Truck 2016: Sunday

At Sunday lunch we see some Truckers walking back from McDonalds.  That’s quite a stroll, they must really be into that stuff.  Perhaps trace elements of bovine faeces are addictive.  If that’s the case, they should have saved time and simply gone to the Barn.  Blades Club might be nothing multiplied by zero, but young duo Mother Me are actually pretty great, floating gaunt harmony vocals over cro-magnon drum machine, twin chiming guitars and a Korg that barely gets touched.  They sound a lot like Bauhaus and Oxford’s own D Gwalia, and it’s brilliant to see young people make such bleak music...especially when one of them has glitter on her face.  Storme sweeps commandingly in later with some downtempo synth pop and an ultra-emotive vocal.  At times the set clutches clumsily at big gestures like Glee doing Bjork, but we’re more often reminded of trip hop torch singer Dot Allison, and even at times of early Sinead O’Connor.

Ysgol Sul are The Senseless Things without the fun, but otherwise Gorwelion Horizons keeps the quality up for the third day.  Junior Bill take cues from The Specials and The Police, and like all the good Jamaican music they nod towards, have an impeccable sense of musical space, giving songs space to unfurl.  HMS Morris, Nightshift favourites from last year don’t disappoint, despite once again playing to a mere smattering.   Theirs are budget seduction jamz, heavy on the slinky guitar and sleazily buzzing synth; they also have the best beard to falsetto ratio we’ve ever seen at Truck.

Abattoir Blues are named after a Nick Cave LP, but they could well connect with earlier Veterans stage booking Too Many Poets and their self-defined “graveyard grunge” genre.  There’s certainly a similar grunge feel, although the Brighton band edge more towards the dirt encrusted whilst keeping some melodic noise hidden in the guitar avalanche: think The Jesus Lizard & Mary Chain.  The vocalist, however, knuckles about the songs as if he’s in some Fugazi-shaped hardcore band, and we’re not sure it really fits together: still, we’ll never turn down some proper savagery.

Formations are an odd lot.  They start their set with a muscular dubby rock stomp that has a slight Tackhead flavour, before building to an elastic rap rock verse that’s Vaguely Against The Machine, and then flipping sideways into a chorus that consists solely of the word “drugs” yelped over and over in a mad-eyed falsetto.  Their next tune features some Jan Hammer synth disco, and we have them pegged as a weapons grade version of old Oxford funk merchants Rubber Duck, with a slight hint of Holly Johnson.  Not unequivocably any good, then, but a lot more intriguing than most of the guff that has wafted from this stage for three days.  Guff like Blossoms, who are to Climie Fisher what Wolfmother are to Led Zepellin.  They have a song that sounds like Pet Shop Boys’ classic “Domino Dancing” has been squeezed through a character killing mangle, and the whole thing’s so like a benighted mid-80s Radio 1 roadshow we just want a crack at the snooker quiz to try to win the chance to cut our own ears off.   So we go home instead.

Plodding wearily along Steventon’s long cobbled causeway, we reflect that Truck has effectively become Cornbury Junior.  There are lots of incredibly anonymous bands, and a fair amount of safely retrograde sonic targets but, even as we lament that the only truly unpredictable acts were brought in by BBC Oxford or BBC Cymru or were slipped in on the Veterans stage, it’s hard to take a stance against large, friendly, appreciative crowds, who are clearly loving so much of what they see, and not shy of losing the odd braincell/shoe/fragile fragment of dignity expressing it.  We have to admit we had fun, and saw a fair amount of strong music, and feel certain that we’ll be back for truck 2017.  In two years.  But also twelve months early.

Truck 2016: Saturday (conclusion)

Thoughts go from interesting “Happy Mondays vibe” to “sounds like Nation” in seconds, and after not being able to get a description of Circa Waves from one of their fans beyond when and where they’re playing, proving that they’re only for people who have no interest in music whatsoever we decide to end the day with instrument inventor and cracked poet Thomas Truax, a sort of end of level baddy for the sound engineers.  Just as Richard Osman should by rights never have been allowed past the gatekeepers of contemporary British mainstream culture for being too odd and clever, Truax should not get a rousing response from a festival that thinks Catfish & The Bottlemen fit for human consumption with his oddly shaped, endearing songs, yet here we are.  Top marks.  

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 2016 Friday pt 2

Later we catch Maiians’ excellent set, starting out like Godspeed!  You Black Emperor on Sleeping Bag and including a tune that sounds like “Papua New Guinea” arranged by Tom Tom Club, and Beach’s unconvincing set that sounds like Hail To The Thief played by Fields Of The Nephilim, which is rubbish, though they do get points for bringing huge reverb pedals to the Barn: drop them a line about it through coals@newcastle.com.  But, the night belongs to Jurassic 5, who are phenomenal on the main stage, and certainly don’t deserve billing beneath the bloated tedium of Catfish & The Bottlemen.  They might rap about how they take “four MCs and make them sound like one”, but the strength of J5 and all great hip hop crews is how each member has individual strength and character, throwing their style into a relaxed whole like Avengers Assemble For Netflix and Doritos.  The whole show, down to the lighting cues, is as tightly drilled and crowd-pleasing as The Moscow State Circus, but the group never loses the handmade, unfussy of classic hip hop.  Even the DJ cutting session, the B-boy equivalent of a stadium drum solo and wee break excuse, is tons of fun (there are two DJs, meaning that there are 6 members of Jurassic 5 tonight, which must have pleased that new-math Gorwelion engineer).  Earlier this summer Oxford saw sets from rap demigods Sugarhill Gang and Public Enemy.  J5 were – whisper it – better.

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 2015 Saturday pt 2

The Loose Salute looks like part of a cryptic crossword clue (is “EU salt” a thing?), but is actually a laid-back Americana outfit.  Truck ain’t short of them, of course – there are probably more dobros than bleeding toilets onsite this year – but the band stands out with some ace sleepy, syrupy vocals and lap steel lines arcing across the songs like distant flares in a winter sky.

We’ve never been that excited by their Ghostbox For Dummies schtick, but we have to say that Public Service Broadcasting do have a knack for programming a good 1989 drum and sample pattern and adding stadium krautrock moves.  The expansion to a quartet makes this a more satisfying set than last year’s Audioscope headline, and we leave cautiously in favour.

Tellingly, Bo Ningen is the only act for whom the programme compiler couldn’t find any other bands to reference. Perhaps we shouldn’t compare them to musicians, but to forces of nature.  With arcane hand gestures, manically garbled lyrics and streaming hair entangled in fretboards, the quartet resemble demon witches, the bassist and vocalist particularly looking like someone has shoved some haunted coathangers into a black windsock.  Although they start somewhat tentatively, they soon explode, and the set concludes with waves of coruscating noise and a bass wielded like a sacramental axe.  The silly fake snow machines that have been infuriating us all day in the Barn are left off for the entirety of the set: fun time is over, mortals, taste the ritual.

We drop in on Temples, but really they can’t complete with the psych punk noise still ringing in our ears, so we grab another pint or two and head back to the Market stage for Peter Cook & The Light.  Now, Joy Division are one of the truly great British bands, New Order are not short of a classic or two, and Peter Hook’s aggressively melodic bass playing was a big component of these, but sadly his voice is just rubbish, in the least interesting way possible.  We only keep from dropping off by imagining that we’re watching Peter Cook & The Light (“She’s lost control again, Dud”.  “Bloody Greta Garbo!”).  This music deserves celebrating, but a slightly moribund trot through the back catalogue isn’t the best method of doing so.

A far more welcome hors d’ouevre to the headline set comes from Truck favourite Piney Gir, in a sugary whirlwind of pirouetting skeletons and lollipop percussion and a polka dot frock and kids onstage and a bumblebee costume and synchronised tambourines and girlpop and fieldmice and grins and the glorious “Greetings, Salutations, Goodbye” and not enough synths.

Basement Jaxx are billed as Truck’s “first festival headliner”, which seems like splitting hairs and evidence of one contract clause too many, but blimey, they don’t half bring things to a conclusion.  The band has taken the concept of a “soul revue”, and run with it to create a “house panto”.  There are guys in gorilla suits and a couple of girls done up like the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of soul sisterhood, and a huge woman with a huge voice getting all gospel pop on us whilst looking uncannily like the fortune teller from Monkey Island.  The single segue of a show contains hits and equally interesting connecting material, reliably banging beats, an interestingly stripped back “Romeo” and even a timbales solo.  The band never revisited on the dense layered intrigue of their debut LP - in a reminder how experimental they were, The Wire listed Remedy in their top 20 releases of 1999, just above Captain Beefheart and The Fall! – and we never expected anything other than crowd-pleasing from this set, but it is still a beautifully put together show and a barrelful of fun.  What else should we have expected from the people who had psychotic monkeys run amok over Gary Numan riffs and now have a video featuring a twerkbot?  First festival headliner?  Job most emphatically done.

And with that we head off into the night: ha, press parking, eat dust, suckers!  It has been a very enjoyable Truck, full of classic moves and exciting new ideas.  Some people will doubtless say that Basement Jaxx were too commercial, but frankly we’ve yawned through enough worthy country acts and third tier indie warhorses over the years to welcome a bit of showmanship.  This was the busiest Truck to date, which is great, but frankly it also sometimes felt like it: nobody should have to miss a whole set to have a piddle.  Truck has always treated people well, and not as cash-haemorrhaging cattle, as witnessed by the reasonable catering prices, the fact that a lot of the trading positions are given to charities when doubtless more revenue could be raised elsewhere, and the fact that we walked in with a bag stuffed with beers.  There’s talk of the festival getting bigger in 2016.  That sounds interesting, but the organisors must make sure that they retain the respect for artists and customers that Truck has always been synonymous with.  Otherwise, if they’re not careful, one day we might be pinpointing the moment Truck died – and unlike Paul McCartney, it won’t be a paranoid fantasy. 

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.