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.

Truck 2010 Sunday Pt 2

One thing we noticed at Truck is how many photographers there are nowadays. Impressed audience members come up to ask what lens a snapper is using, when once they would have been checking amp manufacturers or DJ set lists. Luckily, Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou have framed the pictures for them, by standing in the very centre of the main stage and singing into one microphone, which cleverly gives the impression that we’re all in some poky, cosy folk club. We only really love a couple of their songs, but you simply only see a duo whose voices complement each other like this once in blue moon: he is querulous and melancholy, whilst her voice is lucid and liquid, and when they harmonise it sounds like one astonishing folk organism. Joe Bennett turns up once again to play some rather nifty trumpet, proving their music is even better to share.

Nedry usher in the return of the epic reverb pedal, offering us icy clicks and cuts glitch ambience surrounding girl-lost-in-fog vocal mantras. The songs are something like the forlorn ghosts of Donna Summer tracks in some laptop purgatory, except the one that sounds like a dubstep Stina Nordenstam. Another wonderful Truck discovery a long way from the main action.

Unfortunately, lightning doesn’t strike twice and our next off-piste venture brings us to Summer Camp, who play something like late period OMD, which would be passable, if it weren’t for their horribly plastic wedding singer vocalist, who ruins any small chance their songs have of winning us over. The crass lyrics mostly boil down to “Ooh ooh, nice things are nice”. If you think it would be good if all towns were like Milton Keynes, this is the band for you; if you’re fully functioning adult, steer well clear.

No adults in Egyptian Hip Hop, they’re a band who are very young to have received the plaudits they have, but we shan’t let that affect our judgement. And it turns out they’re...alright. There are plenty of ideas in their songs, and they can chug through a slack riff like Dinosaur Jr before flipping out some cheesy Huey Lewis keyboards and throwing in some hi-life inflected jerky guitars that remind us of – oh, you know – FUCKING EVERYBODY! They sound more like a promising band than a good one, but that’s no crime; also, they’re less than half our age and we think they look bloody ridiculous, so they must be doing something right. Misleading name, however; someone should book them with Non-Stop Tango and try to start a riot.

We’re much more excited by the sounds of young Britain when we visit Unicorn Kid, and his hyper-active Nintendo toybox rave, in a style we christen “Arpeggi8”. “Where Is Your Child” and “Tricky Disco” would have come out a few years before he was born, which intriguingly means that he saw them the same way we saw The White Album. And, let’s be honest, they’re better. His music is also better than most on offer this weekend, and whilst it has its florescent charms, the material is strong because a lot of care has clearly gone into the construction, there are lots of interesting ideas in his Wonky Kong palette. Despite being one of the oldest people watching, we love it as much as the teenagers; although when there’s a stage invasion of day-glo youths, we do feel as though we’ve stumbled into the Byker Grove wrap party. Gigs are rarely this much fun.

We get our final Bennett-spotter points with Common Prayer, as they’re both present and correct, as is a French horn which would be brilliant if it were only audible. This is neo-country Truck mulch to a great extent, but the singer does have a lovely unhurried voice, so we end up in favour, even if we can’t sincerely say, “we’re loving it”.

Watching Blood Red Shoes we remember why we like Little Fish. Their guitar and drums business is all very well, and they have some decent rock tunes, but we can’t really get a grip on any of it. They do, however, have far superior stage banter to Little Juju, whose nervous ramblings can get pretty tiresome. There’s exactly nothing wrong with this set, but after two days of music we want something memorable nearly as much as we want a nice sit down.

We are a smidgen disappointed when we realise nervous_testpilot is going to play a straight trance set with none of the madness of previous Trucks (although we’re sure he sampled the Crystal Maze theme at one point), but then we decide that hearing truly exquisitely crafted music is enough, and begin to appreciate the subtly melancholic melodies hidden amongst the snare rushes and thumping vorsprung durch techno. It may be the end of the weekend, but the crowd are still eager to dance, one of whom has discovered some discarded fragments of the Keyboard Choir’s costumes, which brings The Beathive’s day nicely full circle. The set turns out to be an understated triumph, and Testpilot’s loving ridicule of the dancing crowd is fun to watch.

We finish our festival away from headliners Teenage Fanclub, with The Epstein, stars of many a bygone Truck. They play a beautiful set, the jewel in the crown being a glistening “Leave Your Light On”, and we realise that whilst Truck may have got bigger, louder and – let’s not skim over it – more expensive, it still feels very much like it used to a decade ago. As ever there have been surprises, charming atmospheres and far too much rubbish country, and we relish the fact that Truck can hold on to this frail ability to welcome everyone, yet not blandly smooth itself out to try to please them all. The programme’s editorial might be written as an embarrassing cross between Mr Motivator and Jack Kerouac – “this movement that says no homogenous same-old phoney crap but new real expression” – but there is something in it, and Truck realises that being professional is great, but treating people like profit units isn’t. There’s still a natural, unforced wonder about Truck, and no glib corporate slogan is ever likely to encapsulate that feeling.