Big Joan, 1 July

Big Joan, Charlottefield, OHRATGI, Papa Molasses and the Dane County Paragons
The Croft, 1st July

I hate country music. I mean really hate it. It makes me angry to hear it, and angry to hear other people talking about it like it's worth something. Mind you, I like English / Celtic folk music so I'm sure I could be ridiculed for this. Also I like acoustic country (girls singing) but the whole Dolly Parton / Garth Brooks rubbish makes me cross. So why go and see an alt-country grunge wrong noisey shouting Country band at all? Well I like a challenge. Papa Molasses and the Dane County Paragons certainly provide that! More metal-blues than country they have the aura of a drunken pub band with some unsettlingly good grooves and the singer's shouting really hammers home the emptiness, indeed the very soul of desolation that Country music is supposed to represent. Well I find it pretty funny anyway.


SJ Esau and Team Brick combine in an unsavoury fashion to bring us Onanist Homework Robot and the Guano Ignoramus, or OHRATGI for short. They mix Esau's trademark sampling beats mashups with TB's unparalleled genius of the bizarre and unusual. One song sees Brick hunched over a paperback, his voice too quick to follow, but full of expression and variation over the mess of beats. Their finale is more conventional, the (cursed) sound of Bristol-meets-early PJ Harvey and gets an enthusiastic reception from an otherwise confused but very entertained audience.

Charlottefield fail to hold my attention for very long. It is the consensus that their drummer is an absolute genius, coping with the strange stop-start punky-rock and hammering out an impressive display of complicated fills. Despite his best efforts, the rest of the band stare at their shoes with their backs to a diminishing audience and the music quickly becomes dull and lifeless.

But of course Big Joan are here to wake us up. It has been a while since they played in Bristol and the room is packed with large grins and nodding heads as Annette leads the band through a storming set of hard-edged punk rock.

Circle, 8 July

Circle, the Cube 8th July

The thing about trying to get ten people together to go to a gig is that you're almost definitely going to be late. So I miss the solo set by Anton MAIOF as well as the apparently pretty good set by Big Naturals. (But others didn't, see Rottenmeat for a more comprehensive review). I don't miss Finnish Psyche-Rockers Circle though, oh no. The band are in metal mode today, studded wristbands and tight denim with improbably 'metal' spikey guitars. It is a bit slow to begin with, they seem to want to really lull us into trance this time, but since the Cube makes you sit down I am dangerously close to nodding off. My girlfriend actually is falling asleep and I have to keep nudging her to make sure she gets it. She doesn't and says that the band look bored, to which I reply no, they're just really into what they're doing. But I start to wonder.



The single note/chord is slowly building tension, the singer spits out some high Dickinson-style screams and then the gig really takes off. This is about twenty minutes in, mind. The psychelic, semi-improvisations kick off into furious heavy metal riffing, back to more of the hypnotic stuff then off with the metal again, spiralling upwards into the flaming backdrop. The clumsy guitarist repeatedly knocks over microphone stands, the bass player is humping his bass on the floor and while the singer screams his incomprehensible rock vocals at the stunned audience the drummer is impassive, unmoved. I can't see his hands but the sounds indicate he is as active as the rest of them.

It is all over too early and following the encore we emerge blinking into the real world a little drunk, serene and purged of all emotional stress. I am anyway, I sense relief from my other half that it is finally over.

Ashton Court Festival 2005

Horrified at the thought of becoming a lazy old man I am more determined than ever to get over there, not least because the line up this year is well worth checking out. Brushing aside moans of corporate take-overs, loss of the 'community festival', vast distances and other pathetic attempts to justify not leaving the house on a glorious day. The trek is well worth it. Last year saw ugly scenes of violence erupting by the dance stage, so the organisers decided to not have any dance this year. Boohoo. Instead, they've replaced it with the 'WKD' stage - yes, sponsorship is all over the place now. Along with 6 quid x 150,000 plus sponsorship from Bath Ales, WKD (Smirnoff, innit), Jaegermeister and the great 3vil Orange, they can't be doing too badly anymore. Oh and the pound for a shitty little piece of paper 'programme' that tells you what's on. Extremely useful, but value for money? No. These Orange boys really know how to fsck things up.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say (pre-rant) is that there is plenty of dance music anyway. It's just a bit less generic. Lots of hiphop, bashment, dub, drum and bass, electronica - surely that's enough? We had a bit of a discussion about that when the clubs got together for their little protest. So on with the experience...

 

 
SATURDAY

I arrive at about 1:50pm and quickly scanning through the programme make a beeline for the acoustic tent, where Slow are about to play. I pass Dead St. Hotel at the Venue stage, a kind of generic modern rock-pop band and the main stage where they are setting up for their next act. I pause, distracted by the sound of fast Stephane Grappelli style jazz violin. In the Colston Hall Global marquee, Sheelanagig are laying down some seriously fast and furious celtic / eastern European folk jazz reels and are very entertaining. They finish with a rendition of a Polish folk tune and I finally make it to see Slow. They are like their name, unhurried gentle harmonies and the audience is hypnotised, resting after the long walk.

In the Blackout tent I slowly cook while watching a version of the apparently actually terrible Jude Law film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which is made into a cult classic, shortened to about 40 minutes and given a brilliant soundtrack of electronica which carries the film perfectly. This should definitely be done a lot more with bad scifi, the music can appreciably change your perception of what's on the screen. Also I guess he'd cut out a lot of crap from the original film too.


Frank Dapper entertains the crowds outside, humiliating festival goers and juggling fire on top of a high unicycle. As usual, the show is all about the build up to a very impressive, albeit extremely brief feat of balance.

The Wraiths play their folk acoustic renditions of poems by the likes of Tennyson, Keats and Oscar Wilde to a packed tent. It is hard to describe how it sounds, the music fits well with the words although the guitarist is very scarey.

Some of my friends turn up. Now we have to fight to see what we want.

The Cuban Heels look set to go far. They have the sound, the upbeat guitar riffs, the pretend punk-pop that everybody else of late with lots of publicity seems to have. Whether they have the tunes and imagination to carry it off is another matter. Having said that, we leave them to see The Weary Band who suffer from poor mixing and seem somewhat more pedestrian than I remember.

A moment of uncertainty ensues, do we stay for Caroline Martin, or trek off to the other end of the site to catch Rose Kemp? The gorgeous voice of Rose wins out and she is no disappointment, playing solo on electric guitar. One of the songs falls by the wayside as the loopstation thingy suddenly decides to blast the lovely layered harmonies with loud distortion. Not sure the festival-goers notice though. She is great a cappella doing Sing your Last Goodbye to an entranced crowd. Violence seems to suffer a bit from the loss of the band, and I can't help myself feeling a twinge of regret that she doesn't have the backing. Not that it matters.

Now the event we're all waiting for, well at the announcement of 'really loud hard noise metal' most of the audience disappear as Geisha take to the stage. The space is quickly filled and from the first brutal sonic attack to the last, the front of the stage becomes a frenzied no-go area. I am gratified by the resilience of the audience, even those who seem to hate it stay put as if nailed down by the noise. This is where Geisha are supposed to be. Outside, screaming through a huge soundsystem and yet you still want to hear it louder, bigger. At the end we have the obligatory guitar-smashing, this is the biggest and best they have ever been and they are going to enjoy it. I follow a teen metaller who excitedly runs to the front of the stage and nicks the shattered remains of the singers guitar, a trophy of the first time Geisha were truly unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

Steve Harley and the Cockney Rebel do seem to only have one song and the restless audience has to wait until the very end of their set for them to play it. Until then, it's grandiose dad-rock but when they do bring out the hit Make Me Smile, everybody wakes up and has a big party for ten minutes, suddenly remembering they're at a festival. The atmosphere is quickly dulled down again by the Super Furry Animals who, while they have made an effort to get dressed up and put on a show, are just terribly dull.
A few songs into their set, I fight my way out of the atrophying crowd and find Zion Train, who know how to have a good time. A fair amount of 'One Love' stuff ensues, marred only by the lead singer getting a bit carried away and saying that all Americans are fat lazy and stupid. Now while we like to have a go at them and their country IS going to get us all killed, I think it's a bit harsh to say ALL of them are stupid...

We make our way home down the path through the woods, halfway down the lights go out so you can't see the drunk festival goers impaling themselves on barbed wire trying to get round the bottlenecks. It seems a long trek, but it's well worth it. Home. Cups of tea. Bed.


 
SUNDAY

It takes a while to get moving on Sunday. After a pub lunch to get the energy up we storm up the hill and arrive as Smerins Anti Social Club get under way. They are a great funk band, lots of storming tunes to start our day (at 5pm) on a good footing.