Truck 2011 Saturday

Here we go, part 2. Saturday at Truck. I'm going to eat a pizza soon, and I'm going to have it with spinach leaves and hummus, and just maybe a pint of beer. Then tomorrow I'm going to see the glorious Stornoway (it does mean I'll have to see the rubbish Dreaming Spires, whom I avoided at Truck), and Sunday I'm going to see the Vorticist show at the tate befopre it closes. I can't see why you'd want to knwo this, but I've told been told this site isn't strictly a blog, so I thought I'd add some meaningless eprsonal info. I'm currently wearing dark blue briefs.

Were we slightly critical of the gentrification of Truck’s catering earlier? Opinions change on Saturday morning when we find we can get a proper coffee and some orange juice a few feet from the tent, which balances out the burger we had for dinner. Chav for supper and middle class for breakfast, that’s our motto! What’s that? Lunch? No time for it, we’d rather visit the Butts ale stall, still the non-musical highlight of Truck. Great service, great beer and it costs £2.80 a pint. Two pounds bastard eighty! It’s akin to a miracle. We’re also told by parents that it would be worth our while to borrow a child just to experience Roustabout Theatre’s My Secret Garden, a weird mixture of improvised theatre and archaeology. Well, maybe not, but we do drop in on Nick Cope, who is entertaining some pre-schoolers with his chirpy activity songs. “Stand on one leg”, “Let’s pretend we’re moles”. Not so much later we find ourselves in the presence of Alphabet Backwards, whose music is really the same thing, for those slightly older. “Imagine you’ve just passed your driving test”, “Pretend you just got off with another sixth former”. Unashamedly perky pop, delivered with unashamed chops, it’s pity you don’t see this mix more often. A 21st century Squeeze.

The more spacious Truck layout has enticed us to spend more time away from the main stages, and we are very impressed with some of the Cabaret Clandestino bookings. Ex-Oxonian Face0meter delivers his wordy alt folk with some charm. The obvious reference point is Jeffrey Lewis, though we prefer to think of him as a cross between Richard Stillgoe and Jasper Carrott. Musically it’s beyond sloppy, but as entertainment it’s gold. Hyper-folk performer James Bell doesn’t have the gig of his life, but has energy enough to get away with it. Storyteller Paul Askew also stumbles a few times, but has material to hide the cracks, a long piece about taking a gaggle of words to the botanical gardens before kidnapping a pronoun reminding us of a punk Richard Brautigan; poet George Chopping eclipses him, though, with a perfectly balanced mixture of sweet natured observation and steel-melting bile. And yes, just so the cosmic balance is restored, there’s some absolute rubbish too: The Oxford Imps do fourth rate Whose Line Is It Anyway? guff whilst acting like a punchably upbeat genetically engineered Partridge Family. The festival programme has a typo of “improve” for “improv” – we couldn’t think of better advice for them. Oh, and Mark Niel is just skin-crawlingly awful. He laments the fact that his hometown of Milton Keynes is a bad comic’s punchline – funny, without that comment we’d have no idea he had any notion of what a punchline was.

The main stage bookings are strangely underwhelming in the afternoon, but Two Fingers Of Firewater add some spice to proceedings, their widescreen country rock and well-groomed boogie harking back to Truck history. They make the transition from Charlbury to Truck without losing any punch.

Blessing Force is brilliant: not only is a lot of the music very good, but what is not good is hilarious. In the Last.FM tent on Saturday, we enjoyed being alternately entertained by the music and entertained by the sheer hideous hipster spectacle of things. Sealings fell into the former category. In the past, we’ve been unconvinced by this noisy drum machine backed duo: they weren’t doing much wrong, but it was more a souvenir of good music, than good music in its own right. This time, however, everything fell into place, as the intensity rose from a Jesus & Mary Chain drone to a Swans-inspired squall. Solid Gold Dragons, on the other hand, were possibly the worst thing to happen to us over the weekend – and that includes getting nearly vomited on by a toddler. Their plastic, stadium pop with light reggae inflections might be just about acceptable if the vocals weren’t so clod-hoppingly oafish, even whilst they tried to plumb cosmic realms of imagery. Imagine Big Audio Dynamite on an off night fronted by Bernard Matthews. No, wait, sometimes the trumpet made it more like a tired James lead by Derek Nimmo taking the piss out of Morrissey. No, wait, can we please stop thinking about this, forever?

Riverside 2009 Pt 3

Next up, Ginger Toddler Rucksack Headbutt. No, not the latest Poor Girl Noise booking, just a thing that happened whilst we were laying back watching Two Fingers Of Firewater. And, hey, it’s a festival, if you want to express yourself by bashing our bag about, feel free – decent soundtrack to do it to, as well. We could talk about Two Fingers’ dry humour, their contempo-country lope, their chiming pedal steel or their ‘60s rock touches (we heard the odd waft of Love in the climax), but all we can think about is their wah-wah mandolin.

The Epstein has long been a favourite of ours, and it’s been a long while since we saw them, but at first our rendezvous wasn’t too joyous. The opening two numbers just didn’t grasp us, and seemed overly polished and polite after Two Fingers. Thankfully, “Black Dog” gets things back on track, Stefan Hamilton’s electric banjo scuttles drawing us in, and Oli Wills’ easy, fruity vocal grasping us by the hand and leading us down some dusty mesa. Even if it’s not their finest set, their encore was the track of the weekend, despite an awkward false start, a monolithic sonic surge creating valleys in its wake.

And after that, Liddington were a disappointment, to put it mildly. All the things that have been alleged about Inlight, and against which we have (partly) defended them, ring clear and true of Liddington: empty, vacuous stadium pop, with no discernible character and a vocal that is drab and lifeless just when the music is crying out for something, anything, to lift it out of the slough of over-amped indie balladeers swamping our nation’s musical profile. And, yet again, we feel bored stupid by the giant gestures that the music is trying to make: what’s wrong with you lot? Are you so concerned that your point won’t get across that you have to make it as big and obvious as possible? What are you, a pop band or air traffic controllers? After all, you don’t find us standing dead centre of the stage miming an elaborately theatrical yawn to show how little we’re enjoying the set, do you? OK, OK, Liddington aren’t the worst band of the day (no kilts, see), and a few of the keyboard sounds were well chosen, but by this time we really need something to engage us, and not a whole bunch of vapid honks that sound like old Huey Lewis tunes left out in Chris Martin’s allotment for twenty years until every glint of colour has been bleached out, and nothing is left but the clumsy shell.

But, this brief concluding burst of rage notwithstanding, this has been an excellent festival. It’s our third Riverside, and the first at which we’ve felt that the two stages have been equally interesting. Once again, the effort of putting on this event for free is an astonishing thought to contemplate, and whilst we wish that the organisers could try paddling outside of their safety zones, we’re always happy to roll up our trouserlegs and join them for a dip. Book us in a Diplomat’s Coffee, we’ll be there as soon as the doors open in 2010.