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.

Truck & Coverage

Here's the Friday from this year's Truck.  Some of it has been in Nutshaft, and some of it hasn't.  And here's the July Ocelot thingummy, whilst we're about it:

I was going to write about Hot Hooves this month, but you all know about them already.  You do, right?  If you don’t know about Hot Hooves and Mac and The Point and Talulah Gosh and Les Clochards then simply chuck this magazine over your shoulder and go and find out. 

Instead, I’m going to talk about a band I know nothing about, just because I saw them last night and they were good.  All I know about Jeff Wode is that they’re named after a scene in Withnail & I, and that they’re from Oxford, and that I saw them last night, and that they were good, but I still want to write about them because randomly walking into a small venue to see a young trio playing raucous but witty music is what makes me happy.  Jeff Wode don’t take themselves too seriously, but still put their backs into the music.  Not enough bands do this.  Jeff Wode are sloppy and untrained, but not half-arsed.  Wish I could say that more often, too.  Their abrasive, melodic, angry, sensitive thrash pop reminded me a little of Sebadoh at their grimiest, and even of The Lemonheads in their early punk days, but their real victory is making stodgy, sticky grunge thumping sound sly and hypnotic, and not brattishly petulant.  A band like this is a wonderful discovery at the bottom of the bill. People who turn up late wonder why they never see the great new bands before anyone else: well, it’s free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can’t.

TRUCK FESTIVAL, Hill Farm, Steventon, 19-20/7/13

This year, it’s a sort of Omnitruck.  There are little bits of everything that has been popular in Trucks past (except metal) all dotted around the site on special stages: there are big, slightly backward looking indie names on the main stage, there’s a little metal shed full of Americana, there are old characters and a smattering of new local bands, some stoned East Oxonians spinning reggae, and a BSM/Alcopop! stage for people who like math pop and dressing like Ferris Bueller.  It’s a lovely lineup, and our only wish is that it could be a little less ghettoised, and that styles could be mixed up on different stages, as it was this that drew us to Truck in the first place.  And there should be probably be some metal. 

Our weekend starts with Oxford’s Dallas Don’t, who attack Postcard Records’ jangle with the snarl of Future Of The Left, and who spark up rich, poetic indie tunes by throwing themselves at them full pelt – the drummer especially plays like he’s trying to stab excitable cockroaches with a skewer.

We feel as though new stage The Great Western Whiskey Saloon And Blues Kitchen was probably created by polling the residents of the Abingdon area about what they’d want from a festival: proper pub stools, no stupid new-fangled pop music and vintage Watneys beermats, please, squire.   Apart from the fact that the doorway isn’t really big enough, and that moving on to spirits would be ill-advised in this searing sunshine, this turns out to be a wonderful stage, hosting quality performers, and warm-natured crowds.  Opening act The Spare Room, for example, layer some wonderful West Coast three-part harmonies over pretty little guitar and glock ditties, which proves that novelty isn’t the only route to success.

Although we could have done with more as we approached the Market Stage for Wildswim.  Instead of the mixture of quirky electronica and Victorian light opera we’ve got from them before, we hear something that sounds worryingly like Tears For Fears, so we do a quick 180 and visit Truly Ford at the Virgins stage instead, which seems to be the old BBC Introducing stage, give or take.  She’s a young singer from Faringdon (although her Twitter account proves she can’t spell it, so it may be some sort of elaborate lie, probably connected with the moonlanding), and she shows some real promise, dark cello tones enriching strong, approachably dramatic compositions.  Our only real complaint is that she tends to over-emote vocally, which is the curse of current pop music: schoolkids should be made to listen exclusively to Billie Holiday and Leonard Cohen for at least two years before being allowed a sniff of Alicia Keys.

Same story with Lillian Todd Jones, who seems to be inflating some perfectly decent songs to bursting point, when they might be better off left alone.  Still, the main stage is a poisoned chalice in the early afternoon when it’s too hot even to muster the energy to throw rocks at the twat in the woodland onesie,so she and her band are allowed to try anything to keep people’s attention.  Plus she uses the word “meniscus” in a song, which gets her bonus BBC4 points.  She should have been on at Cornbury, they would have flipped for her over there...they’d probably think this was some of that punk rock they’d been hearing so much about.

At this point we take our second trip to the Barn.  Now, are you reading this, Truck festival?  Because, let us just mention something at this juncture, that we end up saying every year: the Barn is awful.  It could have been purposely designed as the worst acoustic environment in which to listen to music by an evil sonic scientist – a sort of anti-matter Lee Perry, perhaps – and yet the logic seems to have been to throw all the loudest acts in there.  When each strike of the snare takes 12 bars to decay, actually hearing a band takes a heroic effort of concentration and deduction, and even the very best act’s set is like watching 2001 through the bottom of a pint pot.  The Physics House Band are not the very best act, although they’re certainly not hateworthy, doling out complex jazz rock objets d’art.  They loosely resemble Battles, although they’re really just Skirmishes, and beneath all the math slapping crescendos their hermetic muso style reminds us ultimately of Weather Report.  And speaking of weather report, it’s glorious summer, so why are we in a boomy cattle shed listening to this?

Liverpool’s Ady Suleiman provides one of a couple of examples this weekend of an act that is shamelessly commercial, yet not hideously calculated (NB: we steered well clear of Lewis Watson).  He has a fine vocal style, with plenty of contempo-chops and smooth jazzy phrasing, existing in a strange but comfortable space between Sheeran and Sade, and he can pen an ear-catching lyric too.  Good luck to him.

We’re sitting back at the main stage, trying to think of a way to describe Milo Greene, so we ask the man next to us for an adjective.  “Benign”, he says.  Yeah, that’ll do.  Their Fleet Foxes style music seems to want to be anthemically big and subtly intimate simultaneously, and so ends up middlingly harmless.  Benign.  Good like a tumour is good: not exactly desirable in and of itself, but you suppose things could have turned out a lot worse.

Max Raptor make some popcore shapes, mixing wiry, lean energy with friendly old new wave chorus lines, something in the manner of early Biffy Clyro covering The Skids at a screamo night, but we’re in a sitting down mood so we return to the Virgins stage.  Generally, pretention is the worst crime a singer songwriter can commit – in the literal sense of pretending to be what they’re not, we quite like it when songs are about gryphons and particle physics and Mallarme, it at least fills the review word count nicely – but Ags Connolly is the exception.  Despite being a rural Oxfordshire boy who can almost certainly spell Faringdon and who has a speaking voice like a turnip salesman, when he sings it’s in a deep, western croon that sounds as though it’s being broadcast direct from Nashville (to us, that is – to Americans it probably sounds like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins).  And that should mean that we walk away without giving him a second listen, but something about his songs keep us enrapt.  It’s probably the lazily lachrymose melodies, and the sleepy-eyed resignation, that hits the spot in the soul where songs don’t need to be complex or original, they just need to be right.  That whiskey bar suddenly seems like a much better idea.

We love the members of the local Round Table and clergy who have supplied food at Truck for so many years, but we’re not complaining that there’s a nice a separate enclave for other culinary options this year, including fresh bread, pizzas, smoothies and real coffee, which is particularly welcome on Saturday morning, even though the organisation behind the counter makes the Jamalot crew look like NASA.  There are also stalls from charities, instrument builders, second-hand clothes sellers: it’s like a cheery little market place, which is only let down by the fact that it’s in a different field from the, err, Market stage.  The History Of Apple Pie are on there.  But The Masterclass On Mic Technique certainly ain’t.  Despite the fact that the vocals are pretty much inaudible, the music sounds like Weezer played by fifth-formers, which wouldn’t be so bad, if the gloriously useless programme hadn’t claimed they sound like Galaxie 500 and Smashing Pumpkins.

Tony Jezzard, who sadly passed away recently, provided sound for most of the events in Truck’s history, so we go to see one of his old bands, The Shapes, in the Saloon to raise a glass in his memory.  Whether the band find it as emotionally charged as we do, we’re not sure, but they play fantastically, and with more a touch more gusto than we’ve witnessed previously, adding a tang to their accessible mixture of Van Morrison, The Rembrandts and Squeeze.

If you find Ten Benson a bit too baroque, then you might appreciate guitar and drums duo Wet Nuns, who bash away at their huge stoner punk tracks like a cross between Winnebago Deal and Status Quo.  They do one song that just sounds like the riff from “Foxy Lady” made out of concrete over and over again.  Then they do another that sounds exactly the same.  Cracking stuff.