Truck 15: the DiS review

Tim Minchin by Solange Moreira Yeoell

Three men lying on a gingham blanket, eating stuffed olives and peppers, swigging sparkling wine from plastic flutes. A group of 30-somethings clad in white, making a fair fist at a game of badminton between a circle of hay bales. A family excitedly embracing the Truck Monster, posing for photos in the welcome, yet slightly alien July sun. An Oxford indie-pop band playing to hoards of excited local teens. Looking back, the sights and sounds that greeted our arrival at Truck 15’s Hill Farm location turned out to be a pointedly accurate barometer of the weekend ahead.

Having taken the reins from the festival’s founders after they ran into financial difficulties last year, the folks at Y Not decided against reinventing the wheel. Helped by an interesting, if top heavy lineup, some canny pricing decisions (£4 a cocktail and £3.50 a pint) and the reappearance of the artist formerly known as summer, they gave the masses, for the most part, what they wanted. Their inaugural Truck can be viewed as a success but there are, of course, lessons to be learnt.

The decision to renew the local Rotary Club’s catering residency was a nice touch, given that all proceeds went to charity. But if ever a festival lent itself to some boutique, healthier food vendors, then surely it’s Truck – one of the politest, tamest festivals on the calendar. This stomach in particular was groaning under the weight of burgers, fried eggs and pizza after three days onsite. Were a few olives and a baked spud too much to ask?

The local thread was spun through the lineup, too. And while we’re all for encouraging local musicians, Y Not might consider casting the net slightly wider next year – stylistically and geographically. Perhaps naturally, given that many of them were of similar ages, from the same city, there was a familiarity among many of the Oxfordshire acts that by the end of the weekend bred a small degree of contempt. It’s been a while since these ears have entertained such a volume of jangly indie-pop and / or math rock.

Friday

But it wasn’t all bad. In fact, it was mostly very good: starting with the aforementioned ‘Oxford indie-pop outfit’, Kill Murray. The questionably named four-piece have the same Nineties alt-rock bent as one of last year’s highlights Yuck, complete with Mascis-lite riffs but slightly more coherent vocals. An interesting wailing sound midway through threatened to send the crowd into an early afternoon frenzy, before the guitarist realised it was his car alarm, squealing away behind the second stage. An interesting digression on what was an enjoyable set.

Former Magic Number Michele Stodart, playing on the Truck Stage, was an altogether more sedate affair. Sister of Romeo’s voice hasn’t suffered at all since we last heard from her, but a promisingly jammy introduction soon yields to a rather forgettable stew of stripped back folk and whiney lyrics. “When is it over?” she asks mid-song, clairvoyantly. If nothing more, Stodart showed that if you strip a Volvo of its shell and trimmings and leave the engine running, it indeed remains a Volvo.

Vadoinmessico’s appearance, then, couldn’t have been more welcome. They’re a five piece, but at times on Friday afternoon, it felt like there were 50 of them bouncing around the stage. Given that they come from four different countries, the international nature of their music shouldn’t have been a surprise. What was impressive, though, was that they managed to play half an hour of high-octane, Euro-friendly folk without anyone within an earshot saying ‘Gogol Bordello’.

Most of the non-musical action took place around the second stage and so the tail-end of Boat to Row and a fair slice of Josh Kumra were squeezed in amid a couple of delicious local IPAs, a trip to the Tea Tent and a midafternoon stab at the limbo (don’t ask). The former’s lead singer has a touch of Colin Meloy about him and he combined with some gorgeous harmonies, a trumpet, an organ and some strings to make sure every Decemberist fan in attendance was nodding in approval. The latter, however, left no such impression, the highlight of his set being an unimaginative cover of MGMT’s ‘Kids’, which rounded it off pretty appropriately.

Many regulars onsite bemoaned the absence of an actual Truck. The Barn, then, stepped up as the most appropriately named stage of the weekend, being, as it was, a barn. Having had our ears stung by a quick jaunt in for the disappointing John J Presley earlier in the day, it was up to the excellent Spring Offensive to convince us of the outhouse’s charm and they did so with some aplomb. The band jerked about the stage like something out of an Ok Go video, with the towering lead singer Lucas Whitworth especially captivating. His performance drew a wayward line between Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker and was utterly spellbinding. The raucously received set was a highlight of the weekend; with new track ‘Worry Fill My Heart’ a decent contender for the festival’s best moment.

By the time Villagers took to the Truck Stage, most people seemed to have arrived and for the first time, the sold-out festival seemed to be in any way busy. The space afforded by the low number of ticket sales (only 5,000 were put on release) had many good points (no queues, civilized campsites, easy to navigate), but occasionally, it made generating an atmosphere difficult. Despite playing a stirring set, the Irish band failed to cause much of a ripple among the crowd. The haunting ‘Set The Tigers Free’ and Ivor Novello winning ‘Becoming A Jackal’ were standout moments of a set that premiered some interesting, if not completely immediate new material. The electronic leaning ‘The Waves’ alone represented something of a change in direction ahead of the band’s second record, expected late this year.

Upon arriving on the stage, Tim Minchin announced that he was unafraid to offend anyone present. The laughter with which his set was greeted suggested he came nowhere close to doing so. ‘Woodyallenjesus’, named for the obvious connection between the pair (“Short and Jewish and quite political/Often hesitant and very analytical”) was hilarious, though, as was his repatriation of the word ‘ginger’ (“Only a ginger, can call another ginger ginger” – ‘Taboo’). Minchin’s ability to produce genuinely funny music places him in a small minority. Hats off to Truck for having the balls to put him in such a prominent slot.

Which brought us to the Mystery Jets: cited by some as a bizarre choice of headliner, given that their fame was at its height around the time of the superb Twenty One in 2008. Spearheaded by one of the best cuts from this year’s Radlands, ‘Someone Purer’, though, they just about warranted their place atop the bill. ‘Two Doors Down’ inspired the kind of mass singalong you might expect, but the rapture with which tracks from Serotonin were greeted was pleasantly surprising. A fine set from a band determined to prove that they still have plenty to offer.

The Low Anthem by Solange Moreira Yeoell

 

Saturday

Truck won’t guarantee you a good night’s sleep, but you stand a much better chance than you might at most other festivals. Still, no amount of Zs would have prepared us for Robots With Souls, who opened proceedings on the second stage. For one man, it was an impressive amount of noise. Unfortunately, that was the only thing to impress from his mainly monotonous set. Each song was moulded from an identikit toolset (deep bass line, primitive tubthumping, some Tourette’s like outbursts over the top) and each song, funnily, sounded pretty much like the last. Way too little melody, way too much misplaced, shouty angst, way too early in the morning.

‘You’re too polite,’ said the frontman of Yellow Fever to the modest ripple of applause that greeted ten seconds of mid-set guitar tuning. The scenes were indeed more civilised than average. A mass of people had, by then, descended on the main green to take advantage of the scorching sun. To our left, someone was rifling through a Cormac McCarthy novel. To our right, a couple were devouring the FT Weekend + supplements. Yellow Fever provided some pleasant, unobtrusive background music. With remarkable foresight given the changeable nature of the weather this summer, this was the first of a litany of jangly, sunshine indie bands to be booked for the afternoon. In terms of quality they lay somewhere in the middle of the pile, bringing to mind that most forgotten of indie bands: the Dead 60s.

Co-Pilgrim, too, paid homage to the sunshine, but in a style more akin to southern California than central Merseyside. The countrified ‘22’ was positively Byrdsian and the gentle ‘A Fairer Sea’ lovely. The harmonies throughout weren’t dissimilar to those of UK alt-country heroes Redland Palominos Company and their set was a welcome change in tone and pace, on an afternoon remarkable for its homogeneity.

The text for ToLiesel on the second stage could have been transposed with that of Yellow Fever. ‘It’s nice to see so many people here who aren’t our friends,’ exclaimed the delighted, if slightly surprised frontman. Black Hats raised the tempo a bit, but there was little to remember from their Bloc Party-aping Truck Stage set. Over in the half full Barn, Flights of Helios at least tried something a bit different. Their reworking of ‘Dynah and Donalogue’, a traditional-sounding folk song, was fantastic, with the lead singer’s ornamentation particularly impressive. The track was drawn out, drenched in drone and, eventually, spun off in a gauzy mess of guitars. They’re an interesting band, worth keeping your ears peeled for.

Dog is Dead struck a chord last year with a series of excellent singles and their Truck Stage set proved to be one of the weekend’s unexpected highlights. It’s an influence not immediately apparent on record, but live, they come over as a poppier version of Modest Mouse: there’s a whiff of ‘Float On’ about the groove on ‘Do The Right Thing’. With a few good EPs under their belts, the Nottingham band’s show whetted the appetite for something more substantial.

Truck has always rolled out the carpet to returning bands. On their eleventh appearance, we can only imagine that 65daysofstatic were given the keys to the farm. ‘This might now be a party,’ said Paul Wolinski as the band’s opening numbers jolted the crowd into life. Watching a band as busy as this is always entertaining, but 65dos’s professionalism was remarkable, too. They were the first band of the weekend to really try to work the crowd, and they did so magnificently. By the time their set finished, there was barely a sinner left lying on the grass: almost everyone had taken to their feet.

And while, stylistically, they couldn’t have been more different, The Low Anthem managed to keep the momentum going. Fans of the Rhode Islanders would have spent the weekend praying that the weather maintained and sure enough, in the low evening sunset, their performance was exhilarating and beautiful. The title track from last year’s ‘Smart Flesh’ and ‘Lover is Childlike’ from the Hunger Games soundtrack both sounded marvelous, fleshed out with saw, cello, trumpet and an uncategorized woodwind instrument. But it was the subtle, heartbreaking ‘This God Damn House’ from 2007’s What The Crow Brings that stole the show.

The finest performance of the weekend, though, was saved until last. The second stage was heaving by the time Frightened Rabbit took to it. ‘Sing along,’ said Scott Hutchison between ‘Modern Leper’ and ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’ By the time they left, the tent was reverberating to a hundreds-strong chorus of the ‘Loneliness and the Scream’. A blistering 45-minute set spanned, mostly, their latter pair of albums, with ‘Old Fashioned’ and ‘Living in Colour’ ensuring that there wasn’t a stationary pair of feet in the arena.

And so, they departed in what proved (for the festival) to be uncharacteristically raucous fashion, leaving delighted revelers to dance the night away to the chimes of Paul Simon et al at an excellent after-show disco. A successful, if unspectacular weekend, then, but the potential to build for next year is present in abundance.

Written for Drowned in Sound

Steve Von Till, Wino, Scott Kelly – Songs of Townes Van Zandt

Townes Van Zandt is said to have been embarrassed when Steve Earle proclaimed him to be ‘the best songwriter in the whole world’ and threatened to clamber up on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in his cowboy boots and tell him so. Such potent soundbites don’t disappear, though, and this one is wheeled out to accompany every new piece of Van Zandt – related merchandise. And right enough: as a songwriter, Van Zandt gives anyone a run for their money. In a genre that’s saturated with wounded troubadours, few have come close to capturing their grief and that of those around them as effectively and tunefully as he. As a recording artist, however, Van Zandt often paled in comparison to his more celebrated peer.

He was a reluctant presence in the studio and producers frequently struggled to capture his personality on record. No doubt at label behests to make his work more marketable, many of his albums were over-produced: laden with schmalzy strings and polished to a high sheen that simply didn’t belong. It’s why the terrible jokes and nervous laughter on Live at the Old Quarterand Live at McCabe’s are so integral to his legacy. The spit and sawdust setting, the simple yet skilful arrangements and the relaxed, unceremonious atmosphere placed Van Zandt firmly in his element.

To set out to record a full album of Townes Van Zandt cover songs, then, is something of a poisoned chalice. In reworking the songs, you risk making the same mistakes as his producers of yore, whose unwillingness to leave well alone arguably damaged the material itself (many of the most famous Van Zandt covers fall heavily into this territory). On the other hand, the requirement for a set of faithfully recorded updates is negligible.

Scott Kelly, Steve Von Till and Wino, who have teamed up for Songs of Townes Van Zandt, have chosen to stick rather than twist. The trio of metallers have recorded three tracks apiece and for the most part, have eschewed frills, keeping things simple, tasteful and palatable. The problem is: anybody who is already familiar with the material will struggle to find a reason to return to this record.

Perhaps inevitably, none of the covers improve on the original, and only a few offer a viable alternative. Returning to the Dylan analogy, neither he nor Van Zandt could be classed as technically great singers, but both possessed hugely effective voices that are and were (naturally) perfectly suited to their own material. While Kelly, Von Till and Wino each has their own distinct delivery, they all fall short of capturing the emotional punch the songs demand.

Take Scott Kelly’s contribution. The Neurosis singer and guitarist has chosen three of Van Zandt’s most celebrated songs: ‘St. John the Gambler’, ‘Lungs’ and ‘Tecumseh Valley’ and in each case has attempted to make the track darker, mainly by slowing the pace and adding a tiny bit of drone-ish guitar. But tracks like these require little assistance: they’re already dark enough. His take on ‘Tecumseh Valley’ and ‘St. John the Gambler’ (both lifted from what was arguably Van Zandt’s finest studio hour, Our Mother the Mountain) come across as heavy handed – his growl becoming increasingly grating the more you listen to both.

His bandmate Steve Von Till fares better. His rendition of ‘If I Needed You’ betters covers of the same track by names as prestigious as Emmylou Harris and Lyle Lovett. It’s as plain and bare as Van Zandt would’ve intended and is by some distance the best song on the record. His other offerings, however, are less memorable, with ‘Snake Song’ in particular struggling under the weight of some dodgy sound effects, which swim against the stylistic tide of the rest of the album.

In the sleeve notes, Van Zandt’s bass player Wrecks Bell commends the trio for taking ‘possession from the first note’, a statement that couldn’t be further than the truth. Instead,Songs… is reminiscent of an earnest pub-cover. It sounds fine on the surface and for a while, you might find yourself tapping your toe and humming in time. When you come out the other side, though, it’s forgotten. Neurosis or Wino disciples aside, it’s difficult to see a place for this in anyone’s collection.

5/10

Written for Drowned in Sound

Truck 15: the DiS preview

Of the proliferation of small, boutiquey festivals that sprung up around the UK over the past decade or so, Truck was always viewed as one of the most genuine and, well, best. It was a festival that came to be renowned for its warmth of atmosphere, value for money and for the organisers’ willingness to juxtapose the lineup – planting seemingly disparate names together on the same bill in the hope that they would stick: which for the most part, they did.

Last year’s event, however, took place under the cloud of poor ticket sales and there was some speculation as to whether we’d seen the last of Truck, at least on these shores and in its old format. When stories emerged of Truck experiencing financial bother (going bust, no less), they were greeted with real disappointment, with some pointing the finger at the seemingly exponential (read unsustainable) growth spurt the festival underwent, and others at the sheer saturation of festivals in its ilk.

That Truck’s been ‘resurrected’, then, is good news all round. It returns for its fifteenth edition under the fresh stewardship of Ralph Broadbent, he of Y Not Festival, who has replaced founders and long-term custodians Joe and Robin Bennett. It remains in its Hill Farm home, tucked away in rural Oxfordshire, and has reverted to two day format (although this year, it’s on a Friday and Saturday for the first time). The organisers have, on the face of it at least, heeded the cries of the mini-masses: the lineup looks to continue in time-honoured heterogeneous fashion, with a number of fairly big names joined by an interesting hodgepodge of smaller, more eclectic acts further down the bill.

We’ve selected the five acts we’re looking forward to seeing most, and created a Spotify playlist to accompany them.

Villagers

The musical vehicle for the sublimely talented Conor O’Brien, Villagers’ debut Becoming a Jackal picked up a Mercury nomination back in 2010, yet the Irish outfit haven’t come close to receiving the same adulation in the UK that they have in their homeland. Despite playing almost every instrument on the record, it’s O’Brien’s voice which lingers most heavily: packed, as it is with emotion and an impressive ability to run the scales. He gained the inevitable Oberstian references that come with the territory, but such comparisons are mostly superficial. There’s more classicism at play in O’Brien’s songwriting than his Nebraskan contemporary: the Paul Simon nods are much closer to the mark. It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from Villagers, but with an album mooted for early 2013, expect some new material.

Frightened Rabbit

The Frabbits’ second album swept all before it in 2008 (indeed, only M83’s stellar Saturdays = Youth kept it off DiS’ top spot in that year’s album chart). On the heels of its success, those clever sorts at Fat Cat released an excellent live recording of Midnight Organ Fight – a visceral, shimmering beast. Despite the relative misstep that was The Winter of Mixed Drinks, then, anyone who has heard Liver! Lung! FR! or, indeed, caught one of their live shows, will know that their appearance at Truck isn’t to be missed. Last year’s plainer and rootsier free EP represented something of a return to form in the eyes of many. Expectations are high ahead of their major label (Atlantic) debut. This one should whet the appetite nicely.

The Low Anthem

What exactly can we learn about an album from where it’s been recorded? Well, let’s see. Rhode Island folkies the Low Anthem recorded their last album in an abandoned pasta sauce factory, and sure enough, Smart Flesh was slow burning and relatively easy to digest (although more adventurous types may have been put off by the lack of spice). Album number five is in the offing and has been recorded in (wait for it), an abandoned opera house. Whether we should be expecting some bombast from the erstwhile docile (but lovely) Low Anthem remains to be seen. There are few bands on the bill as suited to the farmland setting of Truck than this pastoral bunch, so here’s hoping the sun’s still shining for their Saturday evening, main stage performance.

Future of the Left

Few DiSsers will have missed the wildly entertaining coverage that greeted FOTL’s latest offering, The Plot Against Common Sense. Few manage to takedown a review without coming over all sour grapes, but Andy Falcous did it with some panache. Perhaps the finest caveat attributed to the record, though, came from Kev Eddy of this parish, whose ‘thank you, Future of the Left – you’ve saved rock music. Now to make it pay…’ summed up the strength of feeling that’s followed the band around on these shores for years. FOTL haven’t got many UK shows this summer, so their Friday night headline slot on the Barn Stage may convince some that a £70 weekend pass is the soundest investment of the season.

The Dreaming Spires

It would be rude to conclude a preview of Truck 15 without giving a quick nod to its creators. For while the Bennetts have relinquished the festival’s organisation to Y Not, they’ve kept a musical toe in the water and will be performing as the Dreaming Spires – an appropriately titled tribute to the part of the country to which they’ve brought so much. Debut album Brothers in Brooklyn is a solid blast of open road AM-friendly American, with shades of Petty and Chilton.

Spotify Playlist (play it on shuffle)

Written for Drowned in Sound

Meursault – Something for the Weakened

It’s been a fascinating few years for anyone following the progress of Edinburgh’s Meursault. The band’s 2008 debut Pissing On Bonfires / Kissing With Tongues was a masterful cauldron of ideas that buried beautiful melodies beneath stratospheres of scratches and fireworks. It sent critics scrambling for superlatives and set the bar sky high. So much so that the response to its follow up was, relatively speaking, underwhelming. In retrospect though, the scruffy, lo-fi All Creatures Will Make Merry seems a more realised, focused record. Perhaps Meursault decided that it was better to bottle all the disparate ideas, shake them about a bit and pour out something a bit more consolidated, but no less interesting or enjoyable. And hey presto: it worked.

Their third leap along the evolutionary path (because it most certainly represents progress) is the most drastic yet. The general direction is the same: album number three is more consistent, structurally, and the melodies are more nuclear still. For the first time though, the band has released a cleanly polished set of songs, as nature intended them. The electronics have been discarded in favour of a more analogue setup: keys and strings are to the fore.

And then there’s The Voice. When these ears first bore witness to a Meursault live show, they were stunned into submission by Neil Pennycook’s booming, beautiful vocals, which filled the venue, leaving us to wonder if he’d had a megaphone lodged in his larynx. On album number three it’s been bumped up the bill and unleashed in all its glorious technicolor. Meursault the capricious art project has given way to Meursault, the band. And boy, do they scrub up well.

It shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise. Arguably the most enjoyable moments of the first two albums were the simplest: the plaintive ‘A Small Stretch of Land’ from the debut and ‘Weather’ from All Creatures… being fine examples. Indeed, if fault is to be found in their earlier output, it’s in the band’s erstwhile penchant for gilding the lily. On Something for the Weakened, though, it seems Meursault are satisfied to let the core song do the work. The wonderfully straightforward opening track ‘Thumb’, then, is an appropriate harbinger. Over a strummed ukelele and gentle backbeat, Pennycook repeats the mantra: “We will not be weakened any more”. It’s more resigned than defiant, but sets the tone beautifully.

‘Lament for a Teenage Millionaire’ originally appeared on the first album as a jittery, fuzzy electronic stomp. Here though, it’s reworked as a gorgeous folk song, swept along by a banjo, some strings and a lilting piano riff. Pennycook’s voice, previously submerged in a maelstrom of synths and beeps, is bare and broken. It’s this visceral outpouring, inescapable on stage, that defines Something for the Weakened. On ‘Settling’, you can almost sense the frontman’s veins rupturing his neck as he bellows, sardonically: “Ha, fucking ha”, while on ‘Hole’, amid some lovely harmonies, you can just about see his eyes welling up with tears.

Just as some lamented the scratchy production of All Creatures Will Make Merry, you can bet that there’ll be those who bemoan the slick production and relative uniformity of Something for the Weakened. Such is the cross a band as changeable as Meursault have to bear. Thankfully, though, they’ve always been aware that unbroken eggs do not an omelette make and this is the strongest set of songs the band has offered up to date. So pick up the record and enjoy it, but just don’t expect Meursault to rest on their laurels for too long.

8.5 / 10

Written for The Line of Best Fit

Twin Shadow: Born in the 80s

PHOTO BY TUOMO LAMPINEN

 

As he gets prepared to unleash one of the albums of the year, George Lewis Jr., aka Twin Shadow, outlines his musical manifesto

George Lewis Jr. is a serious man. “I don’t do irony,” he says, setting the tone early on. “I don’t really believe in it.” As the conversation unfolds, it’s clear there are some subjects to be treated soberly. There’s his music, of course, and by extension, his fashion. “Unless I’m going to really psychoanalyse myself and ask why I dress and why I wear clothes as a human being, I’m pretty sure they come from the same place.”

So when he tells The Skinny that it once took him four hours to do his hair, it’s fairly clear he isn’t joking. How long does it take him to get dressed in the morning? “It depends,” he says, deadpan. “Sometimes I’ll get nerves and I’ll know that some beautiful girl’s going to be at the show and it’ll take me an extra hour or something. But it really depends on my mood.” But boy, does it show. Lewis is a spectacular looking man. He’s tall, elegant and infuriatingly handsome. His dress sense draws a dandy line between Prince and the Cat from Red Dwarf. He looks, walks and talks like the epitome of cool. Seriously cool. Serious, and cool.

“I hear it’s pretty shitty over there at the minute,” he says, semi-sympathetically from his sunny Madrid base, as he receives a report on the climate malaise enveloping the British summer. “That’s too bad. I hope that it’s good for my show, and then gets bad for the Olympics.” He’s in Spain to kick off the European leg of his tour. His second album under the Twin Shadow moniker, Confess, is set to hit the shops in mid-July, right about the time Lewis rolls into town. He’s excited to bring his new songs to the stage and if his forthcoming dates are half as exciting as his latest record, we’re in for a treat. “This is the Wild West of the world!” he says, when asked what we can hope to expect. “You can do whatever you want!”

Lewis’s disdain for irony extends to his lyrics, which, he says, are always unflinchingly honest. Yet, it was left to a friend to dream up the title of the album. “When he said ‘Confess’,” explains Lewis, “it made sense, because it seemed like a culmination of what all the lyrics seemed to be about – kind of letting out an honesty. It’s challenging to tell the truth and to say what you want.” The music onConfess, too, is more direct than what we’re used to hearing from Twin Shadow. Building on the synth-based platform of debut Forget, the record maintains the elements of funk and soul, but is rockier enough to recall – sometimes even simultaneously – TV on the Radio and Bruce Springsteen. It’s ironic, given that the record was partly inspired by a move away from New York City to the glistening surrounds of Los Angeles, a place that allows Lewis to indulge in his newest preoccupation: riding his motorcycle all day long. “It only rains about once a year,” he explains. “It’s perfect.”

Whereas the first record earned Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear a production credit (although George is adamant that his input was mainly to tweak a near-finished product), this one is Lewis’ baby, from start to finish. “It was certainly exhausting,” he says of the effort required. “But I’ve found that I prefer to be responsible for everything. I like to feel at the end of the day that everything is up to me and I don’t have to depend on anyone else. That’s very important to me.”

Indeed, this need for control is what led to the inception of the Twin Shadow project a few years back when Lewis was living between Berlin and Copenhagen, working for a theatre company. He’d spent his formative years playing in punk bands – a fact that’s hard to to come to terms with, given his standard getup, and one that raises a wry chuckle even from the man himself. “Yeah, that was me,” says he. “It’s hard to believe in bands anymore, because we’re very different people nowadays. We spend a lot more time alone – everyone’s on his or her computers and things like that. It just made sense, in a way, to create music alone. It’s a cultural thing which is happening; which has happened.”

If there’s one consistency to have bridged both records, then it’s the manner in which they’ve been received: with universal praise. WhereForget helped give Lewis the independence, freedom and wherewithal to do as he pleased, Confess looks set to bring him to a much wider audience. You will struggle, however, to find a single review that doesn’t mention the 1980s, either implicitly or via an obscure, sepia-tinged cultural reference. It almost certainly initially stems from Twin Shadow’s sonic template: drum machine, synthesiser, and Morrissey-esque vocals.

Yet, there are many things about George Lewis Jr. ‘The Package’ that reinforces the aesthetic. There’s the enormous, immaculately sculpted hair; the pornstar moustache; the image of him speeding down the Californian freeway atop a Harley Davidson in a tight leather jacket and, of course, the front cover of his new album, with his mug beaming back at you, kitted out like an extra from the Rockers. While Lewis insists he’s keen to distance himself from the comparison, in reality, he seems to be doing everything he can to perpetuate it.

“Yeah,” comes his resigned response. “This thing comes up a lot. It’s usually the people who I really feel understand the music a lot that never once mention the 80s. They only take it in as songs and listen to the lyrics first and not the production. The production is just atmosphere – it doesn’t matter. It’s like asking what kind of camera you shot a beautiful scene on. Unfortunately a lot of intelligent people love to hate something because of a description that somebody they admire has written. So I hate to lose these people before they even try it [the music] out, because of people saying ‘it’s 80s this; 80s that.’ The truth is, I don’t even like the 80s… I couldn’t give a fuck about the 80s!”

It is, indeed, unlikely that Lewis remembers much about the 1980s. He was born in 1983 in the Dominican Republic, but left as a child after his mother was mugged at a service station. His parents have since returned to Hispaniola and his homeland has assumed more prominence in Lewis’s life. “There’s a thing about Latin blood,” he says, thoughtfully. “I truly believe there’s a spiritual connection to your homeland that’s unavoidable. When I go there, I feel like I’ve returned home. The people are so kind and very different from Americans. They’re real salt of the earth people.”

For many in the UK, the Dominican Republic represents a cheap Caribbean getaway: a land of white sands and turquoise coral. For the locals, however, the reality is much harsher – 10 per cent of the population live on less than $2 per day. Lewis, though, is a realist. “I don’t diss the resorts at all. It’s a tough country; a very poor, poor place. But the resorts are just as important to that country as the shitty parts. That’s how a lot of people there make a living.”

Upon leaving the Caribbean, Lewis’s family rocked up in Venice, Florida – a place he recalls in less glowing terms. We put it to him that Florida is like LA: a sunny getaway; a Tropicana of palm trees, patrolled by scantily-clad rollerbladers and perfect for riding his motorcycle. “No,” comes his curt reply. “It’s a strange place. It’s just like the South, but it’s more like the South than the South. When people think of the South, they think of ignorance, but at least it has culture and a lot of character. Florida has some character, but it’s just a bunch of ignorant people and lots of old people, lots of shopping malls and lots of alligators, just behind the shopping malls.”

Lewis goes on to describe the Sunshine State (to give it its euphemistic nickname) as “uninspiring” and “devoid of good music.” His memories, far from being filled with sunshine, are dreary and depressing. The KKK, for instance, once confronted him at a party at which he was playing guitar. He never goes back, despite the “load of friends who love to get married and call me up for their weddings.” Yet, it was in the jam bars of Florida that he took his steps into music and as unlikely as it may have seemed to him at the time, his first record, Forget, turned out to be an ode to his childhood home. “There’s no such thing as Florida music,” says Lewis, “but if there was, I think my music would be it. It’s music for people who understand how strange Florida is. When I listen to Forget now, I picture everything about the place. If you listen to that record in Florida, you’ll know what I mean.”

His adult years have been nomadic. At various points, he’s been “settled” in Boston, Europe, New York and now, of course, Los Angeles. “Nobody knows I live in LA,” he says, somewhat cryptically. “My friends all think I still live in New York, so it’s kind of a secret that I live in Los Angeles.” It’s the fear of boredom that keeps Lewis on the move: when somewhere stops interesting him, he simply packs up his stuff and heads for pastures new. So does he view himself as some sort of wandering minstrel; collating a scrapbook of stories and music from wherever he lays his hat?

“Well, I really believe in storytelling through songs,” he says. “Even in the 80s, they had amazing songwriters who were writing songs similarly to the Beatles or Harry Nilsson. They had that type of songwriting, but production that was of the time period – the drum machines and synths. I’m from the same songwriting schools as those people. I really believe in the complete song: not just a mood song, or a song that’s just about the beat or some repeated hook.

“I believe in storytelling and that’s something that isn’t done a lot these days. People think of it as being old school, but it isn’t: it’s something that will continue forever and ever. Storytelling will never change, but its popularity wanes and comes back again. I’m going to keep doing it until it becomes popular again and then they’ll say: ‘You know what? I guess he wasn’t so 80s after all.’”

Written for The Skinny

Book review: Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Are the poor caught in a perpetual poverty trap?

 

After the Japanese tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, influential Reuters blogger Felix Salmon ruffled a few feathers by calling for people to hold back on their donations. It was a reiteration of a plea he made following the Haitian earthquake in 2010, when he claimed that campaign-based donations often result in “a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective”. The crux of Salmon’s argument is that philanthropy is often misplaced due to a lack of understanding of the requirements of its intended destination and of its recipients. Too often, we’re sucked in by a compelling advert or an ambitious appeal (think “make poverty history”), without giving a thought to how it might be accomplished.

Poor Economics is an attempt at moving away from such top-down approaches to eradicating poverty. The authors – both professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – go even further than Salmon by encouraging us to steer clear of macroeconomics and instead focus on the finer details of development. Rather than debating the generalist “does aid work?” in plush Genevan office spaces ad nauseam, the west should look at the lives of those surviving on less than $1 per day, and ask: “What can be done to improve this individual’s life?” In their lengthy, painstakingly detailed research, Banerjee and Duflo have done exactly this, using a data set of 18 countries. In trying to understand the machinations of the economics of being poor, they have presented eye-opening, fascinating results.

In one illuminating passage, the authors turn their attention to teenage pregnancies in rural Kenya, where all efforts in educating schoolgirls on the dangers of HIV and early pregnancy seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. Researchers found, however, that if given a school uniform, girls were likely to stay in education and that “for every three girls who stayed in school because of the free uniform, two delayed their first pregnancy”.

The girls were fully aware of the dangers and results of unprotected sex – but having left school, many of them saw prospective fathers as a means of survival. Rather than being foolish and carefree, the poorest people often make calculated economic decisions to ensure their futures that might initially seem baffling to those on the outside. But by figuring out why they’re doing it, perhaps governments or NGOs can provide them with alternative options. It’s this message which resonates throughout the book.

Poor Economics’ greatest success is the length to which it goes to bridging the gap between the perceived personality of rich and poor. It’s almost certainly unintentional, but many in the developed world are guilty of adopting an “us and them” attitude to the poor – a fact, arguably, compounded by the almost taxonomical term “the poor” itself. Poor Economics’ presents those featured in the research with characters we almost certainly recognise in ourselves – sometimes frustrating, but often inspiring. Just as we suffer from lapses in self-control (just one chocolate bar… one more pint), so too can somebody in sub-Saharan Africa, who instead of paying for a vaccination for a child – the benefit of which may not be visible in their own lifetime – buys some extra rice or tea. Short-termism is not exclusively a western trait; the difference is, we can get away with pandering to our immediate desires a lot more than somebody who lives on less than $1 per day.

Our lives, too, are governed by a host of invisible structures, but some potentially life-altering choices have been taken centrally on our behalf that the poor have to take themselves on a daily basis. When did you last wake up in the middle of the night and, without thought, pour yourself a glass of water? For someone in parts of, say, Indonesia or Nicaragua, they must beforehand have taken the decision to purchase chlorine to add to the water (not to mention have lugged the water back from the well). New parents in Britain are legally obliged to have their babies inoculated and a few years later, send them to school. In developing countries, there are no such obligations and quite often, there’s a lack or distrust of facilities (public sector services in the poorest regions come in for particularly strong criticism over the course of the book) that might ordinarily help them climb the social ladder.

Banerjee and Duflo almost relentlessly present evidence of such structural failings and lack of social safety nets in the developing world – along with ignorance on the part of those well-intentioned people trying to help. Until global institutions readdress their own tack and focus on the minutiae, “poverty traps” may continue to paralyse many. But from the comfort of our living rooms, it is still possible to make a difference. This book will, if nothing else, inspire you to do a little digging before you make a donation decision. Don’t always go for the heartbreaking image, the flavour-of-the-month appeal or the catchall sloganeering. Look for those charities and NGOs with clearly articulated, defined and proven methodologies and missions. The success of much of the research explained by Poor Economics shows that empiricism should always trump fleeting sympathy.

Book review: Escape from Camp 14, Blaine Harden

Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known escapee of Camp 14, with the author Blaine Harden

Shin Dong-hyuk didn’t know it was the dawn of a new year when on 2 January 2005 he used the frazzled corpse of his friend and mentor to help him clamber over a highly charged electric fence and escape from Kaechon internment camp. “Camp 14”, as it’s more systematically known, is said to be the most brutal of North Korea’s massive prison camps, although the state denies its existence. The camp has existed since 1959 – a lifespan 48 years longer than that of Auschwitz, to which it’s sometimes compared for its brutality. It’s a place where teenage boys are interrogated on spits over open fires, where babies conceived through rape are beaten to death with rods, where chemical weapons are said to be “tested” on the residents and where children are encouraged to beat one another to a pulp in order to curry favour with their teachers. Shin is the only prisoner ever known to have escaped.

About 5,000 miles away in Edinburgh, I’d just experienced my first Hogmanay celebration and was nursing the inaugural two-day hangover that came with it. I mention this triviality only because I’m roughly the same age as Shin and happen to recall what I was doing around the time he made his break from Camp 14, a fact which makes his story resonate with me all the louder. You see, Shin’s story isn’t something from the archives. The goriest experiences of his life are also being inflicted on others as you read. Half of the Korean peninsula is in the grips of a barbaric regime: the North is the world’s biggest prison and yet has been reduced to a caricature in the minds of many. Try typing “Kim Jong-il” into Google and the first two suggested search results are “Kim Jong-il looking at things” and “Kim Jong-il dropping the bass”.

The fact is, nobody ever talks about these camps, which is why Escape From Camp 14 is one of the most important books on international affairs you can read this year. It’s riveting, it’s horrifying and it’s vital. Shin’s very existence is the result of two prisoners being allowed to fornicate as a reward for working hard. He was worked to the bone, routinely beaten and starved since early childhood. A culture of paranoia pervaded in the camp: inmates may have received some extra food, or fewer beatings, for snitching on someone for stealing or slacking. Thus, upon hearing his brother and mother (in whose company he was permitted to spend a few nights a year) plotting an escape – the ultimate crime –  Shin told a prison guard. Far from being rewarded, though, he spent the ensuing months being routinely tortured in solitary confinement, before being forced to watch his mother and brother’s executions.

It wasn’t until years later – a matter of months before his escape – that he heard of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, of South Korea, and of China for the first time. His eyes had been opened by another prisoner who, unlike Shin, had experienced life beyond Camp 14’s boundaries: the very same prisoner whose body Shin used to help hoist himself over the electric fence. Upon escaping, making his way over the Chinese border and fortuitously encountering a South Korean journalist in Shanghai who facilitated his repatriation to Seoul, Shin found that few wished to hear his story. His own memoir sold a mere 500 copies. Harden’s book has made it onto the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s bestsellers lists and has helped to give Shin, now a human rights campaigner, the voice which millions before him have gone to their graves without.

The book, quite rightly, spares the reader none of the detail. There are passages that make the reader wince – Harden’s prose is plain and effective. Appropriately, there are no frills – just a vanilla retelling of Shin’s life, as bare and torturous as it should be. However, woven through the narrative is a potted history of North Korea and how it has floundered since the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those with little preexistent knowledge on the subject, this introduction may prove as disturbing as Shin’s story itself.

Far from being one of the world’s only surviving Communist states (a commonly held view), North Korea is an dictatorial kleptocracy and is now home to arguably the longest standing humanitarian crisis of our generation. Its relationship with China – which only tolerates the Kim dynasty because it provides a buffer between itself and the westernised South Korea – means that while western hawks are happy to broker war on Iran, Iraq, Libya and anyone else who fails to conform to their ideologies, intervention in North Korea isn’t an option: change must come from within and as such, progress is glacial.

Six years on from Shin’s escape, I found myself standing on the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. On the south side, in which I was then living, every inch of arable land was put to work. Fields of rice, corn and barley rolled out to meet the horizon. It was a lush cornucopia compared to the absolute desolation that confronted us on the other side, in which every living thing had been razed to ground level, so as to limit the chances of defectors making it across the DMZ.

It was, no doubt, thrilling (in a twisted, voyeuristic kind of way) being so close to the most secretive place on earth, but while our guide was more than happy to fill us in on the grimiest details of the Korean War, not once did he mention the imprisonment of thousands – if not millions – of North Koreans in camps like the one Shin was born into. Over the course of a year living in South Korea, the only person who offered me an opinion on the atrocities on the wrong side of the 38th Parallel was a Canadian teacher. Escape From Camp 14 is a brilliant read, but also a klaxon, alerting a mainstream audience to the plight of millions. For these reasons, it should be viewed as a monumental success.

Originally published here

Long to reign over us? I hope not

Badge from 1977′s Silver Jubilee - how times have changed
Photo by dannybirchall on Flickr

The Jubilee celebrations reminded me of a fundamental flaw in British society: the monarchy

In the weeks leading up to Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, a 100-metre wide photograph of the royal family celebrating 1977’s Silver edition was unfurled over a building on London’s South Bank. The image shows a fresh-looking, middle-aged Queen smiling and waving to her subjects from the Buckingham Palace balcony – soaking up the adulation, flanked by her adoring husband and children. Had Kim Jong-un unveiled a banner so ostentatious, inflated and pompous in Pyongyang, Newsnight’s talking heads would’ve been up in arms over the North Korean “personality cult”. The similarities between the Windsors and the Kims are thankfully few, but the picture still rankled with some, who were left to wonder why, in the second decade of the 21st century, are the citizens of a supposedly democratised nation paying homage to a woman who has been its unelected head of state for 60 years?Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the Jubilee was the context within which it was so heartily celebrated. The duumvirate of real power, David Cameron and George Osborne, have spent the past two years sliding down the greased-up opinion polls at an alarming rate. The Labour leader Ed Miliband has been keen to impress the pair’s wealth and perceived sense of entitlement (both are old Etonians and come from vast familial fortunes) upon the public, who seem to be taking note. Yet, simultaneously, the royal family hasn’t been this popular in years: a recent poll conducted by ICM and theGuardian found that 69 per cent of Britons say the country would be worse off without a hereditary monarchy – while only 10 per cent support reverting to a contemporary presidential head of state.

Smiling weddings clearly have a more positive impact than growling public divorces, but these figures still baffle me. I pull no punches about my politics. I’m a republican and feel that the head of a state – no matter how notional its powers are said to be – should be a fully elected figure, whose actions and operations are transparent, accountable and dictated by a clearly stated mandate. I find it difficult to reconcile any of the arguments in favour of a monarchy with these principles, or, indeed, with the opulence on show last weekend. As a £12 million (!) flotilla made its way down the Thames on Sunday, the only emotion stirred within me was one of regret: regret that a further £12 million of taxpayers’ money had been pissed down the river. As the no doubt handsomely remunerated Grace Jones and Stevie Wonder were – on separate occasions – wishing her Majesty a “happy birthday”, hundreds of unpaid jobseekers were being bussed in from across the UK in order to steward the event and then – like a scene from the most dystopian of Dickensian works – forced to sleep under London Bridge before turning up for duty. The duality of Britain’s modern society, laid bare.

Royal minted

As it is, most pro-monarchy arguments are fairly easy to unpick, but rather than sifting through all of them, I’ll focus on some of the most commonly used. Arguably the most frequently propagated is that having a royal family is great for the national coffers. Yes, tourists flock to pick up tacky souvenirs and get their picture taken in front of Buckingham Palace – but not in the droves you might think. Only one of the top 20 tourist attractions in Britain is a royal abode (Windsor Castle, #17). Royal tourism accounts for just 1 per cent of Britain’s total tourism revenue: a drop in the ocean.

In its Value for Money Monarchy Myth report, the pro-reform group Republic points out that the monarchy costs the taxpayer £202.4 million annually, rather than the £38.3 million figure officially released, a figure which excludes, among other things, security and royal visits. This financial hole, claims Republic, would cover the annual salaries of almost 10,000 nurses and over 8,000 police officers. In comparison, the monarchies of Holland, Norway, Denmark and Spain cost their taxpayers £88.3 million, £23.9 million, £10.5 million and £7.4 million, respectively. If you add them all together, the Windsors’ budget is 150 per cent greater than the total. The monarchy, we’re told, assumes the same ambassadorial, figurehead role as the Irish President (democratically elected), but annually, runs up a bill 112 times bigger than Michael D. Higgins or any of his predecessors.

The most controversial facet of the regal finances, perhaps, is the income generated by the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall. The duchies comprise lands, assets and property held in trust for the crown, yet are not the personal property of the royal family. The costs of running the duchies come from taxpayers’ contributions, but profits from them are withheld from public consumption, even while they’re being held aloft as a reason for retaining the monarchy. The monarchy retains all capital generated through the duchies (you may be familiar with Prince Charles’ Duchy Originals range of organic foodstuffs sold in upmarket grocers, such as Waitrose). That the royal family is entitled to retain these profits while still being in receipt of the civil list (the donation made to the upkeep of the royal family by the government) is wholly undemocratic – particularly considering payments into the civil list have increased by 94 per cent in real terms over the past two decades.

You can choose your friends…

Another argument often reeled off by monarchists is that the Queen is a figurehead – a harmless individual who successfully represents her people, while not interfering in political matters. When quizzed on how exactly she completes the above task successfully, supporters usually return a nebulous answer. Apologists often point to her entertaining of state visitors (bypassing the fact that guests first must call on the Lord Mayor of London, further diluting the Queen’s essentiality), yet, such leaders often deserve to have the rug pulled from beneath their feet, rather than rolled out before them. 

In a pre-Jubilee state dinner, the list of invitees was a who’s who of global tyrants. King Mswati III of Swaziland was there, a multi-billionaire monarch of a country whose GDP per capita ranks below that of Iraq and East Timor and who has been implicated in a kidnapping affair (his future teenage bride – to add to his harem of ten others – was the victim) and has claimed that all HIV-positive people should be “sterilised and branded”. He was joined by King Al Khalifa of Bahrain, who arrived fresh from crushing an uprising in his island state, killing 85 civilians and torturing almost 2,000 more. Granted, the Home Office is most likely to have drawn up the list of invitees, but by dining in their company (in her house!), the Queen legitimises regimes of brutality across the world. As someone representing the supposedly suffraged British people – surely her guest lists should be more reflective of their national values.

Domestically, the Queen may well steer clear of party politics (although, given the fact that liaisons between parliament and palace are subject to a secrecy rivalling parliamentary privilege, we may never know if it is the case), but when she eventually cedes power to the first in line to the throne, her heir is unlikely to remain so blank, unopinionated and politically irrelevant. Charles, should he succeed his mother, is a much more vociferously minded individual who has, for his forthright views and willingness to expound upon them, been described as “the republicans’ best friend”.

Good time Charlie 

His views on “complementary” medicines, fox-hunting, architecture and governmental agriculture policy have been widely publicised and roundly condemned (indeed, in 2000, the Prince of Wales lent his support to a strand of “spiritual healing” which can reduce the effects of chemotherapy. In this case, his views are not just controversial, they’re downright dangerous). In a recent column in the Observer, Nick Cohen proposed that the ascension of Charles III would be the final nail in the coffin of the British monarchy: for the moment he starts meddling in matters of national, political importance, the number’s surely up.

My concluding questions are these: are the British public really happy to be represented by a lady who, while thankfully not openly airing views as offensive as some of those of her son, has not once in her life uttered an opinion worth recording, let alone remembering and whose supposed political irrelevance and detachment are held up as virtues? Shouldn’t a country that is seemingly content to go to war with “less democratic” nations and individuals in the name of freedom practice what it preaches abroad, at home? Shouldn’t we do away with such nepotism in favour of something more meritocratic that produces a figurehead who more clearly represents and articulates Britain’s supposedly democratic values?

In the 10,000 years since Britain became an island, there have been many things worthy of celebrations on the scale of last weekend. To name but a few, there’s that language that we all speak to varying degrees of competency, which seems to have caught on fairly well in other parts of the world; the Magna Carta – the first step in transferring power from the antiquity of monarchy, almost 1,000 years ago; London becoming only the second place in the world after Venice to outlaw the trade of slaves and serfdom way back in 1102 (the rest of the country wasn’t free from the shackles for another 600 years); the establishment of universal, free healthcare in 1948; the inventions of the television, the jet and steam engines, the telephone and the internet; the long overdue legalisation of gay matrimony in 2005. The list goes on: there are many things that make Britain great. The monarchy, I’m afraid to say, is not one of them.

Originally published here

Star Wheel Press – Life Cycle of a Falling Bird

When a lead singer possesses such a distinctive burr, it’s often easy to overlook everything that sits behind it. Not so on Life Cycle of a Falling Bird, the parentheses friendly-debut album from Aberfeldy-based Star Wheel Press. For while frontman Ryan Hannigan’s larynx purrs like Aidan Moffat on the happy pills, the songs on here are so finely crafted, so wonderfully nuanced, it’s but another instrument in a superb alt-country orchestra.

Hannigan is joined by a medley of strings: banjo, slide guitar, pedal steel and fiddle on 15 literate and buoyant tracks, which are melodically simple, but beautifully composed. There’s a touch of Whiskeytown circa Stranger’s Almanac about opening track Railway Lines (the North Carolinans’ spectre hangs heavy over much of the record), and Betamax Waltz is a real lyrical treat – funny, clever and impossible to shake, hours after spinning.

4/5

ATP: I’ll Be Your Mirror, Sunday 27 May

Image by Gary Wolstenholme @Drowned in Sound

The sparkling sunshine outside is matched by the talent on show inside Alexandra Palace on a wonderful day

There is a mass of pasty white legs slowly making its way up the substantial, winding hill that leads to Alexandra Palace. The palace grounds are strewn with hungover bodies, draped in black t-shirts, supping cold beer in the scorching sunshine, trying to summons the wherewithal to cope with a third day of I’ll Be Your Mirror. The sunlit halls of Ally Pally, as it’s known to the locals, are decked out with intricate wall mosaics, marble floor tiles, huge bay windows and Archers of Loaf merchandise: a bizarre combo by anyone’s reckoning. But then, ATP pride themselves on doing things differently.

Having been Slayer-ed and Mogwa-fied in successive nights, the 140-year-old royal abode must have been hoping for a quiet Sunday in the sun, and you can almost hear its foundations emit a justified “why me?” as Blanck Mass takes to the darkened West Hall for a terrifying, marvelous set of deep, bass heavy ambient drone. One half of Fuck Buttons, his eponymous solo debut of last year took a while to reach these ears, but has become one of our belated discoveries of 2011. More tempered and less immediate than his work with FB, his solo stuff is equally startling when heard in the flesh. The subtlety of his music is transformed into something much darker when churned out at about 200 decibels, in front of a visual backdrop of dismembered limbs, leaving half of the small crowd wondering whether they were still feeling the effects of Saturday night’s ingestion. A power cut about half an hour in sounds, momentarily, spectacular, but leaves Blanck Mass miffed and the rest of us questioning ATP’s failure to invest in solar panels.

Continuing the slightly unnerving theme are Demdike Stare, a pair of experimentalists who take the audio / visual concept further than Blanck Mass. A black and white film montage plays out behind them, Hitchcock-esque snippets: voyeuristic, mysterious and perfectly tailored to their claustrophobic, percussive music. It fails to attract the masses, however, as a dash to the heaving beer garden attests. Ally Pally boasts spectacular views of London and many revellers have yet to even make it through the doors, preferring to take full advantage of the locale.

In the well-lit, carpeted Panoramic Room, The Tall Firs have been playing for 20 minutes. “The next bit is our sad section,” says Aaron Mullan, on the back of three songs in each of which someone has met their maker. Having missed Codeine the day before, veterans Tall Firs were a “must-see” on our schedule, but while their brand of slowcore is equally dour, it’s only fractionally as enchanting. The pair is ill-suited to such a fluorescent setting and struggle to generate any kind of atmosphere. It’s disappointing, but we reckon they would fare much better in a suitable venue. Matters are compounded when Thee Oh Sees take to the stage in the West Hall, threatening to drown out the Tall Firs. A quick jaunt across the palace reveals a good crowd assembled, but we fail to see why. The Oh Sees have been subject to a fair amount of hype in recent years, without really justifying it on record. In the live arena, too, they tick the box marked “style” rather than “substance”; that “style” being very shouty and mostly forgettable.

One of the highlights of the day comes in the form of Siskiyou back over in the Panoramic Room. Founded by former Great Lake Swimmer Colin Huebert, the Vancouver band have released two fine records in as many years and while their patter is substandard (“you know that feeling when you’ve sprayed deodorant but it still isn’t enough?”), the music and the manner in which it’s delivered is first rate. Huebert’s voice is Spencer Krug-esque and his harmonies with the spasmodic drummer are a joy. The rollicking Twigs and Stones and fantastic cover of Neil Young’s Revolution Blues steal the show, in what’s a terrific performance.

Yuck’s self-titled debut, released last year, was promising but patchy. This evening’s twilight set in front of a swelling crowd, though, is outstanding all the way through. They have the same effortless, don’t-give-a-fuckery as early era Blur: dripping with attitude, blasting out hummable, poppy indie rock. Album opening one-two Get Away and The Wall along with Holing Up sound superb in the West Hall: even the hippest of hipsters – and by Jove are there some hip hipsters here – couldn’t keep their toes from tapping, their heads from bobbing along approvingly.

Anyone else a big fed up of this “50s revival” we’re having rammed down our throat? Does the omnipotence of the cupcake (or, as Charlton Brooker so eloquently christened them, “muffins with clown puke topping”) really constitute a revival? Most of the music that dabbles in such dark arts is worth avoiding, but to their credit, Tennis are one of the more palatable of the “Keep Calm…” brigade. Their second album is a big improvement on their first and once you get past the Marty McFly pastiche, they have some very decent tunes. Lead singer Alaina Moore has a beautiful voice, and from the moment she opens her mouth, has almost all of the cross-legged Panoramic Room in the palm of her hand. Not The Skinny though, who make a break for the Archers of Loaf, only to find that their set has finished 20 minutes early.

Which means there’s only one thing to do: sit around and wait for The Afghan Whigs. There’s plenty of atmosphere to soak up, for this is whom the majority of today’s punters have come to see. The band cut striking figures in front of a blood red curtain. Each track, from Crime Scene Part One, through to Faded gets a raucous reception. Greg Dulli is in masterful form, his voice carrying the years wonderfully. EL-P has cancelled his show due to the death of a loved one, which means the Whigs’ headline slot has an extra half hour of play – they seize it with both hands, even squeezing in a Frank Ocean cover (Lovecrimes) before departing to huge applause. A fine way to round off the weekend… welcome back.

Written for The Skinny