Punt Up Emotions

Most of this review appears in the current issue of Nightshift.  The new bits are mainly the bits where I say people are not so good - fair enough, as Nightshift booked the event.  So, read on if you are hoping for some negativity to leaven what you've already read.

PUNT, Cellar, PT, Wheatsheaf, White Rabbit, Turl Street Kitchen, 13/5/15

The stage at the Purple Turtle is dedicated to the late sound engineer, blues fan, musician, husky owner and huskier singer, Tony Jezzard.  If his spirit dropped by tonight, it would certainly appreciate the volume levels on display, but more likely his spectre would smile wryly at the tales of a locked venue, a PA shoved together at break-neck speed, and an electrocuted soundman.  After such a start to the proceedings, it seems churlish to moan about the stage running late when James Serjeant has had the national grid pumped through his skinny frame, so we start our night at the Cellar, with only the most cursory grumble...just for the sake of form, you understand.

There, Balkan Wanderers are kick-starting the night with more crackling energy than James Serjeant’s first piddle of the night (yes, yes, we’ll stop now), buoying the crowd with spicy East European pop, and inspiring some surprisingly early hedonistic dancing, considering it’s Oxford on a Wednesday and most of us are still digesting our burritos.  Superficially they resemble gypsy punk rabble rousers Gogol Bordello, but listen carefully beyond the thumping drums and shoutalong choruses, and you’ll find that Balkan Wanderers have replaced the wild aggression with chirpy, quirky mid-80s indie pop, in the vein of Grab, Grab The Haddock, or even Stump.  This allows the band’s secret weapon, the conversational intimacy of Claire Heaviside’s clarinet, to slowly steal the show.  In what will become a leitmotif throughout the evening, we overhear someone saying the band should have finished the Punt.

Back at the PT, The Shapes have now taken the stage, offering a breezy cocktail of Radio 2 melodies and light rock styles.  They have a track that resembles The Beautiful South, they have a tune that sounds like Tom Petty, they even have a song called “Tom Petty” that sounds a wee bit like 10cc and a wee-er bit like Darts.  In many hands this would all be pretty generic fluff, but there’s a mercurial, alchemical sensibility at work that keeps the music interesting; take “Mr Sandman”, a mash-up of The Beatles’ “Something” and Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage”, with keyboard player Colin Henney throwing properly loopy jazz-dance poses as he doles out elegant fruity chords.  You’ve heard of Dad rock, but this is more like Eccentric Uncle rock – enjoy it, but don’t sit on their knee.

Entering The Wheatsheaf’s upstairs room, you can really tell that this is the only Punt venue that exists solely for listening to live rock, such is the room’s dinginess, the cosy crush of the crowd, and the full-fat glory of the sound.  It’s a sound that suits Ghosts In The Photographs, who open the dam to wave upon wave of Explosions In The Sky styled guitar noise.   Perhaps we’ve come across this tumescent post-rock business before, and Ghosts do nothing new, but who ever complained that a sunset was unoriginal, eh?  Imposing, impressive stuff.

“Money is the devil’s pie”.  Did Rhymeskeemz really just say that?  Let’s assume we misheard.  Ah, now, he certainly did just slip “I’m sick of my dad’s impressions” into a litany of politico-social criticisms, which we like a lot.  Yes, there’s a lot to enjoy about this rapper, who has a vibrant wit that keeps his bars the right side of cliché, and a nice rhythmic variation.  But the vocals just don’t seem to bear any relation to the music, as if the backing tracks were composed in isolation, and DJ Bungle has just unleashed them for the first time.  An enticing new discovery, but a frustratingly unconvincing set.

Outside The White Rabbit, a morris side is giving it the full hanky.  Considering it’s as close as we can get to a native Cotswold music style, there really should be some morris on the Punt bill one day.  Get your applications in for 2016, chaps!  Inside, things are less old-fashioned, but sadly, rather more dated.  White Beam, featuring local band veteran Jeremy Leggett, are certainly not too bad, but hark back to 1991 or so, when indie dance has dissolved into lightly funky, floppy rhythms and thin, fuzzy guitar provided a sickly European cousin to grunge.  Probably, lots of older Punters feel a warm glow of the post-Ride Oxford sound displayed here, but it simply reminds us exactly why Britpop happened.

Over at the Turl Street Kitchen, 18 year old Katy Jackson is pulling the carpet from those over twice her age with some delicately tuneful acoustic ditties.  The first impression is of Joni Mitchell without the paranoia and patchouli, but it soon becomes clear that there’s a sardonic side to Katy, as if she’s looking askance at her melodies and raising her eyebrows at her own undoubted ability.  Our next reference point is the smooth cynicism of Evan Dando, and before we know it we’ve spotted a Lou Reed influence in the vocal delivery.  We’ll definitely be revisiting this songwriter at a less hectic date.

But for now there’s a pint to be tossed back, and a wobbly jog back to The PT on the cards, to check out another very young act, fraternal duo Cassels, who take the flea-bitten sneer of early Sebadoh and weld it messily onto the fuzzy tuneful surge of The Pixies.  They’ve got the ‘flu today, apparently, and if so, we’re quite excited to see them at peak fitness.  Apparently, we hear, if they were feeling better, They Could Have Closed The Punt (mark 2).

At every Punt there’s one act that ends up with a crowd that’s just a little too large.  Sometimes it’s a band that just proves too big a draw, as anyone who stood craning at the doorway to see The Young Knives or Little Fish in earlier years will attest, but often it’s a quieter act who can’t battle past the increasingly, ahem, relaxed crowd.  Whilst Water Pageant might not have been quite as up against it in the volume stakes as The August List a few years ago, we can’t really hear anything from the back of the White Rabbit but some pleasant vocal fragments and what sounds like a mellotron.  A couple of tasty ingredients, doubtless, but we can’t really judge the dish.

Sometimes we worry that the Turl Street Kitchen is a little too refined for the maelstrom of spilt pints and tinnitus that is The Punt.  In about three minutes flat Despicable Zee has destroyed that notion by calling the audience grumpy, and starting a good natured argument.  Then again, Zahra Tehrani, of Baby Gravy/BG Records fame, probably starts an argument at every rehearsal.  And she’s the only band member.  Beyond acting like a surly drumming Jack Dee, her music stretches from drunken clockwork electro in the style of Plone, through MIA flavoured attitude pop and a kind of Capitol K home-made doodling, to a beery hip hop barn dance featuring various local MC luminaries...some of whom may have even known how the track goes.  This is messy, abusive, unfinished music, of the sort that dodges every traditional indicator of quality.  It’s almost certainly the best set we see all night.

Zaia and Maiians on at the same time?  Don’t the organisors realise how confused we are by this point?  How about some other vowels to help us get our bearings?  The former are a phenomenally slick reggae band, with plenty of juicy bass and stabbing brass, who sound wonderful in the Cellar’s resonant gig space.  Strictly, this is the sort of band you want to listen to at a festival, in a set long enough to allow you to take all the substances, read a book, fall in love, start a political party with a stranger and still have time to nip to the cake stall a few times, but our brief exposure tonight leave us impressed.  Maiians are equally bouncy and dancefloor-focused, but a little more ornate, with their excellent cross-rhythms and organic kraut-electronica keyboard lines.  Those who discover the band tonight will go home very happy, we suspect.  These are two acts that exemplify the observation that crowd-pleasing isn’t always the same as stupid.

And, incidentally, we hear they both Could Have Closed The Punt.

Like Cassels, Esther Joy Lane has apparently climbed from her sick bed to play for us.  Seriously, we’d never have known.  The trick of unfurling rich reverbed vocal melodies over freeze-dried beats suggests a strong Grimes influence (as does the T-shirt Esther wears on her Soundcloud page), but there’s a sultry steeliness to the delivery that contrasts with Grimes’ pastel comedown haze.  If this set might have been suited to a PA bigger than what could be squeezed into the corner of a city pub, in quality it cuts easily through sonic paucity. 

Sadly, we don’t make it back to Turl Street to catch Adam Barnes, having got confused, lost a notebook and accidentally drank some beers, but we’re present and correct for Rainbow Reservoir back at The White Rabbit.  The trio play a punky pepped-up pop racket, with a devil take the hindmost insouciance, but without any vestige of aggression.  In this sense the band reflects the singer’s American roots, harking back to US college keg parties rather than British commuter town basements, red cups hoisted rather than glasses in the face, and if the wordy songs sound a bit like Kim Deal reading out her PhD, the best of the tunes are packed with fire, fun and energy. So much so, we think the band Could Have Closed The Punt.

Oh, wait a minute.  They did.  Right, is the bar still open?

Holy Truck

Of course, since I wrote this review Truck festrival (or rather, Steventon Events, who run it) has gone bust. I decided to leave the review as it was writtena day or two after the event, rather than go into hysterical eulogies. I'll miss it, though, for all its faults.

Sat & Sun copming very soon.

Yes, there are a lot of words here. Don't read them if you don't weant to, I don't mind. There are plenty of blogs out there that average 10 words a post, go and find them, if you don't like reading. You deserve each other.


TRUCK FESITVAL, Hill Farm, Steventon, 22-4/7/11

FRIDAY

Oh, there’ll be letters. Pints will be mumbled into. The internet may be utilised. Truck has done the unthinkable, and redesigned the festival site. Not only is the main stage in a different place, it’s in a different damned field. And the barn is gone. Everyone loved the barn. Everyone loved the atrocious acoustics, awkward bottleneck entrance and lingering smell of cow faeces. Who wants this new Clash stage, with its high-quality PA and easy access?

Well, we do. We feel that, for the most part, Truck’s new, more spacious layout is a success, and if they have co-opted some of the trappings of the well-heeled boutique festivals they helped to create – posh sit-down dining, stalls selling over-priced nick-nacks made from old Penguin paperbacks – the old, unpretentious, home-made atmosphere still survives. And, yes, you can still buy doughnuts from the vicar and grub from the Round Tablers (quote of the weekend: “I got a lovely burger, but it was weird to buy it from the masons”).

Our weekend starts in the new Clash tent, with Gaggle, a large bunch of vibrantly bedecked young ladies doing a line in big tribal pop chants. It’s something like a school nativity play version of Bow Wow Wow, and is good honest fun. There are about 35 of them, which we suppose might look impressive if we hadn’t just spent 20 minutes as part of a large and twitchy crowd at the Steventon level crossing, as some sort of ovine emergency meltdown caused by sheep on the line a few miles away meant that the barriers had to be kept inexplicably closed.

The Wood stage is a cosy, intimate tent that is sadly a little underused over the weekend, but it’s a the perfect place to watch Water Pageant, a likable folk-pop trio, whose delicate sound might get lost in larger spaces. At another corner of the site, the Last.FM stage is curated on the Friday night by BBC Oxford Introducing, and we’re tempted to say this was the lineup of the weekend. The Braindead Collective swap their free improv racket for an exploration of open-ended pop, and it works beautifully, Chris Beard’s lucid, careening voice sailing high above a mixture of dub touches and Fripp-like effects.

Mr Shaodow follows them admirably, with a crowd pleasingly boisterous set that may have hidden some of his clever lyrics, but highlights his way with an eager audience. Shadow is one of an odd breed of Oxford-connected artists who always get a rave reception at Truck, but who generally play to small, indifferent audiences in the city (cf testpilot, nervous), and with this in mind we can hardly blame Shaodow for keeping things accessible. One question though: are we missing something or is DJ Watchcase the worst hip hop moniker in a fifty mile radius?

You Are Wolf aren’t mentioned in the programme, but we stumble across her making complex loops of vocals and keyboard, to deliver a lilting traditional folk song over the top. She then announces it was actually a Dolly Parton cover! Did we imagine this?

Back at the Wood stage, London’s Non-Classical club have taken over for the evening, and we have the pleasure of being amongst the small attendance for one of the sets of the weekend, from Consortium 5, a recorder quintet. In previous years a recorder only ensemble at Truck might have meant Piney Gir and chums arsing about and playing smugly dire Steely Dan covers, but Consortium 5 is a highly drilled, professional group of musicians, offering us a little Purcell and a lot of contemporary composition. The sonic range is astounding, from the sound of a baroque traffic jam through a Ligeti-like cloud of chirrups to the final number, a mass of breathy percussive bursts and gasping trills, like Thomas the Tank Engine and friends playing Takemitsu. It’s random discoveries like this that make Truck special.

There are lot of people on the Truck bill this year who Used To Be In Bands, which is fine, but there are also a lot Whose Dads Used To Be In Bands: Truck wants to watch that it doesn’t become some sort of indie Cornbury. An example for the prosecution would be Liam Finn, offspring of him out of Crowded House, who is decent enough but pretty dull, going for a wall of sound pop effect, but losing us swiftly.

Perhaps feeling guilty for giving up on Finn so quickly, we decide to give Africa Junction more of a chance, and are amply rewarded for doing so. At first, they sound too studied to make anything from their polite African percussion – Jesus, we left East Oxford for the weekend to get away from this stuff – but as the tempo drops, and the balafon starts to lead the music, it wafts out of the Cabaret tent like a warm sirocco.

Johnny Flynn reminds us happily of childhood TV, and Rolf Harris painting vast wall-sized pictures with house paints. Flynn’s band similarly takes simple, bold strokes and throws them together to create something impressive. There’s nothing here we’ve not heard before, just chunky folky choruses, lively trumpet lines, bluesy guitar licks, and a bit of ‘cello to underpin things, but the whole is rather lovely.

James Surowiecki wrote a book called The Wisdom Of Crowds, claiming that large groups of people are effectively cleverer than individuals. Our problem with this theory has always been that vast crowds of people are generally seen assembled to watch adequate but unexciting things like Coldplay or Michael McIntyre – just how fucking clever can they be? Still, we get a little buzz of pleasure in seeing hundreds of Truckers swaying along to Bellowhead’s outstanding version of “Amsterdam”, squeezing every drop of tawdry voyeurism and tragic celebration from Brel’s composition. In truth, this is the outstanding moment of set that is very good, but doesn’t reach the heights of their 2010 performance. Uncharacteristically, it’s the slower tracks that are more successful this time round, although the wah-wah mandolin does lend a funky edge to the more upbeat songs (images of Starsky & Hutch driving through Cecil Sharp House in a flurry of madrigal manuscripts). Not up to their own high standards, perhaps, but still probably the best festival band on the circuit.

Nipping out to catch some of Spring Offensive’s set turns out to be an excellent decision. We’ve always admired their music, but tonight the Introducing stage witnesses a band coming of age. Not only do they perform with an acidic intensity we’ve never seen before, but new track “52 Miles” takes the melancholic triumphalism of their best songs, but replaces the Youth Movies guitar twiddles with a slow-burning haze that eventually erupts into a bloom of furry beauty. A very good band just got better.

And we follow that be revisiting a good local band whom we had somewhat forgotten. Dive Dive remind us that they can produce bitter little nuggets of pop excellence, and send us off happily into the night, or at least towards the beer tent.