Cowley The Beast

A review of a pretty bad day out. Mind you, they're all bad days out now aren't they?


OX4, various venues, 9/10/10


Throughout the afternoon, passersby are enticed up to the doorway of Cafe Tarifa by the music the Oxford Folk Festival has booked, only to turn away after discovering the £5 entry fee, yet the vast majority of those who have spent twenty quid on an OX4 wristband don’t venture out to see anything until the sun has set. Somewhere in this paradox is the promoter’s eternal frustration, and the problem couched at the heart of OX4. You can go on all you like about “Oxford’s Creative Quarter” and musical diversity, but whilst this festival may superficially resemble The Punt, OX4 is more like a touring gig writ large: there are a handful of big acts (all from outside the county, if not the country), and the rest of the multifaceted day is like one long local support act that nobody goes to see. We visit the open mike at the new INevents space, to find the host begging for participants – it seems a musical community, like music itself, just can’t be forced.

But good music there is, and it’s OX4’s secret victory that all the best acts we see are homegrown. The Folk Festival stage is strong, with highlights from Bellowhead’s John Spiers, and Huffenpuff, a duo of accordion and soprano sax/flute, which blithely skips through the glade of musical history grabbing fragments of Breton, klezmer and jazz like so many falling blossoms. Hretha build intricate yet reserved instrumentals that are full of delicate mystery, and construct their arrangements with clockwork precision when most post-rockers rely on sketchy dynamics. Despite taking far longer to set up than one man with a keyboard has any right, Chad Valley make a quietly euphoric music that isn’t far from late 80s Scritti Politti or a sun-bleached Beloved, and once you’ve forgiven the fact that the vocal sounds like Tony Hadley with hiccoughs the set is strong.

Some days it feels as though every band in the world can be defined with reference to The Beach Boys. In that sense Fixers fall somewhere between the approaches of Animal Collective and The High Llamas, but more importantly they play the set of the day. The smooth, AM sound beneath the soaring falsetto serenades is as much Dennis Wilson as it is Brian, and intrigues those of us who feel that Surf’s Up is at least as good as Pet Sounds. The pastel-tinted songs are also dusted with mid-80s synth tones and Phil Spector drum patterns, yet manage to retain a cohesive and individual air.

Fixers are proof that music can be retro and still feel fresh, but the lesson has been lost on most of the larger acts. Everything Everything offer a stilted ersatz funk that could make Arthur Russell spin in his tragically early grave, and Glitches are the same but worse, a Wanky Goes To Hollywood melange of syn drums, stupid hair and ineffectual yelping. Jesus, we love the 80s and these two acts are making us sound like we write for Proper Music Pub Rock Weekly by their sheer lack of vision. Dog Is Dead are a tight band with some decent tunes, if you can battle past the fact they sound like Level 42, and Willy Mason is impressive in holding a large audience with just an acoustic and some slow paeans, but does remind us queasily of an unhoned Springsteen. More reference grabbing from Abe Vigoda, who make a passable swipe at Talking Heads artfunk and Devo japery without having the character to equal either.

The hipster homogeneity of the name acts, with influences stretching from Now 5 to Now 8, takes the edge off the event, but as with all art, the gems are there for the dedicated. Our final act is the excellent Mr Shaodow, for whom half the room sadly leaves within minutes, but who energises the remainder with pure expertise, originality and intelligence. As someone who has lived in London, China and Oxford, he could tell you that good musicians are united by hard graft and talent, not their postcode.

The Song Remains The Sam

Not been much going on here, has there? Well, that should all be changing, as I wrote two (2) reviews for MIO on Sunday, the first of which is below, and there are no fewer than two (2) reviews in this month's Nightshift too, so expect plenty more coruscating opinion to come.

SAMUEL ZASADA – NIESEN EP

Sometimes it’s hard to say exactly what it is that makes an artist. Michael McIntyre, for example. Come on, his material’s not that terrible. It’s hardly comedy gold, but if other stand ups were delivering it you might give a half smile or a light chuckle, before wandering off to make a cup of tea. But something about McIntyre’s repulsive comedy style makes you want to destroy your telly. In fact, he’s so mind-meltingly infuriating, you want to throw out your flat screen and climb up to the attic to find your old cathode ray beast, just so you can have the pleasure of sticking your foot through the screen and watching as the exploding sparks shower your living room; snapping a McIntyre DVD just isn’t satisfying enough, so you have to slog back up to the attic to lug down the old VCR, record all his Comedy Roadshow routines onto VHS, solely so you can enjoy the thrill of ripping every inch of tape from the cassette and tossing it into the air whilst naked and daubed with woad.

And Samuel Zasada are the same in reverse. It’s easy to point out impressive elements of this record – the slinky bass, the warm chocolatey voice, the winning melodies – but it’s hard to work out why it’s quite so wonderful, and why it’s so enormously likely to end up on Oxford best of year lists when December rolls around. Like so much great pop music, this EP is far more than the sum of its parts, meaning that it cuts right to the heart without leaving the listener dissecting the construction as they might with classical, prog or jazz.

Despite a jarring, wistful note in the arpeggiating guitar figure in “Omit”, this EP is a little less dark than previous Zasada offerings, and the incisive rhythmic accordion stabs give the track a buoyancy that would not have been feasible in the dense introspection of Samuel Zasada, 2009 vintage. Similarly, the jaunty banjo on “Of Late” adds a wry smile to the gothic folk misery we’re used to.

Perhaps the real development on this record is in the vocals. David Ashbourne has always boasted a rich, resonant voice, but on previous recordings we’ve always been concerned that he was foregrounding his vocal ability at the expense of the song. Take a listen to “Losts & Founds”, our favourite on this EP, and you’ll hear how far he’s come. There’s passion here, but whereas once we’d suspect that he would have groaned and sweated his way through proceedings like an over-egged 80s rocker, now he uses his impressive pipes to further the song: listen to the delivery of the line “You crazy people”, it has just the mixture of despair and incredulous amusement that the words demand. The fact that the tune is a funky little acoustic strut built on a sassy hi-hat rhythm, like an open mic twist on blaxploitation soundtracks, doesn’t do any harm either.

We could go on, but as we said the songs here work best on their own terms, and it doesn’t add much to pick them apart looking for secrets, or to cast our net around looking for musical analogues. This is an immersive collection of quality melodies that should entice even the weariest acoustic critic: hell, it’s making us smile, and we have minor burns, a broken toe and several feet of knotted video tape cutting off our circulation.

I Don't Recall Writing This, But I Mastodon!

I'm just plotting a pub quiz I intend to write soon. Last time I did it the music round got booed, because I expected people to name not only the act who had a dance hit from the 80s or 90s, but also who they were "featuring" in the offical act name. I called it Late Twentieth Century Chart Dance Crediting Minutiae, and I thought it was a great round, but hardly anyone got any of them. And I never even used any of the three Jellybean tracks I had up my sleeve, just to make it easy!

Anyway, I've thought of something even more horrible, so I shall report back if it ever transpires.


MAMMOTH & THE DRUM – Demo

Mammoth & The Drum’s Myspace comments on their experiences in the studio recording this album, “we've felt like big kids in a sweet shop...'what about if we tried this?'”. Well, what did the tracks sound like before these additions? This record may be a lot of things, but a blueprint for sonic experimentation it is not: somehow we can’t imagine Brians Wilson and Eno sitting up all night with their furrowed brows resting on the mixing desk before one of them leaps up with dawn inspiration, shrieking “Eureka! Synthesised strings!” To be honest, before getting all wild-eyed and putting fake vinyl crackle on the intro to “Johnny Lightening [sic] and his Blue Ray Gun”, should Mammoth & The Drum perhaps have gone back to make the drums less clunkily elementary? Should they have checked that the vocals didn’t sound like Harry Enfield’s DJ Dave “Nicey” Nice? Not ‘alf!

The thing is, M&TD are not a bad band at all, but in recording a full length CD they may have bitten off more than they can chew, when a four-tracker and a bit of gigging experience might have been the best step. We hate to penalise musicians for stretching themselves, we despise artists playing safe, but in challenging themselves to create a big, varied LP, M&TD have ended up challenging the listener to sit through it all without throwing the stereo into a bloody tarpit or the middle of a glacier, with the other mammoths. Whole tracks could happily have been excised from this recording: “Back to Zero” is nasal, clodhopping, constipated folk rock that makes the ears itch for something better, and “It’s Now or Never” is a charmless trudge through a blasted pub blues wasteland: ironically, with its cheeky jibes at rockers who think they’re cool and Russell Brand’s coiffure, there’s an ironic distance between target and effect that can be filed with Chad Kroeger’s “Rock Star”. “Dawning of the New Dark Age” also has stupid lyrics, which goes off like a 50s editorial by likening the Far East to a sleeping giant, before claiming it will “consume everything in its wake”...surely “in its path”, not “its wake”, right? Or is it just those snoozy Orientals being damned inscrutable again?

This is all a pity, as there’s evidence that M&TD are a decent proposition. “Who says you shouldn’t surf in Jimmy Choo shoes?” is a perky slice of pub rock (in its best sense of music to experience with a full pint and a few mates), with a chorus lifted wholesale form The Rolling Stones, which is fine because they filched most of their early tunes anyway. “No Ordinary Day” has a nicely phased 60s guitar and lyrics about naughty drugs that nods politely to Oxford’s hippy roadshow Redox, whilst “Extracts from my Brain - Part 3 (Do Replicants cry?)” is the pick of the bunch, introspective like Wish You Were Here era Pink Floyd, with an interesting arrangement and some more restrained and affecting vocals. The duo seem to treat music as a bit of fun, and we salute that, as rock ‘n’ roll, especially in Oxford, can sometimes lose sight of the value of a good night out, but sad to say listening to the whole of the LP isn’t much fun. In fact, it’s a bit of a chore. Most of the music sort of happens unconvincingly, and it feels as though somebody is desperately trying to divert your attention. Hang on, whilst we’re typing this, is somebody downstairs nicking the telly?

Like a panda shuffling listlessly round its cage in Colchester Zoo, we feel that judging M&TD on the back of a full length recording isn’t the same as seeing them in their natural habitat: get them on in some cheery boozer on a Friday night, or stick them in the middle of next year’s Hanneyfest lineup, and we can imagine having a grand old time, but for now we’ll pass. The band may have felt like kids in a sweet shop recording this CD, but we feel like diabetics in a sweet shop listening to it: there’s lots and lots here, but it’s not for us.

Chat Lines

Today's entry is dedicated to Oxford music photographer Johnny Moto. Not that he's dead. Or, I guess he might be, he doesn't check in with me every hour, so how would I know? God, I hope he's OK. No, hang on, let's assume he is.

Anyway, Mr Moto gave me a pen when I was writing my first review of this year and the venue was so damned cold the ink froze solid in my ballpoint. I never gave it back. Anyway, whilst writing this review I dropped said pen and said Johnny trod on it. He was so apologetic he bought me two new pens! So, now I'm in his debt to the tune of three pens (and each pen rather niftily had four differently coloured nibs, so perhaps it's more like twelve pens - although they were short pens, so let's call it six on aggregate). Still, he's dead now, so I suppose I'm off the hook...


CATS IN PARIS/ UTE/ COLOUREDS, Pindrop, Cellar, 16/9/10

The surprising thing about electro duo Coloureds – aside from the hand-crafted face masks that make them look like Ray Harryhausen’s Michael Myers maquettes – is how much contemporary club music seeps through their distorted, jittery IDM. Just as Funkstorung a decade ago took hip hop rhythms and twisted them into Wire pleasing glitchfests, so Coloureds seem to have taken garage and funky as their base metals, to be experimented upon ruthlessly. The music is all about texture, and there isn’t much in the way of theme or melody (although the odd arpeggio recalls Orbital, and a scuzzy three note organ breakdown sounds as though Philip Glass tried to create one of his scores on an Etch-a-sketch), but the rhythmic intensities, the subtle twists and the theatrical performance make this set musically captivating as well as pummellingly excoriating.

We’ve vacillated in our opinion of local trio Ute, and tonight we find ourselves doing so mid-set. The first half is all keening vocal lines and twitchy semi-acoustic rock, and it’s fine, but apart from the excellently regimental drumming, doesn’t truly excite us: at its best it’s Radiohead enveloping Robert Wyatt, but at its worst it sounds like a generic copy of any lightly groovy artrockers (and does the refrain “Psycho killer” suggest anyone, hmmm?). But then, suddenly they win us over again, with loud and well thought out rock songs, one boasting a bass that impersonates a truck burping, and one which is a manic grunge thrash, like a skiffle Mudhoney. Most importantly, the vocals switch from annoying self-conscious wheedle, to an effective growl that drops into unexpected valleys of delicate harmonising. If this gig were a football match, you’d assume the half time talk had been ruthlessly galvanising.

Manchester’s Cats In Paris also rise in our estimations, but this is probably because it took us two songs to calibrate ourselves. What does one make of their maximalist maelstroms, where jazz funk bass meets keyboards from a budget ELP and vocals from a literary EMF? But, once the fluent violin came in, the power of the rhythm section became apparent, and the joyful refrain “This is modern British cooking” had invaded our mind, we decided their Zappa child grab bag of pop oddity was something to be cherished, and in retrospect the fact that opener “Chopchopchopchopchop” sounded like a mixture between “O Superman”, the theme from Let’s Pretend and Flaming Lips made perfect sense. They didn’t fulfil the promoter’s description of their sound as “electro spazz swing”. They surpassed it.

Brook Shields Required?

Here's the game: 1) choose a composer 2) imagine what their most incongruously named offspring might be, eg Wayne Tchaikovsky. Playing this led me to the realisation that "Terence Trent Wagner" is the funniest group of five syllables I've ever heard.

Warning: preposterous PJ Harvey/prefix pun contained below.


SPRING OFFENSIVE – THE FIRST OF MANY DREAMS ABOUT MONSTERS

Unlike some drunken old colonels, we don’t lose any sleep over the way the word “gay” has changed its meaning. Unlike one of our old English teachers, we aren’t upset by current usage of the word “nice”. She used to get riled because the word was supposed to mean fastidious. Yeah, in the seventeenth century, when lest we forget, “healthcare” meant “being bled by your hairdresser”. In English, words mean pretty much whatever we want them to mean; unlike in France, the British government does not officially control the language (Jesus, can you imagine if it did? Three year waiting lists for the subjunctive, datasticks full of pronouns left in bars, creeping privatisation of the irregular verbs).

And yet, we still get miffed at the way “pretentious” is used. To us, it will always imply someone simply making a pretence. Therefore, in rock terms, it would be pretentious to hide your Eton accent with ersatz glottal stops whilst preaching revolutionary punk politics, and it would be pretentious to dress up in flimsy scraps of leather and prance round the stage looking like you want to fellate any passing roadie in a paddling pool of Jim Beam, when you actually prefer an early night with a mug of Horlicks, but it would not be pretentious to make a 14 minute single based on Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stage Grief Cycle.

It might be a bit bloody silly, but it wouldn’t be pretentious.

Yet, this is precisely what Spring Offensive have done, with their free download track “The First Of Many Dreams About Monsters”, and whilst it might be easy to dismiss behaviour like this as sophomoric, or needlessly ostentatious, but we feel that we can defend them. First up, there’s nothing wrong with shooting high, because you just might make it – we’re surely glad that Brian Wilson tried to make “teenage symphonies to God” and not “a couple of catchy tunes to net me some pussy” – and secondly, the conceptual elements of this song may have been useful for the band in its composition, but really we’d defy anyone in the world to work it out in a blind test. In fact, the handwritten notes that are supplied with the track conclude “we sing about the act of writing about grief”, which shows how far they are from producing Grief! The Kubler-Ross Story On Ice, although we do feel the distancing is a little meaningless, as if their intent was to present us with a concept and then immediately hide it behind layers of obfuscation (“Don’t you wish you’d never, never meta-“).

Add to this the fact that the lyrics are, as ever, wonderfully vague and allusive, having more in common with the imagistic snapshots of William Carlos Williams than your average pop song. “Beware the intruder/ I have scissors in my hand [...] He says he’s an artist” doesn’t give us enough data to construct any real picture, but does make a truly evocative yet unspecified image with a powerful economy of words...which is perhaps what all good pop songs do, after all. And it’s especially effective when delivered with a mixture of reticence and declamation by Lucas Whitworth, whose voice is sounding better than ever on this recording. There are other fantastic elements to this single, especially the guitars’ undulating shimmer in the quieter sections, the wonderful percussive loop at the start that sounds like an old typewriter being pecked at by a fledgling reporter, and the fact that the mammoth song hangs together without ever feeling stretched.

But this impressive release isn’t perfect. The seems a little too much in awe of local heroes Youth Movies in the crescendos, and we can’t help feeling that the rubbery Foals guitar lines and massed choruses are the least exciting part of Spring Offensive, even when they do them incredibly well. So, we urge everyone to download the record, it’s incredibly impressive, and hugely enjoyable, and yes, it’s a bit bloody silly, but the weird part is that Spring Offensive have released what might look like a magnum opus, a career summation, but have in fact revealed how swiftly they are outgrowing the old sound. There’s lots to get excited about here away from the obvious moments, and it could be the first glimpse of enticing new paths and alleys for the band to follow. The first of many, doubtless.

Comboverdose

I was going to write you something fascinating, and then settle down to submit another CD review to MIO, but I feel like cack, so I may just take a Night Nurse and go to bed with the Prom. You'll survive.


JUNKIE BRUSH – WHAT YOU SEE, WHAT YOU HEAR (Rivet Gun)

Why does nobody talk about the huge volte face in the history of punk?

How come no one comments on the fact that punks seem to spend most of their time in the company of hippies nowadays? We know that not all punks bought into the swastika-badged, vomit-flecked attempt to bring down civilisation by slightly scaring old ladies, but surely all original punks saw their movement as a tabula rasa for music and culture: no more hippies, no more well-heeled prog indulgences. And yet, sometime around 1985, when the rest of the punks had given themselves up to electronics, black eyeliner or proper jobs, the hardline of believers found themselves in the company of their old enemies, fraternising with hippies, playing free festivals, supporting left wing causes. Of course, by the time the 90s rolled round, with the advent of crusty folk rock and Megadog trance, punks and hippies had lived together for a few years, and already it was impossible to say which was which.

And so it is with Junkie Brush. Despite sounding a lot like the clinical autopsy hardcore of Black Flag at times, you’re more likely to find them playing for genial dopeheads Klub Kakofanney than anyone else, and you’ve a greater chance of finding them on a bill with acoustic strummers and Gong-a-likes at some oddball West Oxfordshire all-dayer than playing to moshing revolutionary youths in some Friday night sweatbox. None of which detracts one iota form the high quality of this new EP, which balances brutality with beery japing perfectly, and may well be the best set of tracks Junkie Brush has put on record, but it is intriguing nonetheless.

There is a picture of a protester winding up to hurl a projectile at a wall of riot police on the cover of the record, but in reality, the politics have no more depth than the inlay card. The title “Problem-Reaction-Solution” seems to hint at revolutionary activity, but doesn’t go so far as to specify anything in particular that’s good or bad about society, and elsewhere phrases like “Don’t you want to destroy the other?” and “You are the enemy” are vague enough to be essentially meaningless. Also, throwing such dumb-ass yelpalongs like “Fucked In The Mind” and “Monkey Boy” onto the EP could be said to detract from any cogent political message that might be lurking somewhere.

The music, on the other hand, is simple, direct and uncontentiously excellent. Marxist - and, like Big Tim from Junkie Brush, Zappa fanatic - critic Ben Watson once postulated that all great rock bands were essentially drum circles, and that all rock instruments should be counted as percussion. If that’s the case, then in “Problem-Reaction-Solution”, Junkie Brush have gone one better, turning a three piece band into one giant bass drum, bashing steadily away as if haranguing some Phoenicians slaves to row a Roman galley. Nowhere on the record does the musical construction get far beyond the rule of “riff, refrain, and slight dynamics”, and is all the better for it. “Sickening” has a sprightly bounce that caries tiny hints of Rage Against The Machine, “Fucked In The Mind” is scuzzier and more leaden footed, and “Monkey Boy” might be paying homage to local punk daddies Headcount, but whatever slight alterations the band makes to their recipe, they don’t diverge too far from insistent, declamatory, hugely enjoyable chants (although “You Are A Target”’s nods towards The Prodigy’s “Poison” are unexpected).

But none of this musical dissection can actually capture the sense of barely controlled rage that Junkie Brush embody. The vocals have a reedy, Dead Kennedys intensity, which is offset by the roiling sea of guitar noise, and drums that sound like deep-fried cannonballs being dropped onto your ears from an Olympic diving board; Jim, formerly of mildly convincing artrockers City Lights Just Burn seems to have found his spiritual home hitting things in Junkie Brush. Come to think of it, there’s another difficult truth about punk that doesn’t get aired often enough – when it’s done as well as it is here, it still sounds miles better than most of the turgid guff that passes for rock and roll. This EP made us want to smash the nearest radio and jump up and down on every half-arsed Myspace band in existence, which can only possibly be an enormous mark in its favour.

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.