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Truck Festival: Saturday: Brakes, Blood Red Shoes, Piney Gir Country Roadshow, Emma Pollock, Fanfarlo, Monkey Swallows The Universe, Coley Park
Steventon, Oxfordshire
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Article
written by Ged M
Oct 7, 2007.
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A warm Saturday at Truck should mean avoiding the Barn since in past years it’s reeked of its recently departed bovine residents but this year they’ve either cleaned it really well or the cows have learned the importance of personal hygiene. The prevailing smell now is farts, BO and spliffs. Who’d have guessed that what’s making you choke isn’t B&H smoke but the eye-wateringly toxic bum-blasts from the scruffy drunk in front of you. The sooner they print warnings on lager glasses the better.
Coley Park have the dubious pleasure of playing early in the day. One track sounds like Dire Straits but it’s ‘Sultans of Swing’ so they get away with it. It’s mostly an English take on alt.country but nothing stands out as much as the excellent ‘Quiet Lanes’.
Ronnie Corbett dead? Monkey Swallows the Universe disturb my weekend by announcing the short one’s auto-related demise but they’re taking the piss. They seem to take little seriously, playing their whimsical (and pretty lightweight) folk pop, and managing a slapdash cover of Jonathan Richman’s ‘Ice Cream Man’. Much better are Fanfarlo, currently one of my favourite bands. You can still trace the influence of the Arcade Fire but they’re rapidly developing their own full-sounding baroque-pop sound. You shouldn’t miss them if there’s a chance to see them live. Then it's back in the Barn for Emma Pollock but the sound is pretty poor, muddying her voice within the mix when it’s a potent instrument by itself but at least she plays fast and loud, employing the stop-start rhythms of the Delgados to good effect.
There’s plenty of hoedown country on the main stage with the Piney Gir Country Roadshow where the azure skies and bright sun appear to have been themed to match Piney’s dress and flaming hair. That theatricality carries over to the show where the stage is filled by a multitude of gyrating Panthergirls and Pantherboys for ‘Greetings, Salutations, Goodbyes’. If Truck, for all its populist sentiment, has a monarchy, then Piney’s Queen to Goldrush’s kings.
Blood Red Shoes are named for Ginger Rogers who danced so long and hard with Fred Astaire on one movie that her white shoes were stained blood red. No chance of that in the Trailer Tent as it’s too packed to move but Blood Red Shoes make a very danceable noise for a two piece, playing drums and guitar furiously and in an ultra-rhythmic groove, like an English Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Brakes are the last band we see today and they’re the best; they play maybe every song they ever wrote (twice, in the case of ‘Cheney’), some they didn’t and some new stuff that sounds unfamiliar but instantly exhilarating. I’ve never seen a band enjoy themselves on stage as much as Brakes; how could you fail to love them when everything they do signals their passion of music? And when was the last time you saw a band at V doing it for love not paycheck?
(pictures by Ged M and Colin B)
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