Truck Music Festival 19 & 20th July 2008

25 July 2008, 09:00 | Written by Tom Whyman

(Live)

The evening of the Tuesday before Truck, and my friend texts me, hardly completely out of the blue, but still, asking me if I’d like to buy his Truck ticket off him, because he’s run out money or wants to go to London that weekend instead or both or something, and I’m his last resort for actually getting something out of that £60 he’s blown on it. Well, I suppose since the opportunity came up, I may as well take him up on it. At £35 for the weekend, I reckon I got a good deal.

I’ve still yet to master that whole music journalist trick of getting guestlisted for everything, of course. But maybe if I did I’d lose my unique everyman perspective. Or something.

Truck is, I know its often said but it really is, a *lovely* festival. Not quite at the level where everyone is skipping about holding hands, swapping mixtapes, sniffing flowers and kissing but still, almost. Friendly atmosphere, no more than a 15-minute stretch of field you’ll ever need to walk, the weather’s even nice for this one and by the end the toilets are still vaguely serviceable. Classy. Word from a Friday ticketholder to Latitude is that this place is MUCH better. And, you know, I can see that. Not that I’ve ever actually been to Latitude. But here is both smaller AND it has the two best bands in the country. Or, well, at least it supposedly does on paper.

Best band in the country no. 1 are of course Johnny Foreigner and they play for about all of 60 seconds- that’s an exaggeration but it sure does feel like it. They do a fantastic new song at the start and ‘The End. And Everything After’ is stunning as always but I’m still left wanting so much more. I’m just going to go out and say it: playing on the same day as a headliner known affectionately by seemingly everyone I speak to as Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fuck Off, I think they should have been substantially further up the bill. JoFo 4lyfe.

From a bit nit-picking though to full-fledged TRAGEDY, as best band in the country no. 2 are the perhaps slightly more leftfield choice of Cats In Paris and they fail to even show up, Michael’s apparently very rare vintage keyboard breaking sometime before arrival. Tragically, the still-ignorant (and I was still ignorant at this time too) Johnny Foreigner tell everyone after their set to go see them (which was a lovely moment right there and then). I think the sheer number of people disappointed at their cancellation was very encouraging though, at least from a band’s general profile point of view, I mean people in general at least seemed to care. I’m still going to give them bonus points for the sheer obvious parallel-universe close-to-100% chance they would have played an absolute blinder though.

I guess maybe I shouldn’t spend so much talking about a band who didn’t even play but then, my pretty-much band of the weekend didn’t even play either. In fact, they weren’t even on the bill. This is because my official nomination for band of the weekend is Ace Bushy Striptease; a ramshackle, drunk and giggling crew on indie fanboys from Birmingham who are in basically *the* band that everyone ever ought to be in- one that shouts, pummels, invents whole genres by themselves, is more about the song titles than the actual songs, publishes fanzines to accompany every gig they play and when they need something to shout whilst getting drunk along to, its their band name. (*every* band should gratuitously shout their own band name) Seemingly led by indie-pop-demented (or at least very drunkenly affectionate) player of whatever-it-is-he-plays Simon, who randomly recognises me personally somehow after Johnny Foreigner, their camping presence near my tents both saves me from a minor existential crisis brought on by a combination of a) boredom, b) that dawning and special sort of late-night all-day-drinking sobriety that happens when you stop drinking for about two hours around eight or so and then start to be able to see time and stuff, and c) the fleeting memory of the cute girl who started talking to me after seeing my HEALTH t-shirt after The Research who I then somehow managed to completely loose, drifting out of my life forever on a barge of fate like some tragic wilted summer blossom in the breeze… and then causes me to invite them to play a gig in September in a church. I mean how unwieldy a sentence even is that but you get the general point, they rule.

That aforementioned HEALTH t-shirt admiring girl from after The Research is the definite winner of my festival crush of the weekend but if it wasn’t for her then Eva Spence from Rolo Tomassi might just clench it. Theres something magical about that combination of girl-next-door good looks, wild, flailing sexy dancing and back-of-the-throat screaming, and I think I know exactly what it is. Rolo Tomassi are an utterly amazing, brutal live band I just wish I could have enjoyed it in a more uninhibited fashion, but I was at the time powering my way through a bottle of Vermouth and didn’t want to add to the problems caused by that not-quite-legal glass by bringing it into a mosh pit. Pretty damn brilliant though.

Earlier that day on the Barn Stage (easily the best for stuff generally on the Saturday- well… discounting that magical fresh doughnut stand of course) I manage to catch both the incredible Buttonhead and the excellent This Town Needs Guns. This Town Needs Guns were apparently playing their last gig with their bassist, who is off to pursue a life in the real-world as a parent to his soon-to-be-born child. Few happier reasons exist for stopping an exciting career in the world of quality Kinsella-emulation, and I suppose you couldn’t wish a more ambicable parting of ways on a nicer-seeming or better band. Despite being put on somewhat ridiculously early TTNG put in a fantastic performance and very nearly manage to rebel against their sadly curtailed festival set by starting to play another song when told to stop anyway, their singer with a big shit-eating grin on his face but their bassist just sort of resigning to the correct ordering of things and giving up instead. Would have been both funny and awesome if they’d gone through with it.

Buttonhead, though… wow. Buttonhead are, alongside YACHT, one of the two most very serious contenders for the best actually-playing band of the festival, and manage to make up for Cats In Paris’ absence by sort of sounding like a less cartoon-y version of them, a big humming wonky-prog mess with SUCH an awesome vocal loop in the first song. That “hoo ha hee hoo ha hee” thing oh my god. That’s basically where it is for me generally in the universe right now. YACHT for their part though by our sweet lord Jesus Christ in heaven they are quite possibly the single most fun band in this little ball of dust and metal and light we call Earth right now. YACHT are so far ahead of the curve, they’ve realized what almost everyone else still has yet to: you don’t need to play your own instruments in order to deliver a great live set. In fact, in many cases they can be an active hindrance. For example: if YACHT, when performing live, had to play their own instruments, they couldn’t wildly (in the true, uncoordinated indie disco style) dance about and shout so brilliantly and so enthusiastically. Jona and Claire are true and ridiculous karaoke pop star heroes; windey, lithely, bedroom-eyed girl and “young and into good music Jerry Seinfeld” best-described-as boy. The one point where their joint and constant dancing/bounding around does match up, like this one part where they actually deliberately do the same thing… its pretty magical. Its late at night and last-on at the Beat Hive on the Sunday night and I’m wearing a massive duffel coat but I could still dance to them forever.

Best of the rest time, and Youthmovies on at the Barn Stage on Saturday were OK, but their ‘special’ improvised collaboration with Rolo Tomassi in the transition between their two sets was… somewhat uncalled-for, I suppose. Haha. These New Puritans, closing band-based proceedings at the -again- Barn on the Saturday, were amongst my personal favourites but somehow I still got the impression that you would be perfectly justified in just plain not getting it. These New Puritans look great, in their chiselled, well-bred, oil-painting way (boys just as much as lone, sullen but consistently perfect girl) on stage but sound… I mean as far as *I’m* concerned they sound good, but there’s something about how their songs are constructed that makes them perfect studio creations but live somehow… sloppy. Like that critical amount of extra energy just gets injected into them and they end up helplessly shaking with it all. Still ace though. Just I felt kind of like I had to prove a point to everyone in the universe about These New Puritans being genuinely amazing and all that happened was a lot of underage kids started moshing. Fire, fire!

My friends are well into Camera Obscura at the main stage on the Sunday but frankly, I’d take the real Belle & Sebastian over them anyway. Not that I didn’t I guess enjoy it. Especially the part where their drummer has the sun in his eyes, someone chucks up their sunglasses, they hit the edge of the stage and bounce off and their guitarist goes: “well, now somebody’s out ten quid,” or words to that effect. Yeah.

I was pretty sure I was going to see Thomas Truax at the Beat Hive pre-YACHT (and what I had planned to be post-Cats In Paris, sadface)- the man really is amazing, but a combination of arriving too late to see anything and hearing some of my favourite songs from when I was about 14 drifting over from the main stage cause me to forsake him after just one song for Walter Schreifels, who is performing yes on just an acoustic guitar but he’s performing *Rival Schools* songs and things. So I parked myself up to watch that and when he did ‘Used For Glue’ well wasn’t it just fantastic? Hardly the single best performance of like forever but when it came to a well-timed massage of my nostalgia glands I don’t think it could really get much better. Short of a Far reunion, of course.

Big bands now, and see just how much one of my favourite things about Truck is that no one is really *that* excited about the headliners. The closest I think it gets is The Lemonheads. The Television Personalities being on the same stage on the same day way before I think is apt reminder if nothing else of how much more charming and amateurish our British deeply-flawed-yet-talented drug addicts are (and plus, their bassist is the spitting image of Gordon Brown). But Evan Dando and anonymous company are doing the whole of ‘It’s A Shame About Ray’ in that wondrous Don’t Look Back style, so I for one actually care about some guy in his forties headlining a festival actually for once. And, well… the actual album recital itself is pretty fantastic but the two encores are laughably ‘too’ (two, etc, see what I kind of almost did there eh? EH?) much, crowd noise possibly (well, me and my friends hypothesised so?) being played or at least recirculated from the front through the speakers so as to create a false sense of excitement for said Dando reprises. Really, though, he only at best needed the one. I thought for the second he would just do ‘Mrs Robinson’ and head off, I think probably everyone did, but then… we don’t live in a perfect universe, I suppose. Oh well. Definitely the type of album that deserves more plaudits for just what a great guitar-pop record it is anyway.

Before them, Okkervil River obviously have their fair share of fan boy/girls, but really? They sound like a really dull bar band given a massive stage to just… sort of pompous about on. In the words of the Nuts TV guide re:Newsnight (festival humour in-joke REFERENCE), give it a miss. Honestly though I’m really not entirely sure I ‘get’ the whole Okkervil River thing. Enlighten me as to why they’re meant to be so special? (actually do, there’s a comments section and stuff, I WANT TO KNOW, the Plan B program festival guide spiel thing proved useless)

As for Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, well… if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Haha. Conversely, I do have *something* nice to say about Emmy the Great, I just can’t quite form what it is in an in any way engaging manner.

PS: just a short mention has to be given to Dead Kids, who had possibly the most inspired/irritating stage banter of all time. “Yeah just… hug the person next to you, kiss them, get drugs off them, whatever…” “MY GIRL WANTS TO PARTY ALL THE TIME!” Just… fascinating. Man, the world is so not just about drugs and sex anymore, didn’t anyone tell you? Its about… I dunno. Messageboards, and drawing.