall singalongs and simple 70s pop, but it's performed with more than enough jazzy dexterity and aplomb.

It's hard to describe what makes Luke such a great prospect. Phrases like "catchy dittes", "homely honesty" and "subtle drum accompaniment" could be employed, but they call up such horrors as Chas 'n' Dave, or Richard Stillgoe. I suppose Luke is a little like that, but imagine a parallel universe where "Snooker Loopy" is an elegant and moving anthem.

Can't? You'd best attend the next Luke Smith gig, then.