Truck Festival 2014 - a miscellany.

I wasn't intending to blog this evening but so what. I'm still thinking about Truck and in two weeks I shall be off to the orthogonal word of festivals once again, so I had best keep up.
After two posts comprising the goings-on at one small stage, this is going to be a bit different. I did visit the main stage, quite often actually, and the Veterans and Virgins Stage too. I visited the Shed Stage, if only once and briefly.

It is a fairly modern agricultural shed, and it smells the part but has a certain charm I suppose. At times it was, I am told, more crowded than a veal crate, but with willing humans. To the point that security, which generally has very little to do at Truck, had to restrict entry on valid grounds. It would certainly be more atmospheric when it was dark outside.
On the other hand, and on the main stage, I saw two bands that I first saw at End of The Road Festival 2013 (EOTR) on the Thursday on a small stage. I was very impressed then and remain so now. Both are Truck-friendly, guitar-wielding types and they went down very well with a sizeable crowd basking in the scorching sunshine on Friday.

North Wales five-piece Catfish and The Bottlemen, Truck Stage on Friday afternoon.

They nailed this and that will give them much to savour - the début LP 'The Balcony' is released in the UK on September 15 and in North America in early 2015.
A little later, so Friday early evening, came a band well accustomed to playing in such adorable weather - Los Angeles duo Deap Vally.  I purchased the 2013 début LP Sistrionix (on vinyl) after seeing them live at EOTR. This bought back a comment from then, which is that "nobody takes pictures of drummers". This is often because they are hidden right at the back of the stage, I guess.

 Since Julie Edwards was not so hidden, and the light was terrific, here she is.
Whilst I am on the subject of Deap Vally, what the hell?  This is both of them.

A little later that evening I headed, on a strong recommendation and one that proved to be absolutely spot on, to the Veterans and Virgins stage to see an artist that I had never seen before and was only very faintly aware of and quite probably neither are you. Let's put it this way, she is from a musical family.

Mary Epworth.

Her music is percussive and heartfelt, based around anything from UK folk to south-eastern European rhythm via prog and psych rock, including Greek influences; bouzouki infiltrated UK folk from Asia Minor, via Greece, in the 20th century so why not? Her only LP to date is 'Dream Life' (2012).

If that description sounds like a recipe for a train wreck then, given the degree of control exercised here, it is most certainly not. Live however, it is quite the thrilling ride. One of the best acts at Truck Festival 2014.

To summarise the last four posts Truck is a great festival for (especially) new music, is well run, very friendly and remarkably good value for money. This last point applies not just to the tickets but on-site catering and bars. The drinks were marginally cheaper, like for like, than the equivalent in any worthwhile pub in my home town of Frome, Somerset.

And so to finish as I started with another picture of the first act that I saw - Heavy Heart.

In a curious twist of fâte my post today included the début album 'Not Kings' from the first act I saw at Truck Festival 2013, Candy Says, on 180g 12" vinyl. Some things are well worth the wait.

Truck Festival 2014 - settled in The Saloon

It happens that this last weekend I ended up too busy to complete the post about my time spent in The Saloon at Truck Festival the previous one.  I wasn't even involved with music, though plenty more has now come my way, by hook and by crook. I'm always on the lookout for new music but I am certainly never going to complain when it comes to me from its author (so more for later in the week).
It is a hard life but by Friday evening at Truck Festival I was comfortable in the saloon. I returned later Friday evening to see a band that, until I was in The Saloon last year, I was completely unaware of:

The Redlands Palomino Company and now the 2014 LP 'Carelessly Broken'.

I had heard the album, it was released in April and I purchased it, but live it is something else. In this case I will serve my blog with pictures taken live and refer you to this review of the album; we don't need to trample on each others feet, there is plenty of music to go round. It was probably just Saturday but whatever; it was time to catch The Dreaming Spires on the small stage.

I find it next to impossible to tear myself away any time pedal steel is involved.

Right. We are now into Saturday proper and that was to provide surprises all of its own.  I can't be two places at once and saw Italian duo M+A on the main stage instead, so the first Saloon act I saw was  the second to play and that was The Buffalo Skinners.

More a Truck-typical guitar band than most on this smallest of stages is, however, not a half-hearted compliment. It was good, very good, and beyond that it is the variety, across any and all stages, that is one of the strongest points of Truck Festival. It may not be huge, might not have the biggest of head-liners but ultimately it is the strength in depth and the values that matter.

After this, I have to admit, I took a sizeable time-out to visit the other stages and have something to eat. Before returning in the evening I headed back to see another artist of whom I was hitherto quite unaware - Nova Scotian Gabriel Minnikin - and that decision was repaid many times over. In the space of a half-hour set.

Takamine 12-string backed only by pedal steel and occasional harmonica. Guitar porn.

In the evening I headed back in good time to see My Darling Clementine as I had heard many good reports. I made sure to arrive in time in order to get a good spot and hopefully some pictures.

 I accomplished that mission and caught The Saloon at the quietest I saw it all weekend.

    

Every band needs a tour manager and front-of-house presence and My Darling Clementine certainly has one.  I was sitting by the bar, making sure my camera settings were good before the set (I had made that mistake earlier in the afternoon) when she introduced herself - she is their daughter and is not yet in her teens.  This might have caught me off guard had I not, a couple of years ago and also at a festival, met Ned The Kids' Dylan for the first time in somewhat similar circumstances although in this case he was the artist and his parents tour managers and all the rest.

The set was top drawer. Music and asides combined beautifully.

Next up was Hans Chew and while I was aware of his music I wasn't quite expecting this.

If I had to select one picture that I took in The Saloon, that really sums the whole stage up...

This is it.

Truck Festival 2014 - life, live in The Saloon

This time last Friday evening I was exactly in the place I'm about to write about. By the end of a festival weekend there is often something of a desire to spend a weekend at home (writing about it). To be honest, however, I'd quite happily be back there or somewhere similar right now.
Almost all of the time that I wasn't watching electric guitar bands on the main stage, or the equivalent delights of the Barn stage, this is likely where I was to be found instead. It has already featured in my posts about Truck Festival 2014 and certainly did so heavily in those of Truck Festival 2013. It was a new feature then. I know what I like when I come across it and my only concern was whether it could live up to my memories of it last year.
I'm not one to be shy of seeking out new music, especially in genres that I like - and so very much including folk, roots and Americana - yet last year it served up several acts the knowledge of which I was quite naïve. It was certainly no less so this year but I made it something of a mission to explore and, if possible, photograph. I'm not sure how well I succeeded in the latter but I thoroughly enjoyed trying. The music was amazing. All of it.

The action started a couple of hours after that on the other stages: at 2:20pm Friday with Delta Mainline. A big sound on a small stage, and a guitar band (vide infra) to boot, that hails from Edinburgh.
Three things to note here:

• The Saloon is just a tin shed (as many of the prototypes no doubt were) but sheds and music have a certain affinity - particularly this one!
• It is one stage on which a wide-angle lens is as useful as a telephoto one, and I'm still missing a band member here.
• The Dreaming Spires' drum-kit is generic, for all to use, although the band did perform there twice over the weekend too.

This is one from the outside, looking in. The Saloon has doors that open both ways and that, for important reasons, one can see both over and under.

Otis Gibbs - Saturday afternoon.

   

By mid-afternoon I felt like I was part of the furniture, often sat on the floor, and either nobody seemed to notice or they didn't care. That is a good place in which to be.

The August List. The duo have yet to release an album, but it is in the works. Watch this space!

After this I wandered back out into the summer sunlight for a few hours, only to return without remembering to change my camera settings for the evening gloom back in The Saloon. As luck would have it the next act was 'Rutland troubadour' Paul McClure. My bacon was saved because his tales between songs are as long as, if maybe not actually longer than, the songs themselves. As for the song and what it is about, Lord only knows. 

We are up to early Friday evening now.

Putting this supposed précis together is actually taking longer than listening to the original performance. Do I regret starting this - post or even festival-going? Hell no.
Maybe I shall split the post into a Saturday portion and a Sunday one but, either way, I'm not going to finish it on Friday.
And not to be finished on Saturday either, but for different reasons. Riding the iron horses...

Truck Festival 2014 - Guitar bands, and all that...

I think that it is fair to say that Truck Festival leans towards guitar bands, especially electric ones. This is exemplified by the head-liners; The Cribs (Friday) did the honours and White Lies (Saturday). That is just fine by me and I shall return to that later. I have never really been one to choose my festival choices by dint of the headline acts --- Arcade Fire at Latitude 2007 being a huge exception and sine qua non the reason for my festival going renaissance.
The point here is that, being typically Richard, I didn't actually see any of either set last weekend and purely out of choice. I have seen both on the main stage at Latitude Festival in the past, enjoyed them hugely, but I just felt it was time to turn my attention to music on other stages. It wasn't something I had planned in advance. It just turned out that way.
The first message here, I suppose, is that it would be wrong to consider Truck Festival to be hidebound in that regard. I am of the opinion that much of the best that the vibrant festival scene has to offer is to be found by looking at the artist list entirely the other way about: as though in a mirror, starting with the first artist on the least significant stage.

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop."

That sound advice, as well as being in this case an apposite Oxonian reference, is truer of festivals than Lewis Carroll could possibly have known when writing in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.  The Cheshire Cat and The Mad Hatter's* tea-party aside --- Truck and all other festivals have robust policies that militate against the use of illegal substances --- but to be fair they weren't proscribed when he was writing.
That, however, is history. There is speculation, of course: maybe Fleetwood Mac will headline Glastonbury 2015, maybe they won't. That is a discussion for another day. This is all about the music that actually happened on a farm in Oxfordshire last weekend.

I'll tell you something about this.  The little digital thermometer on my camera strap was reading 39ºC (102ºF) inside the Market Stage early on Saturday afternoon and I was wilting whilst just watching.
Guitar banditry this most certainly is not. 
   

Accompanied only by sparse, but therefore also very effective, keys and acoustic guitar - Ella Martini.

Recording status: unsigned.
Category: urban (the kind of urbs that Romans, and us too, would aspire to).

*The Mad Hatter was actually a victim of hydragyria, mercury poisoning, and as a result of the felt making process. That affliction was also well attested in Roman times but as a result of the use of mercury in other applications.

Truck Festival 2014

This weekend gone I headed off into the Oxfordshire countryside for two days of music at Truck Festival 2014. Now I have had a little time to reflect on it and also look at the pictures it is time to start writing. First of all a picture that I didn't take myself, and some thanks to the weather gods...

It was a weekend in which much of the UK experienced some unusually violent summer storms. Viewed over the camper-van area and car park on Saturday afternoon this one just missed us but visited hailstones 2cm in diameter on Oxford, which is barely ten miles away. For the most part however, it was hot and sunny.
I'm always keen to catch the opening acts on as many stages as I can and this was no exception. I will add a link as soon as I can (there are many bands called Heavy Heart worldwide) but this one from South London, with its New Wave echoes, was a good first act to see.
Note added 29 July:
Heavy Heart can be found here - many thanks to the band for providing confirmation of this.

The Veterans and Virgins Stage, early Friday afternoon.

I visited all five stages at some time or other but little from the Barn Stage will feature as I spent almost no time there for one reason or another.

The smallest is The Saloon Stage and I spent a great deal of time there, as I did last year. On Friday the artist list was curated by Clubhouse Records and on the Saturday by At The Helm Records and was home to more great acoustic, roots and Americana music, both home grown and imported, than you could shake a stick at. As often as not it was packed to bursting. Very much from across 'The Pond' comes this artist.

Otis Gibbs - Saloon Stage, Friday afternoon.

Music piracy (still) isn't just an internet phenomenon...

It is a while since I have written a post such as this but a news article today put me in mind of it once again. It may not be quite the topic that it was but it certainly hasn't gone away. I first commented on it in these pages almost seven years ago - how time flies! - with this illustration from the 1980s.

The means have changed but perhaps not so much as we might have thought. It still isn't all individuals or organised crime file-sharing by any means.
There is a waiting list, and often then delays to the promised delivery, if you want your latest released pressed on vinyl for legal release. Several acts have told me about this based on their own experiences. That is a reflection of the vitality of music in physical format.

Police in Germany have revealed that, after a two-year investigation, they have busted a huge counterfeit operation involving physical music, both CD and vinyl. The article comes with a stock picture of a collection of vinyl and this is not it.

This one is home-based.

New Music 2014 - Part 25 - Phillip Henry & Hannah Martin - Live In Calstock

Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin were relatively little known until s 2012 when, nominated for, and then winning, 'Folk Duo' at BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2013 their public profile changed a little. They seem not to have changed at all.
Less than a week after they were receiving the aforementioned award at London's Royal Albert Hall they were were playing to a capacity crowd of ninety at Marnhull Acoustic Sessions (and they had played Dulverton Village Hall in the meantime).
Somewhere along the line they had hatched a plan to record a live album - a proper live album - recorded in a single take with a real audience in a small venue. This is that album, released 14 July and recorded 14 May at Calstock Arts.

I have mentioned this release before in the 'Something Else To Listen To' section of the blog side-bar. I have to say that if there is a better acoustic live album released in 2014 then it will be truly a year to remember and I'd like that to be true.
For a much more detailed analysis I commend to you this one from Folk Radio UK.

New Music 2014 - Part 24 - Bella Gaffney

I am not at Priddy Folk Festival, and Bella Gaffney is not in so far as I am aware one of the artists advertised to play there either. That said I have somehow become aware of her music and, I have to say, I like it. She is from Bradford and to be quite honest the North Midlands of England have been giving UK folk a rare treat over the last decade and more.
If I could find a Bella Gaffney LP or EP to tell you detail about then I would do so; at the moment I can't but that is just how it is and simply count this as another 'artist to watch', if you will.

I don't think, for one moment, that this is the last that we shall hear from Bella and probably sooner rather than later. It is not a summery song in the slightest. The really frustrating thing is that I know that there is an album 'The Clock That Didn't Stop' and I currently can't find it to buy for love nor money in any format. I can find some of the songs from it but that is not quite what I was looking for. If you know more then please write a comment. [Please note that any comment might not appear at once - all comments are moderated by me, but at least that way you know that I have read them.]

New Music 2014 - Part 23 - Joanne Shaw Taylor - The Dirty Truth

Barely a year after the release of the live LP/DVD 'Songs From The Road' and less than two after the release of her third studio album 'Almost Always Never' in 2012, Joanne Shaw Taylor returns on 22 September with her studio LP 'The Dirty Truth' and this is the artwork for it and the track list.

1. Mud, Honey

2. The Dirty Truth

3. Wicked Soul

4. Fool In Love

5. Wrecking Ball

6. Tried, Tested And True

7. Outlaw Angel

8. Shiver And Sigh

9. Struck Down

10. Feels Like Home

It is to be released on her own bijou label 'Axehouse Music' on physical formats including two heavyweight vinyl options. For this project, more blues rock than the last two LPs perhaps, she is reunited with Jim Gains who produced her début 2009 LP 'White Sugar' and if you haven't listened to that then now is the time to do so.

If you have never seen her play live then you ain't heard nothing yet!

        

The most recent time I saw her live was at The Brook, Southampton on 12 June.

New Music 2014 - Part 22 - Sylvan Esso

I'm learning to do things that once I could never do. One of those is recognizing voices that I have heard before when they crop up in unexpected new places. This is an example of that and neither is the artwork of their self-titled LP going to leave you any the wiser.

In 2013 Amelia Meath put her former band, female folk harmony vocal trio Mountain Man, on indefinite hold and teamed up with electronic musician Nick Sanborn as duo Sylvan Esso. This is their début self-titled LP and while the combination might on the face of it seem a little improbable, if not exactly problematic, then the outcome is that both bring their respective strengths to bear and the result  a thing redolent of the dreams of summer. The electronic twists and turns, that at times sound like a xylophone or glockenspiel, never overpower the melody or vocals. Not only have they managed it on the recording, recently released by Partisan Records, but they seem very capable of recreating it live too. Suffice it to say that Sylvan Esso is added to the list of artists that I want to see live.
The lead track, that preceded the LP by months, was the very promising 'Hey Mami' and it turns out not to have been a prelude that flattered to deceive.


This is the penultimate song on the LP, 'Play It Right' recorded live recently.     I can certainly see myself listening to the album many times over the coming months and indeed, because it has made me take notice, you will probably see me mention more from the Partisan roster of artists in the forthcoming weeks.

Frome 2014 - this is the town in which I live.

Wherever my focus of new music listening may currently lie - and actually it is still in the US - this coming weekend is going to focus on those events playing out in my home town of Frome, Somerset, UK.
   
It is raining at the moment but the forecast isn't bad; so let's see how things turn out. I'm planning to take my camera and simply see what comes my way and how it all pans out. It is the start of the festival season, after all, and where better to start than at home? It is also Frome Festival 2014 between 4 and 11 July. There is a great deal more to music and performance arts in Somerset than the admittedly rather famous Glastonbury Festival, not least during the other 362 days of the year, and there will be little, if any, mention of mud.

I don't intend to lose sleep prefiguring the outcome but I least I know the layout, the pitfalls, and the short-cuts. On the other hand, should anyone try to tempt me into opinion on music in 2014 then I've been thinking about that too. It is halfway through so, based on simple logic alone, I should have heard half of my favourites of the year.
It is akin to saying that Frome is a small/medium-sized country market town (pop. ~25,000) where nothing much happens and it probably never has. It doesn't work quite like that.    

Carnival-style. Frome Street Bandits. Live in the audience. This afternoon.

From my point of view at least it was going to be difficult to imagine any other artist to be the highlight of the music stage. It is a running joke that because she hails from Bristol... this however is the third time that I have seen Daisy Chapman play live in Frome. And then the sun came out, at last.

It is fair to say that she was likely to be the highlight of the evening.

She played some, at least to me, new songs. I wonder if a follow up to 'Shameless Winter' is in the works?

Between the two aforementioned acts came the Celtic folk of Frome based eight-piece Milk Street. I had never seen them all playing live together before and (all my own fault) was actually in a poor position to capture all of them in the same picture.

An up-beat selection was just what was required at this point in the proceedings. They served it up admirably.