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.

2011 - The return of the guitar band?

The fabled return of the guitar band...  it is something that has been trailed by many in the last year or so, and the lack of which was oft-bemoaned before that. Is 2011 the year in which it will happen?
Maybe is not an answer to a polar question, so I'm not going to use it. Some languages, English is not usually one of them (but Welsh usually is), have other ways of answering such questions...

Well there are plenty of guitar bands/artists vying for our ear-space in 2011 but wasn't that the case in 2010? Some of them have history, even true pedigree...
Beady Eye, Elbow, Miles Kane, The Strokes to name but a few... (and The View will try again too). Some of them will succeed, some will not, but that is nothing to mark 2011 as remarkable.  Some of the most notable guitar-led bands will be those that are either currently almost unknown or, at best in the wider scene, little known. That is more important.
I think it unlikely that there will be a sudden revolution in 2011. It will, however be an exciting year, again focussing on live music, and in that quiet but subversive way the revolution will continue. I admit it unlikely that 2012 will feature such scintillating tour dates as Coldplay in Havana or Cheryl Cole live in Pyongyang.
On the other hand, had you asked me in 1983 if I believed that my parents would ever go to Romania then my response would have been "only as the result of some catastrophic invasion".

There are signs that lead me to believe that, however good guitar bands may be, they are going to face a struggle in a world now complicated by cross-genre considerations.  Many of the best acts/artists of 2010 played/featured guitars but were not 'guitar bands' in the typical - I hate to say it - male-orientated tradition.
Warpaint, to mention just one such act, play guitars - a lot - but apparently that's different.

It isn't.