Bestival 2007 review for Fact Magazine: All rise

It's kind of hard to review Bestival without reeling off a long list of its many good points, but here goes, for Fact in September 2007:

Bestival does what no amount of earnest costume drama, lame tube advert or eager yoof retrospective can: it makes you feel genuinely, honestly, a little bit proud to be British. Rob Da Bank’s Isle of White festival has been taking the logical step of recreating a dusky summer country fete for four years now, and how: it’s been voted the country’s best small/medium festival and this year, tickets sold out double-speed. You’ve probably been told how good it is. September’s event saw the world’s best tea party nearly double in size on last years. It was, in no uncertain terms, spectacular. Though still a “boutique festival,” its 30,000 festival-goers made up the world’s biggest fancy dress party, there were 14 different stages where you could be entertained, and whether or not you can call a festival that featured heavy hitters like the Beastie Boys, Primal Scream and Madness alongside the latest upandcomers “small to medium” is in dispute.
But, still… Bestival retained its small town character; this is a festival put together by people who actually really, really know what they are doing. Rob and his mates have been through the filth, godlessness and magic that marks any festival – though most sorely lack the last part of the equation. They totally get what you what you want at every hour of the day. It’s Friday afternoon, you’ve just got in, you don’t want to queue for anything, so the bars are fully staffed. After partying at the Introducing tent till the wee small hours, come Saturday afternoon, more than anything, you want to play on a Coconut Shy and drink lemonade while listening to dub. In the Bestivalley you can! Listening to Bat For Lashes and eating lemon drizzle cake lifts Sunday morning’s fuzzy brain fuzz perfectly. People stand around selling the Observer in organic cotton sacks, on Sunday. As an aside, this is brilliant – even lying in a field, having slept in tent the size of a coffin for 4 hours over two days while teenagers threaten to steal shoes while we sleep and crapping in toilets that set off ‘Nam flashbacks, we’re still middle-class. Strangers, even as friendly as the Bestival crowd, need something to talk about, so surprise guests are speculated about left, right and centre and some of the most exciting acts are on at the Hidden Disco. Where is it? No body knows! For the first two hours at least! What else do you want from a festival? How about the world’s biggest fancy dress party? 20,000 people dressed as pirates, Lego men, Amy Winehouse, jellyfish and biscuit packets, and everything in between, makes for one motherload of happy. Especially when people forget they’re in fancy dress – the sight of a Crayola crayon having a lover’s tiff with a Ghostbuster will be making me and my girlfriend grin idly at work for months. It’s weird – it’s almost like they want you to have a good time…
Not that Mr and Mrs Da Bank (husband does the music stuff, wife does the arty stuff) are obsequiously giving us what we want – there is an agenda at work here. Firstly, there’s the huge peace sign subliminally and unsubtly placed over the rig in the main arena. Then there’s the constant appeals to pick your litter up, not “poo or wee” anywhere but the loos, the biodegradable plates and the recycling bins everywhere. Your mum would be proud of this festival, but that’s awesome: your mum’s great, she makes lovely spag bol, she was right about that haircut you had in 1998 and she brought you up, so she must have been doing something right: it’s just nice to stay at a site you don’t want to burn down like LA in 1992. There’s also another agenda here with the programming – though each one of the 14 stages has a distinct identity, it’s hard to stay at the same one for more than one or two acts, so great is the musical diversity of each tent. A lovely effect is created; rather than shacking up in the Dance tent and not moving till shin splints set in, you’re gently coerced into mixing about, trying out stages and events you might never bother with. Artistic manifestos – so long as they’re kept completely deniable – are magnificent, and this extends to booking virtual unknowns main stage slots. Nathan – A & R not Guys & Dolls – Detroit played before the Chemical Brothers, and Beardyman (champion comedy beatboxer: far better than he sounds) was sandwiched between Kate Nash and The Beastie Boy’s instrument set. It’s a sweet, very appreciated idea – hearing people praise Beardyman for the first time feels like watching your kid win the egg and spoon race.
Not too surprisingly, with a festival that celebrated more than anything else crowdpleasing and fun dance music, young pup or leftfield legend, the only real disappointment of the weekend (apart from Rob failing to declare himself the messiah, or at least king of the world) was the Beastie’s decidedly selfindulgent headline set. A band whose greatest moments evoke teenage kicks more than any other should know that what every person wants to hear Sabotage played twenty times in a row really, really loud, not watch a man born in the 60s tell us that the Isle of Wight is actually the “Isle of Mike” before launching into a jazz-funk didgeridoo jam. Cheers, but… This lapse notwithstanding, the music was peerless all weekend – it was the last night of Patrick Watson’s tour, but he played like it was the last night of his life, Go! Team were revelatory, Digital Mystikz’s night bus blues were achingly beautiful, Tom Brosseau broke hearts, Buraka Som Systema were terrific, Foals predictably killed it – but the real highlights were the non-musical ones. Learning how to Mambo, chatting rubbish to strangers, the Cockney Knees Up, not getting lost once, listening to a poetry slam in a yurt and laughing at the cunningly titled Jestival all made the weekend, as much as any individual band. Comedy tent headliner Andrew Maxwell, in between howling at the moon and yelling at breakdancers summed the spirit up nicely a few week ago: “At every single festival you get a few arseholes waving national flags, even at Glastonbury, that haven of the British left, whatever the fuck that means. At Bestival, the only flags people wave are the skull and crossbones.” Bestival: the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Cajun Dance Party live review for Fact Magazine: Air violence

A curmudgeonly live review of Cajun Dance Party from Summer 2007:

Cajun Dance Party take the prize in this egg and spoon race. One of many bands heading up the Way Out West charge of tremendously exciting bands born in the nineties, CDP are feted as heroes tonight, the penultimate date of their first headline tour. Taking to the stage through the crowd to the strains of World, four-fifths of CDP plug in and play, stating on the one. There’s no time to wait. It’s straight into the opening, future anthem chords of Time Falls. After giving it a couple of minutes, Singer Danny wanders through the scrum, resplendent in blood clot inducing trousers and hand-me-down jacket, looking like nothing so much as Tiny Tim sketched by Jim Henson. Right on cue, he launches into song, a nasal whine tangled round the mic stand.
Though Danny strutted his way happily through the set, yelping into the crowd, and getting every person under 18 into a tiz, guitarist Max was the standout, the thing that lifted the band out of the “cool band” stupor into something that could, perhaps, be magnificent. Subconsciously paying homage to that age old indie set-up of slightly irritating singer / great guitarist (hmm, Suede, Blur, Stone Roses, The Verve) his winding yet acerbic, exuberant yet tighter than sewn-in jeans jam was incredible. His shout out of “this guitar’s new. The man who gave it to me is called [hammy pause for suspense]… Bernard Butler” was a sweet and unreconstructed homage. The tracks are good, clean, and fun, brilliantly arranged and professionally preformed. Very professionally – Danny’s electro-shock boogie, his cuddling of Max, his fey mumble “Brighton, we love you,” Max’s sonic youth meets Spinal Tap strutting – CDP are damn close to the bedroom mirror. Not that this is a cynical appropriation of rock history. Far from it – they are literally the opposite of cynical. Rather that this gig felt somehow phoned in, rehearsed, appropriated.
But why is that such a big deal? How many gigs do you go to when the music not the stage show is identikit, lifted straight from the annals of Britpop (urgh) history? When the music is uninspiring, over-rehearsed and copy-cat? That’s not the case with this band – CDP are make great, fun songs that, though never jaw droppingly original, are never dull. Crowd wise, how many dancey gigs have you been to only to bemoan the lack of dancing? Why does it matter when a band so full of vim go through the motions? The factor that made the other night slightly wanting is, and I’ve been trying to avoid this, age. Not just of the band, but of the audience. They could have quite easily packed out an over eighteens show, but opening it up to over 14’s (this is such an everyday occurrence that it doesn’t even have to be mentioned at ticket retailers) it’s an just more energetic, more wild, it’s less knowing, more grinning, but sets anyone over the age of nineteen as an observer than a participant. Facing the crowd rather than a face in it. Take the moshing – it is guilty pleasure, and a bit of a daft-but-fun thing to do, but for the pit last night, it was their first time slam-dancing. It’s strange watching things that you did when you were younger done by people younger and it can’t help but seem like the band are going through the motions - enacting rock’n’roll’s rituals as much as enjoying them. Even the stage invasion felt practiced and safe – it was the air guitar of violence.
Why are journalists so fascinated by the phenomenon of under-18 nights? That’s obvious: standing in a crowd of under 18 year olds and you instantly feel, well, old. Somehow, strangely, out of the club. And that comes from the band – there is an edge (or, more accurately, a lack of an edge), an energy, a certain wide-eyedness that seems both exuberant and but a also little naïve. Listen to them on CD and you’re blown away – the Guardian recently called final song The Next Untouchable, their I Wanna Be Adored” with only fifteen stone of hyperbole. See them live (at an over 18 show) and they’re just brilliant – when they were 11 months younger, I saw them in Edinburgh, and they sounded more like the future of rock’n’roll than any cynical no r/wave. See them at an underage show and all the above will still be true. It’ll still be a great party, even though the party isn’t (y)ours. Halfway through the encore, the stage got rushed. First, a couple moshers climbed on the stage. They climbed fully behind the amps, gleeful, before the entire crowd ran forward to party with the band. The older people (all journalists, as far as I could tell) hung back and couldn’t tell musicians from fans. That, all things aside, is a beautiful thing.

Fact Magazine's 2007 Great Escape Review: Do You Love Rock And Roll?

2007's Great Escape in review, written in the wee small unprofessional hours before a trip to Amsterdam:

The Great Escape, is not really a festival, despite appearances to the contrary, like exhaustion, cheap noodles and tinnitus. It’s more a trade fair, where the great and the good of the UK music media pop down to the sea-side to snap up the Next Big Thing. The Kooks exploded off the back of last year’s, and a little band called Klaxons went from being, well, the Klaxons, to being the most influential band of 2006. That, essentially, is why a) there was not a truly shit band on all weekend b) punters queued for hours everywhere while smug laminate-badged delegates casually strolled in and c) tips were the talk of the town. Rockabilly-Metal band Gallows and you-saw-them-here-first Foals were the bands everyone was pretending to have seen. Less talked about (in grown-up circles, at least) but an equally dead cert is Jack – Jamie T meets Shakin’ Stevens - Peňate. Fact’s photographer was nearly torn apart limb-by-limb by a mob of sixteen year-old girls (think Combat 18 in Topshop skirts) who’d been waiting for Jack for god knows how long, and they smelled blood. Jack Penate for number 1, then: if there’s one thing to never bet against in pop music, it’s teenage girls hell-bent on ultra-violence.
Once you accept this fundamental fact about the Great Escape (that it is half hype sweatshop, half riot) you can actually concentrate on the music, man. And so much music! There is a great correspondence between the ADHD itch that 120 bands spread across 20 odd venues encourages and the agitated, jumpy rhythms so many of the bands played. Fear Of Flying, for example, are an excellent post-punk, angular, jerky three piece. If that sounds familiar, it was. A great band, but in five years we’ll say “yeah. That was 2007, that was.” By contrast, Late Of The Pier were mind-blowing, precisely because they didn’t sound like 2007 – on Thursday night they sounded like half nine on 17th May 2007. Beautiful.
CSS were a nicely riotous start to the weekend. A 200 strong moshpit generates enough heat to make Brazilians sweat, and they repaid the favour. After a quick chat with the bloke from the aforementioned Fear Of Flying, it was off for some cheap noodles and an early(ish) night. The battle was won, but the war had just begun. Friday night, the dash started.
The Hat came out on top – a smashing bunch whose rapping rockabilly meets Jackanory thing won the local types over at Sunday Best. Plus, the keyboardist Dave took time out of making a pizza to chat about the sea and ley-lines, so they are well and truly in my good books. After them were Kitty, Daisy and Lewis - the band that every mum wishes they were in. The same could not be said about either Gallows or zZz, who both caused the best bit of aggro since Stalingrad, a ruck rivalled only by the scene outside the just fucking phenomenal Foals. We knew they would destroy, but it didn’t half make us proud when they did.
Some of the best experiences are those you least expect – you could wander into the back of a pub and be blown away having seen the world’s greatest band. Music is a deeply personal thing, and experiences are most fruitful when they are unplanned. Whilst I broadly go along with these ideas, there is a the eternal risk of watching some Icelandic bint swanning around to a xylophone solo that Enya would have called “a bit naff,” as happened at Adjagas. Sometimes the ace, sometimes the deuces.
Two of the most optimistic moments of the weekend came from the hip hop side of things, for once. The chorus of Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius P’s opener might have been “hip-hop is arse”, “art” or “ours” – all of which sum up the state of play for HH this year dead-on. Spleen gave me the biggest grin all weekend not just because he won the crowd with his 175 bpm beatboxing, Bad Brains hardcore and pink tutu. We chatted backstage as he presided over his bandmate’s proposal to a punter. Seemingly unaware of the adoring (and obscene) platitudes that passing audience members thrust his way, he told me “art can change the world… I love rock and roll so much. Do you love rock and roll?”

Holy Hail for Fact's New Talent

A lovely, lovely band that I've had had the pleasure of interviewing a few times. Here's the first one though, from early Spring 2007, courtesy of Fact Magazine:

You know that bit in the Wicker Man when Edward Woodward first sees Britt Eckland, and he’s actually offended by how fit she is? Hearing Holy Hail is like that dancing to that glance. They’re the dance-punk band that is so warm, pretty, delicate, dark and different that it’s a little bit frightening.
A band that are as seductively clever as they are subtly riotous they formed eating in the clouds above the streets of the Rotten Apple: “Kevin and Cat [then with fantastically named Booty Bass band Fannypack] met at a rooftop summer barbecue in New York and came up with the conceptual ideas for Holy Hail. Matt came into the practice room one day and a week later he was playing drums in the band.” When Cat’s mate from Chicago Michal joined, HH’s rise from NY buzz to velvet, underground superstars was set. Their live shows at Trash, Adventures Close To Home and The Do Club on this side of the pond have established them as the band to bliss out the jams to live. One reason is that they have a habit of dressing up as the cast of Karate Kid, another is that they clubs “parties.” The biggest of all is that they sound like the band you and your mates wanted to be in when you were ten.
Their shit draws on all to wide a set of influences for them ever to become pigeonholed. You can hear shades of Giorgio Moroder’s tingly backbeats, Scott Walker’s darkly divine country, Chic’s black Panther disco and The Neptunes’ honeyed hip-hop vocals on their tracks. Seeing them live is like being an invited to your mate’s sister uni party when you were 16. Hearing them in a sweat-drenched club is nothing short of life affirming. It reminds you why you give a shit about music. “We want to keep pushing the envelope and keeping it interesting - surprising ourselves and writing songs we love to play and listen to. Inspiration can come from politics, love, history, southern boogie, western expansion, eastern winds and northern lights.” All Hail!

Born of A Star single comes the first week in April on adventures close to home recordings w. remixes by Shir Khan and Bondo Do Role.
Big Guns EP coming out on Kanine Recs in the States around the same time, remixes by Rory P and Dave P / Adam Sparkles.

Chrome Hoof for Fact

"Chrome Hoof's doom disco feels space" was the title of this, the first band preview I did for Fact, from way back in January 2007:

“Our twelve foot tall ram got caught in our Disco Ball during one gig.” Bouncers had to wrestle him free, which they weren’t best pleased about,” says Chrome Hoof bassist Leo Smee. Making it possible to write sentences like that isn’t the only reason that the Hoof will destroy everything, but it’s up there. The real reason is that they play the most horrendous doom metal with glistening disco-funk soldered on. That and they sound like MDMA Valhalla live.
Leo, bassist with Death/Doom gods Cathedral, started playing warehouse parties with his brother Mylo on drums about five years ago. They had both been massive fans of funk and disco for years, and yearned to play the sort of music that they’d been digging for so long. They also wanted to have fun live with as many people as would fit on a stage. First to be recruited was Chloe, the Bassoonist. “I met her on the street, and started talking to her about her instrument, and told her she should play with us. That’s how most people joined: I scared them on the street.” Before long, the beast grew and grew into the twelve plus member’d behemoth it is now.
The stage show eats every other band alive. Besides the aforementioned 12” ram, there are street sweepers, robots and day-glo monks, all combining to produce the most amazingly stupefying (and stupid) live show since Funkadelic. “Dressing up’s very important. The visual sense, it gives a band an identity, and its been lost over the years, I think. It’s basically having a right laugh, and some people’ll get, and some won’t. It’s creating a visual story, something that people can go away and talk about.” I tell him, slightly over-excitedly, that the Hoof will rule the world one day. Then I ask how they would change the world. He thinks and says “play one note that starts a tidal wave that engulfs the world. And make it more interesting, with better stories. Yeah, that’s about it.”

Beyond Zade EP out on Rise Above records, album out in the summer

www.myspace.com/chromehoof

Richard Milward interview for Dazed and Confused

I wrote a piece for Dazed about a pretty and moving book about love on council estates in December 2006:

Concerned with two adolescents on a sink estate in Middlesbrough, Richard Milward's Apples tells the story of Adam, a shy Beatles obsessive with OCD who is desperately in love with Eve, the pill-crunching, Bacardi Breezer-guzzling school beauty. Where this gem of a book distinguishes itself is in the charm, freshness and sheer humanity that the author brings to the characters. "I wanted the Middlesbrough in Apples to be colourful and manic and beautiful," Richard says. "It's got a terrible reputation really (you know, heroin, pollution, deprivation), but it's actually a very fun place to be."
Despite the miles of column inches spent discussing "the chav", actual, humane reports on what life is like growing up on an estate in Anthony Blair's Britain have been ridiculously thin on the ground. Apples, then, is a revelation. The "anti-Macho fairy tale," as Richard describes it, is told by a mixture of the two heroes – and they are that – but also a cast of drug dealers, date rapists, graffiti writers, butterflies, drug dealers, lampposts and unborn babies.
Apples will probably be described as Kes in day-glo or A Catcher in The Rye for Smiths fans, but this short, unassuming and charming first novel, half of which was written by Richard during art college and half while on the dole, stands in a class of its own. "In a way, I had a sort of double life mirroring Adam and Eve's," he says, "except I don't have to shut things all the time, and I've never been caught wanking in my attic."

Foals live for Fact

A piece of wide-eyed hyperbole from Feb 2007, an online review of the first Foals headline tour. Yeah, they were really, really good:

Bliss it is to be alive, and to be young is very heaven: Foals are the revolution. Soon the knife-sharpeners will call us liars, but we know what love is. Their set was more than a great set by an-up-and-coming myspace b(r)and soon to have the hype-rug pulled. It felt like the stuff that might, one day, maybe, be legendary.

Fair enough, an arty band with a set of clever influences and a set of clever haircuts were never going to do badly in Brighton – Death Sentence: PANDA sold out the other week, for God’s sake. The crowd, however, was more than the usual scene kids and record-shop workers – old ravers, this dubstep producer I vaguely know, even (shock, horror) some boring-looking people were down to pack the place out. The sense of anticipation, man, you could feel it. When Foals came on stage, Audio screamed. We were dancing to the soundcheck.

They destroyed live, by the way. The second the sound check faded, they blasted into some hi-NRG spidery afrobeat that made the kids say “yeah!” Yannis (yelping, guitars, channelled charisma) jumped off the stage against the barrier and avoided getting smacked by Walter (bass-lines, strutting). At the end of the song, he said “what is this fucking barrier about?” only to spoil/emphasis the rockstar cliché by following it with “if anyone wants to come up, we’d be cool with that.” The banter was tightly pitched and perfect. By the time Hummer’s “QUIET HEARTBEATS” chant started, every person that had been dragged to the gig by their mates were in love. A few people have cussed the boys for sticking to the Bloc Party line, but, basically, fuck them. This band pack more ideas into a three minute record than I ever learnt in school, and at the end of the day the mark of a great band is making you need more songs just like the one before – not playing a set of handbrake turns. And, whisper it – they're young, stupid and bright enough to walk the beaten path of disposable pop and precocious rock and snotty punk, and they're just about fast enough for it to sound blissfully NOW. At the breakdown of Balloons they raise their hands into the trance shuffle – it’s fitting, and euphoric.
This was their homecoming, after all.

This is why they deserve every inch and blog post and friend add. A lucky few were there at the off, seeing them tear apart squat parties and make girls dance. They’re the smug ones. In these diagonal days, when a band’s first single is the difficult second album, when there’s ten passably amazing music experiences available a week and one genuinely thrilling one a year, Foals are a revelation. A fist pounding, swaying, jumping revelation, for the simple reason that they torch every last-week notion in the way that new rock music always has done.

This is why the Foals are the band of 2007. They are not consciously revolutionising rock: they are simply playing the music that they dig as they see fit, and are unashamed of who they are. They know that there is nothing strange about being into indie and dance music, nothing out-of-sync with an iPod playlist that jumps from Don Cab to Timbaland, nothing contradictory about digging hands-in-the-air techno and knowing who Kurt Vonnegut is, nothing novel about making adventurous, high-concept music that’s closer to Steve Reich than Razorlight that the proverbial milkman could whistle along to. Where Foals set themselves apart is by taking this formula (pop + abstract + guitar + brains) and playing it so naturally, so assuredly that it hardly seems strange. Which it isn’t, when it comes down to it. Why the Klaxons have dated so badly (can you imagine a time before Gravity’s Rainbow) is that they sounded like a novelty band when they were just playing an absurdly natural mix of music, like a kitchen sync drama with canned laughter.

This is why Foals absolutely destroy. Believe, they are Cool (that's what Arena will be telling you in ten months) but their studied charm is both furiously worked and genuine and shy and barrel-chestedly confident. That’s why you got people dancing on the stage three minutes into the set. It’s why people yell in the faces of bouncers who tell them, politely, to get off the stage. It’s why Foals felt like whatever the fuck rock n roll was supposed to feel like. It’s because Foals are ours.

We want a band that delivers that the things I’ve rambled about, but without any pretensions, without any knowing winks or smug spot-my-references. We want a band that feels it. That doesn’t need a pat on the back for liking grime. That gets where we’re coming from. That can get on with the job of moving 300 heard-it-all-before Brightonians. That grabs today, this minute, this second in a chokehold. A band yells in the face of (the) Zeitgeist “THIS IS HARDCORE!!!” One that makes us dance and say “YEAH!!!”

Snottily charimastic singer Yannis, equal parts Che Guevara and Hugh Grant, was dancing and yelping, unaware to the manic energy of the stage rushers when the music cut out. The spider’s jazz punk ended and a quick apology, laughing rather than fawning, was issued like a manifesto: “This has happened every single fucking night of the tour. Hold tight!” They calmly twiddled knobs and jangled nerves. Driving bassist Walter, who looked like the Student Union Paul Simonon, span round on his heels as soon as the drums started to twitch into life, at once glorious and unaware and worked. And beautiful. And triumphant. Foals are now!