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Truck 11 Festival: Sunday: Maps / Spectrum / The Tamborines / The Early Years / The Nuns / Le Volume Courbe and more
Steventon, Oxfordshire
Article written by
Ged M - Jul 25, 2008
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Sunday reminds us why we visit Steventon each year. There’s a pleasant, drowsy, hungover feel to the morning, with lots of young local bands given time on the various stages. The best we see is Tristan & The Troubadours, with their charming out of tune drone rock but I doubt the band will survive till their 16th birthdays, given the ferocity of the on-stage argument over what last song is going to be.
The programming of stages today is much better, and we spend most time in the Barn where the service from Sonic Cathedral is more eclectic than you’d imagine. The Barn still smells like a cow’s rectum all day, apart from during Spectrum’s set when it smells of another sort of shit (the good sort). It’s good to see that Winnebago Deal are still going, although the two-man metallic assault hasn’t progressed from the Barn since we first saw them at Truck years ago and the guitarist has adopted that legs-akimbo Metal stance that looks as if you have bollocks the size of watermelons.
Early Years
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Kyte are spacy shoegazers, making more use of electronics, a sort of Radiohead meets Tangerine Dream. It’s all a bit too dreamy though and I have to pinch myself awake. Le Volume Courbe are also in the Barn but are no way shoegazey. Charlotte Marionneau trembles like a wounded bird, her fluttering hands grasping the stand for support but the sound that she makes is powerful and magical; it all starts with tender tunes plucked delicately by a band that includes Terry Hall’s son Theodore on guitar, and the Clientele’s Mel Draisey, and builds up to a wall of sound climax, before finishing with their last single, the wonderfully ethereal ‘Freight Train’. They're great, as are the next Barn act, The Early Years. Their sound is less shoegazey and more electronic experimentalism: they could easily have been on, say, Warp Records with their mixture of Spaceman 3, Suicide and heavy-on-the-effects-pedals Krautrock. It’s absolutely brilliant. And then there’s the Tamborines (I told you this stage was good – consecutive great bands all afternoon). They look rockstar good and they sound good too – still My Bloody Velvet Jonestown Underground drone-pop, but they’ve made it even more melodically moreish, as the forthcoming ‘31st Floor’ single demonstrates.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Oxford band Borderville are getting art college credits for their band. Flamboyantly dressed, their glam rock-meets-vaudeville approach is more eye- than ear-catching. Anthony Elvin’s cabaret comedy songs are as arch as only a man in a purple jumpsuit can be. The Circulus man has a wicked repartee, with songs about young girls arousing naughty thoughts in the trousers worn by members of the House of Lords. Fellow Circulus man Will Summers demonstrates that you can’t beat a bit of Sunday afternoon crumhorn. My favourite band of the weekend follow Elvin on Sunday afternoon.
Julie Andrews
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The Nuns are six women (with the glamorous Panthergirls in attendance) covering songs by primitive garage rockers The Monks. It’s both a homage and brilliantly original too, combining riot grrl sass with a relentless stomping monster beat. The music has a simple, visceral effect delivered with such joy that the crowd in the packed tent are in motion from the first banjo twang to the last organ parp. The Monks’ warped genius has passed by musical osmosis to this unholy sisterhood. Later on the same stage are the Bronsteins, led by Melinda from Absentee. This is bit of a revelation, playing nothing like her role in that band; instead she’s forthright, spunky and confident with her smart and sorta-folky songs.
My one visit to the main stage on Sunday is to see Camera Obscura. They play nice, relaxing comfort-pop for the Sunday teatime slot. They’re shed any indie-nerves they used to show and now they’re very professional, dispatching one well-crafted 60s-flavoured pop tune after another. New song ‘French Navy’ suggests they continue to mine their rich seam of fey indiepop.
Sonic Boom
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I spend most of my day in the Barn thanks to the excellent line up but I’m in the car park when Spectrum start playing. Despite the distance, the long, low drone is distinctly audible and draws us to see Sonic Boom and his band. There’s only time for three songs, although his ambient noises produced from a tableful of pedals and knobs could almost count as tunes in their own right. His version of Spacemen 3’s ‘Transparent Radiation’ is a real hit and it’s a shock and a shame that they’re forced to finish after little more than 30 minutes.
Maps
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The official headliners Maps (Chapterhouse are the one-song special guests afterwards) are certainly too energetic to have time to contemplate their footwear. There are some shoegazing and dance influences but above all there’s a broad and clear strain of pop running through James Chapman’s songs. It’s pop so loud that I have to borrow earplugs for the first time: maybe they’ve been inspired by the recent MBV shows. For their final song they invite Ulrich Schnauss and Henrique Tamborine on stage to join them for a woozy, celebratory, massively distorted version of Ride’s ‘Leave Them All Behind’. It was great stuff, even as I mopped by bloody ears.
The last hour of the festival in the Piney Pavilion feels the most in tune with the Truck festival spirit. The wedding singalong has a shambolic, pick-up feel with various singers leading on different songs. The band work their way through all the songs that they know, including ‘Ever Fallen In Love’, ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, ‘American Girl’, ‘Twist and Shout’, all dredged up from drink-hazy memory. The tent gets ever fuller as the night’s musical synapses start to fray but that just lends a greater sense of fun. The final song is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’; at the point when the guitarist (the luxuriantly whiskered guitarist from Paris Motel, I think) goes into Brian May Overdrive following that “Beelzebub has a devil…” line, the whole crowd erupts into a frenzy of Wayne’s World-style mass headshaking. In that moment of friendly collective abandon, the whole spirit of Truck is evoked afresh, reminding you about why Truck is still a special event. Roll on 12.
The good photos are courtesy of Bob Stuart at Underexposed The bad ones are by J Anarchy.
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