Summer Sundae 10 // Day 1 – Leicester, 13/08/10

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For me Summer Sundae festival was a somewhat gruelling experience at times – the weather was very much against us until the final day and, exhaustion compounding illness, your correspondent briefly blacked out on the train home. After a couple of days to recover, though, it is the quality of the performances at this generally expertly-run medium-sized festival which stay in the mind. It’s easy to see that Sundae deserves to have reached its proud tenth anniversary with this year’s event; its trump card of being based in and around Leicester’s DeMontfort Hall lends it a professionalism and comfort few festivals can match (not to mention a place to hide from the rain) and the lineup always looked worthy of the tagline “a musical treat”.

Accreditation email swapped for passes and tent assembled during a break in the downpour in a corner of the campsite in Victoria Park, we made our way to the Last.fm-sponsored Rising Stage, where we were to catch openers Rugosa Nevada. It was only when we arrived that I remembered that these guys were one of three Derby bands who played a criminally under-attended charity show at Keele’s SU in December, but they were better here, playing the kind of mobile and energetic rock we needed to kick things off. Kyte opened the main stage thanks to having won a competition run by BBC East Midlands, but were were so turned off by their bizarre cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” that we fled back to the Rising to see The Megaphonic Thrift, who belted out this Sundae’s first great set. This was a masterclass in Norwegian noise rock, snowballing intensity with each song and helmed by the throbbing machinegun bass playing of Linn Frøkedal. Absolutely sterling stuff; they’ll have won new fans in that tent.

Without doubt Nottingham post/psych-rockers Swimming were one of the bands I was most excited to see at the whole festival, being a huge fan of their debut from last year, The Fireflow Trade. I must confess then that I was mildly disappointed to hear them mostly play unfamiliar new material on the indoor stage, but their signature “Panthalassa” sounded as wonderfully vast and alien as the primordial super-ocean it’s named after. From swiftly catching the very end of a intimate Peggy Sue set on the small Musician’s stage, we might have hoped to see Fanfarlo at 5pm but sadly for the second year running they’d dropped out. Instead we waited around until we could see the much talked-about folk-rock singer-songwriter Lissie, who had a few serious fans to count on in the Rising tent and proved pretty talkative, explaining about her origins in Rock Island, Illinois but unfortunately not about how she came upon a bassist who looked so uncannily like George Harrison.

The Sunshine Underground were, like the Thrift, another surprise favourite. Beaming from start to finish, they leapt around the main stage with the kind of swagger it warrants, their extremely solid songs backing up their exuberance. Given that The Wave Pictures, due to be on the Rising stage at 7, were another high-profile cancellation, we headed inside the Hall to see Lou Rhodes. More than anyone at the festival, she came across as the serious musician, requesting quiet and allowing her often sombre songs to unwind slowly. After the Underground, she was always going to be a big shift, but whilst pleasant her set struck us as just a little too solemn and we’d soon be ready for something more upbeat.

I’d been far from impressed by Teenage Fanclub’s headlining set at Truck so we took a break while they played the main stage, reconvening inside the Hall again for Slow Club. It was then that the festival’s most surreal moment arrived; Sundae’s first day was coincidentally my 21st birthday and as part of the soundcheck, Rebecca sang “Happy Birthday” to someone with my name, birthday and age. Surely just a coincidence, but a pretty incredible one which gave me a weird feeling throughout the Club’s great, thumping set which included a fair part of Yeah So as well as a new song or two.

Before long it was nearly headliner time and that meant an amusingly polarizing choice between Seasick Steve and Roots Manuva. Formatting should make our choice clear; seeing Steve was a real experience. His set was possibly the longest of the festival, sprawling out like the huge crowd in front of the main stage, which by now was a very soggy crowd as the rain was almost at its heaviest. It’s fascinating, but completely deserved, that an ageing bluesman can get such a number of people to withstand the elements – and we were all amply rewarded by Steve and his similarly bearded, frantic drummer. Maybe the best moment was when, in a trademark move, Steve invited a girl named Georgia (“Ah, Georgia on my mind”, he quipped) on stage so he could sing her a love song. Bless her, she was nervous and stage-frightened and possibly drunk. Steve reprimanded her, “you look at me now” when she wouldn’t keep her eyes on him. That wasn’t a problem for anyone else present, transfixed as we all were.

All the kids went to the first of three silent discos at the Rising stage but it wasn’t long before us oldies retreated back to the tent, knackered. We’d found Friday at Summer Sundae a great experience, and felt lucky to have seen so many great bands, even if the cancellations were disappointing. We dreamt of better weather for Saturday… we weren’t going to get it.

Photos courtesy of Joe Collins