Haldern Festival Friday - Thus: Owls / Serena Maneesh / Daniel Benjamin / Beirut / Esben & the Witch / Mumford and Sons / Delphic / Rox / Laura Marling / Fyfe Dangerfield / Detroit Social Club / Triggerfinger / Wendy McNeill / Gary
Rees-Haldern, Lower Rhine Area, Germany
Article written by
Richard F - Aug 27, 2010
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Mumford & Sons
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Friday kicked off at 9.30am in the pub, the excellent Haldern pop bar (looking like a cross between the ideal working men’s club and village boozer) serving beer and sandwiches for thirsty journalists like ourselves. By the first gig we were grateful for the alcohol; the place was packed and sweating for Gary. Now calling your band Gary takes some guts, but I’m sure that the appeal of seeing a band named after all the Gary’s of this world wasn’t why the audience was here. It turned out that the band (which had seemingly split years ago only to reform for this show) was a musical vehicle for a number of young famous actors, most notably a gentleman called Robert Stadlober, who was/is regarded as a bit of a dish by young Germanic girls. Regardless, in the bliss of ignorance, we watched a gig that will live with us to the end of our days. For one, a number of the band looked dead ringers for other people; Adam West on bass, and (most startlingly) Benny from Crossroads on drums. Secondly – outside of Stadlober - they couldn’t play a bloody note. Most crucially, the drummer lacked any kind of rhythm, or any appreciation of what songs he was playing. It got to the point where other band members were either counting him in or persuading him not to drink, or stare at the huge picture of the cow being milked behind him. No matter, it was magnificent: utterly, absolutely magnificent, mainly because the songs were so good. These were Beatles/Aztec Camera-style torch numbers, or rockers that were a bit Deacon Blue in tone, belted out by the clearly talented & competent Stadlober. And somehow, just somehow… I feel that any improvement of the band in terms of musical ability would utterly ruin them. They were perfect and the gig was triumphant.
After this we raced up to the Speigel Tent to see Wendy McNeill, play her “Folk Noir” (Musette, Klezmer, dark folk, that sort of thing - best seen on her brilliant LP “A Dreamer’s Guide to Hardcore Living”). In complete contrast to the amateur charm of Gary, McNeill played an absolutely perfect set, musically astute and canny, balanced with that hint of dark menace that we so love in her music. The gig was so compelling because the approach was so simple and frank, even if the subject matter is somewhat disconcerting at times. In essence, you can sing along to songs of murder, shape-shifting and depression without realising. To take this observation to the brink of flippancy, you could imagine a song like “Ask Me No Questions” being sung by Julie Andrews (that is, if the lyrics weren’t so off the wall). We got some new songs, which sound mesmerising and Wendy got yelled back for an encore which was entirely appropriate. Brilliant stuff.
The main stage at this point boasted Triggerfinger as its opening act. Somehow the bombast they showed was too much after the delicate patterns created by Wendy McNeill, so our judgement of them was initially quite harsh. Still, they rocked out well enough. Detroit Social Club ended up sounding like U2 a bit too often during their set, so we had to call it a day. So we ran away to the Spiegel Tent, only to be confronted by Fyfe Dangerfield, who has progressed a helluva lot since his Guillemots days, and thank goodness for that extra punchiness, but we still really can’t get our heads sufficiently round his muse. We just can’t put our finger on why we can’t, either. Back to the main stage only to be confronted by an act that was noted as “?” in the programme, which could mean one of two things; an unknown band or a band called ? … We’re still no closer to solving this and neither was the audience. No matter they also sounded just like U2, so we ran away to the Spiegel Tent again, only to be confronted by Laura Marling, who was perfectly respectable and perfectly competent but boring beyond the powers of description and possessed just enough of the whiff of Sunday school to make this old punk run a mile. I just do not understand why the tent was greeting Miss M as the answer to all their musical problems; believe us when we say there was weeping and hugging, sighs and faint wails of love and devotion. Fair enough, they paid good money.
Back then to the main stage to see Rox, whose debut LP is patchy, to say the least. Still that doesn’t matter so much when you have the talents this girl has; (including the ability to limbo dance and sing at the same time, which is well nigh impossible for 99.9% of us). And it certainly doesn’t matter when you are able to seize hold of a festival crowd and shake it into life. Haldern was at that point where the audience was waiting for things to take off, for gears to shift, for someone to pull everyone together. And Rox delivered in spades with a real display of sass and vigour. The songs that sound so stilted and unsure on the LP (mainly because they feel so bunched together, like odd bedfellows) were given room to breathe and stretch a little. And the band was marvellous; subtly giving Rox the room to display her ridiculously infectious, puppyish charm to full effect. The highlights, funnily enough, weren’t the singles, but more reflective moments like “Rocksteady” “Do As I Say” and the great “Breakfast in Bed”. Marvellous, we say go and see her play, even if her music is not your thing.
Delphic were on next and built on what Rox had started with a great display of grit and sass. Delphic create sumptuous, understated synth anthems, like “Clarion Call” and “Red Lights”, both of which were magnificent here. It helped that the sun was setting that the strobes could be used to full effect, and that the crowd had suddenly found their own identity (always on some point on the Friday, the festival audience finds it’s collective mental and emotional compass and acts on it). Still, Delphic have a number of “big” anthems that have a happy knack of not peaking too early, of having just the right amount of emotional connection, of allowing the listener enough room to reflect and react on the darker, grittier areas: tricks too rarely played by synth acts.
Interviews and other things meant we missed Post War Years, which is a shame… but caught most of Mumford and Sons on the main stage – a fact which some of the more musically precious amongst us could construe as an even bigger shame. I’m no fan: I can’t for the life of me understand the seemingly unquenchable thirst for folksy harmonies: nor the fashion for about 50 guest musicians on stage at once amount (it’s this Sunday school “thang” you see). However they rocked out at times and the crowd was visibly content. And that’s all I can manage without sarcasm. Look, a million other websites will write better appraisals of them than me. Off to something I really did want to see, Esben & the Witch. Yet again we confronted a band who preferred to be unseen, preferring swathes of dry ice and backlighting to put the visual message across. As if this wasn’t enough, the singer mooched about under a hooded top. (Themes of the year seem to be the swapping of instruments taken to ridiculous lengths and wishing to hide on stage – is this what using computers does to Youth?). Still: however unprepossessing in appearance, the band’s music was pretty bloody great. The influences were there for all to hear; Cocteau Twins (the lad on guitar had got that “Love’s Easy Tears” era Guthrie sound off to a tee), Siouxie and XMAL Deutschland provided most of the ingredients for this particular sonic pudding. But spotting their influences didn’t really matter, as they certainly have something individual to offer in terms of attitude and a particular vision (even if these things could only be sensed rather than pinpointed). And the gig boasted a great ending: what had been a drifting, dreamy set was suddenly turned on its head with the last track morphing into a mini rave-up, GusGus style.
We should say that we caught a bit of Beirut on the main stage but there’s something about the lad’s muse that continually fails to spark our interest. Maybe it’s our suspicion that the man’s personality is dependent on whatever musical stylings happen to take his fancy. No matter. Back to the Spiegel Tent for Daniel Benjamin, who provided the comedy moment of the day by diving into an audience that resolutely refused to be dived on. Luckily Daniel’s music is of such calibre that any such embarrassments can be swiftly & easily overlooked. His songs possess a beautiful reflective pop vibe that puts this reviewer in mind of the Blue Nile, Aztec Camera or an MOR Pale Fountains (if you could envisage such a thing). And his music is about the only Emo-tinged stuff I can listen to without feeling that immediate violent retribution should be enacted upon the perpetrator. He has talent in spades. Serena Maneesh were on the main stage after Daniel; a band that knocked us down in slightly hysterical wonderment last time we saw them at Haldern back in 2007, even though that gig must rank as one of the messiest sets we’d ever seen.
This time the band decided that any experiment would be cast aside: energies were channelled into a show of brutal intent. The last track must have chugged on at ear-splitting volume for 15 minutes: a digitised Sister Ray for this folksy crowd. As if that wasn’t enough the track’s sonic after-burn grumbled on for a further 10 minutes. Wonderful. It seems this lot could achieve a kind of greatness in retrospect. Then it was back to the Tent for more Scandinavian invention; this time in the shape of Thus: Owls (bloody daft name if you ask me, but there again, you should hear my Swedish…). We liked their debut LP even if it was a tad academic and awkward. But as a live band this lot is a cut above. Being uniformly good looking in that Nordic way doesn’t hurt either and the girl singer’s voice is a thousand times more powerful live than it is on the record. Mein Gott, she gives it some thump, live. The difference with Thus: Owls and other bands of this genre (you know, the folksy, “Play at Home” types) is that they emit a lot of presence and willpower. The track when the girl singer rants on about running through the fields of Norway was a highlight simply down to the band’s character and attack; Lordy, does the girl singer let the audience know she enjoyed running through them there fields. New songs sounded great too: this lot is onto something special. After that we were knackered and couldn’t face Junip, though we heard they were good: Bedfordshire for us, even if it meant slumbering alongside 4,000 or so increasingly frenzied Germans hell-bent on burning everything in sight.
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