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ventaAt some point on Friday, I made a horrible discovery. It turns out that my expected tea, in a park, was all something of a misunderstanding. Apparently it's not tea but T - harmless enough, until you realise that the T stands for Tennent's. For heaven's sake, even Carling drinkers look down on Tennent's and as a card-carrying member of CAMRA I'm obliged to froth biliously at the mouth at so much as a glimpse of the stuff.
Everyone else in the world knew this. I didn't.
However, I boldly overcame all odds, didn't have to drink any Tennent's, and managed to have a reasonable cup of tea at least once a day. I even watched The Who while drinking a nice cup of Earl Grey. Fairtraded Earl Grey, to boot.
T has many stages - 11 in total, some of which are in hoofingly large tents. They are all very close together, and the bands play quite short sets (mostly 45 minutes) which means you can easily catch an extremely large number of bands in a day. So we did. All those listed here are acts where I felt I'd heard enough to form an opinion (which in some cases wasn't very long) - bands I merely meandered past aren't included.
Saturday
Humanzi were an accidental discovery on the way past the NME stage. Spiky rhythms and a bunch of bass caught my attention; they should bear further investigation.
Seth Lakeman is actually a reasonably traditional folk singer, though his guitarist should really learn that you can't slam about like that while playing an acoustic guitar because you look stupid. His percussionist is great though - firstly he can actually play a bodhran rather than just hitting it with a stick, and he also had a strange box which seemed to be both a seat and a drum. I know Seth Lakeman's album was nominated for the Mercury prize last year (the token folk entry), and I'm curious to hear it. He's got an interesting percussive style going on, though his songs are a bit drony.
Manu Chao were also an accidental discovery; we caught the end of their set while passing. Punky ska, with big tunes and lots of energy, like a slightly slowed-down Rancid. They also went on the list to check out.
The Cribs were a band I was vaguely curious to catch. I caught. I wandered off. The sounded a bit like your mate's band down the pub.
Project: Venhell happened to be on stage when we stuck our heads into the T Break Tent, which is the tent for unknown Scots bands. Project: Venhell were really quite dull nu-metal, played by teenagers. The singer had "It's Just Noise" written on his bare chest and stomach. He was correct.
Levellers were, well, you pretty much know what you're getting, don't you ? They'd drawn a slightly larger crowd than I might have expected - but then they're a good festival band, and always happy to provide a bit of fun.
The Divine Comedy actually made me want to check out their latest album, which after the disappointments of Regeneration and Absent Friends is quite an achievement. Certainly a song they played from it sounded like a proper old-fashioned Divine Comedy song. The set was most notable for them striking a deal with the guy responsible for getting them off-stage promptly: they could overrun on condition they did his favourite (Our Mutual Friend). The squeezed the song in, stopped it abruptly because "there really isn't time for the outro" and closed with Tonight We Fly. Hurrah.
The Zutons Er, to be honest, I don't remember that much about the Zutons. The were probably bouncy and saxy.
Kaiser Chiefs had a huge crowd watching their set on the main stage, despite slightly poor weather. No marks to the area of crowd immediately to my left who were good at singing choruses in the wrong places.
Pretty Girls Make Graves mostly made it onto the must-see list because they were playing an in-tent stage and it was raining. They seemed much more attention-grabbing than last time I saw them, with their slightly agitated sound and choppy vocals.
Franz Ferdinand seemed like a good band to aim for, since, well, they're Scottish and I was expecting a large and bounding crowd. As it turned out, they were markedly less popular than Kaiser Chiefs, which rather surprised me.
Goldfrapp didn't look as expected. I thought it was a duo: Alison Goldfrapp (the visible one) and her bloke (the invisible one). Except there seemed to be 4 or 5 people on stage, before you even counted the immactulately outfitted dancers. So I'm not quite sure who they all were. Goldfrapp seem to come in three flavours (one for each album), and their set was definitely most-recent-album flavour: glossy dancefloor stuff that made me boogie about (with my carton of Thai chicken with ginger). I think this was probably the slickest, most professional "show" of the weekend.
Bedouin Soundclash are a lot less foreign than their name suggests, they are in fact a Canadian guitar/bass/drums trio who've knitted themselves quite a nice sound based round reggae and dub influences.
Paul Weller is, in my head, a very whiny singer. However, he's also the former frontman of a band I've a lot of time for, so I waggled my ears at him for a few songs until my headliner of choice came on. It seems he's not actually whiny, after all.
Sigur Rós make the sort of music that glaciers listen to. They're one of Iceland's great exports, producing strangely haunting music that's full of weird noises, strange babbling vocals and epic sweeps of cold sound. As we walked into the Pet Sounds Arena, they were already on and were playing with a thin gauze curtain across the stage. Shadows of the band were just visible, a monochrome projection played across the curtain, and a mixture of smoke and the waving flags of the crowd produced a really impressive overall effect. If anyone's seen the sleevenotes to their album () then it actually looked strangely like that, come to life.
Although the curtain was eventually drawn aside, the lighting remained odd, throwing huge, towering silhouettes of the guitarist (playing his guitar with a cello bow) onto the backdrop. Later, the shadows of various band members appeared scary and distorted across the curved surfaces of the tent roof.
Sunday
The Crimea win the prize for knowing how to handle an audience - or lack thereof. Opening the largest stage, to a minimal audience, in poor weather, what do you do ? Well, you get the band on stage, but put the singer on a long lead in front of the security barriers and down among the audience for your first song. The you quickly follow up with a well-known cover (Fleetwood Mac in this case), then launch into one of your catchiest songs. It worked a treat.
I'm a big fan of the Crimea's album, but seeing them live was slightly odd, as they're an unstable mixture of pure pop and complete mentalism. The singer seems to have discovered his inner Ian Curtis, but they're still producing pretty, poppy tunes which are clear summer winners.
Sandi Thom, I admit, was someone I wanted to see merely because she recently released a single titled "I Want To Be A Punk Rocker (And Wear Flowers In My Hair)". Which is a great name. Sadly, it's not a great song, which was rather disappointing. Her voice is nice enough, but the music utterly failed to grab me.
The Spinto Band were on at the wrong time; we were really aiming for My Latest Novel and missed. Four blokes across the front of the stage (3 guitars, 1 bass) and drums - some jump up and down fun, but nothing that sticks all that thoroughly in my mind.
Captain were billed as being ideal summer pop music. Sadly, through no fault of theirs, I mostly remember the fact that it hosed it down in the middle of the set. With really impressively big raindrops. I think I was enjoying the set, but I got a little distracted by the weather.
The Proclaimers made the sun come out. The Proclaimers. On a Sunday afternoon. In the sunshine. In Scotland. Enough said. Pretty much the entire festival turned out and sang along.
Regina Spektor was high on our must-see list, but actually turned out to be not quite enough to keep us from slinking back to the Proclaimers. She sings and plays piano, sounding (to me) a little like Tori Amos' deranged and faintly drug-addled little sister. I do like her music but, despite being impressed by her ability to drum and play the piano at the same time, she didn't quite work in a big venue - the huge Pet Sounds arena swamped her. I'd very much like to see her at a small venue, though.
Coldcut were what happened to be on when we tracked down the Slam Tent - the utterly massive Siamese twin tents where the big DJs hang out. Coldcut had one singer, plus four people doing various unidentifiable things with decks and boxes o' twiddly knobs. The overall effect was impressive, with a vast array of samples and live vocals weaving together to form a track. Despite it being 'not my thing' I enjoyed the bit I saw - and was quite taken with the live video-editing they were doing, too.
Gomez proved to be unexpectedly popular. King Tut's Wah Wah Tent (isn't that a great name ? The Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow is involved in the running of T) had people spilling out of its doorways as we approached - which surprised me, since Gomez seem to have more or less dropped off the radar in recent years.
From the one Gomez album I own, they appar to have quite a gentle, almost acoustic sound. Live they appear to have generated about three extra layers of noise, acquired more drive and turned everything up to 11.
Hard-Fi had to compete with a fairly complicated and precarious burrito. On balance, I remember rather more about the burrito than I do about Hard-Fi.
Arctic Monkeys are another band that sound a bit like your mate playing at a local pub. Not a bad pub band, admittedly, but not much special.
Feeder were on form with their shiny summer indie sound. Like a lot of the sets, theirs seemed terribly short.
Go! Team were definitely the highlight of the festival. I've heard their album and not been much moved, but I remember![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lnr's glowing review of them live a few months back. She's right.
As far as I can tell, Go! Team were formed from some sort of charity collection at a festival where bands were asked to donate spare members. A hiphop outfit donated a singer they no longer needed, a Japanese riot girl band gave a guitarist. A glam rock band could spare a bassist, and there were (as ever) a few pasty-faced indie boy-bands with more members than necessary... this hapless collection decided to make the best of it, and have munged all the above (and more) together to create something that actually doesn't sound at all like anything else.
However, by far the best bit of seeing them live is that, with the exception of the main vocalist, everyone seems to play everything. So, at the end of each song (or occasionally mid-song), everyone scurries round the stage swapping instruments. So, when I mentioned a Japanese guitarist above she also sings, plays various bits of tuned percussion, plays the melodica and, er, I don't think she drums but I'm not quite sure. The drummer plays bass, and the bassist plays drums, and the both play (the same) keyboard when the the other drummer comes out to sing.
Oh yes: they have two full drum kits, always a winner. And they have their name on both bass drums.
The Who didn't really seem right to me. I didn't watch the whole set, so don't know if an aging, greying guy in a short-sleeved check shirt sang "I hope I die before I get old". I can see how seeing The Who is something that means a lot to many people, but to me (not a big Who fan) it was just some people trotting out songs.
Mind you, the oo-oo, oo-oo bit of Who Are You? did lodge itself unmovably in my head for most of the next day.
Primal Scream were in full swing when we wandered up from The Who, but had police on every doorway blocking people from entering. It was, incidentally, slightly unnerving seeing the police there - although they'd been wandering the site all day, they only seemed to be decorative. Here, they'd been roped in to bolster the cordons of the ordinary security guards and keep grumpy Primal Scream fans out. I'm not quite sure why - but shortly after we arrived, the stage lights went off and the band stopped playing, repeatedly asking the people climbing the tent structure to come down. Most did, but a couple stayed on their perch, dancing and flicking Vs at the band while the crowd bombarded them with empty (and full) plastic glasses.
Eventually, they dropped down again, the gig resumed, and a couple of songs later people were let in again.
Primal Scream have remembered how to rock. I approve. I've not heard their most recent album, but their set seemed mostly the rock-based, dirty-sounding end of their repertoire. They finished, predictably enough, with Country Girl and Rocks, but I was delighted to find Swastika Eyes squeezing itself into the setlist too.
I also have a variety of opinions, which I'm sure everyone's terribly interested in, on T as a festival (complete with inevitable comparisons to Glastonbury). In order to avoid this post becoming monstrously long, they will be put off to a more convenient season. There will also be a few photos, when the nice people at Bonusprint have done Things With Chemicals for me.
Everyone else in the world knew this. I didn't.
However, I boldly overcame all odds, didn't have to drink any Tennent's, and managed to have a reasonable cup of tea at least once a day. I even watched The Who while drinking a nice cup of Earl Grey. Fairtraded Earl Grey, to boot.
T has many stages - 11 in total, some of which are in hoofingly large tents. They are all very close together, and the bands play quite short sets (mostly 45 minutes) which means you can easily catch an extremely large number of bands in a day. So we did. All those listed here are acts where I felt I'd heard enough to form an opinion (which in some cases wasn't very long) - bands I merely meandered past aren't included.
Saturday
Humanzi were an accidental discovery on the way past the NME stage. Spiky rhythms and a bunch of bass caught my attention; they should bear further investigation.
Seth Lakeman is actually a reasonably traditional folk singer, though his guitarist should really learn that you can't slam about like that while playing an acoustic guitar because you look stupid. His percussionist is great though - firstly he can actually play a bodhran rather than just hitting it with a stick, and he also had a strange box which seemed to be both a seat and a drum. I know Seth Lakeman's album was nominated for the Mercury prize last year (the token folk entry), and I'm curious to hear it. He's got an interesting percussive style going on, though his songs are a bit drony.
Manu Chao were also an accidental discovery; we caught the end of their set while passing. Punky ska, with big tunes and lots of energy, like a slightly slowed-down Rancid. They also went on the list to check out.
The Cribs were a band I was vaguely curious to catch. I caught. I wandered off. The sounded a bit like your mate's band down the pub.
Project: Venhell happened to be on stage when we stuck our heads into the T Break Tent, which is the tent for unknown Scots bands. Project: Venhell were really quite dull nu-metal, played by teenagers. The singer had "It's Just Noise" written on his bare chest and stomach. He was correct.
Levellers were, well, you pretty much know what you're getting, don't you ? They'd drawn a slightly larger crowd than I might have expected - but then they're a good festival band, and always happy to provide a bit of fun.
The Divine Comedy actually made me want to check out their latest album, which after the disappointments of Regeneration and Absent Friends is quite an achievement. Certainly a song they played from it sounded like a proper old-fashioned Divine Comedy song. The set was most notable for them striking a deal with the guy responsible for getting them off-stage promptly: they could overrun on condition they did his favourite (Our Mutual Friend). The squeezed the song in, stopped it abruptly because "there really isn't time for the outro" and closed with Tonight We Fly. Hurrah.
The Zutons Er, to be honest, I don't remember that much about the Zutons. The were probably bouncy and saxy.
Kaiser Chiefs had a huge crowd watching their set on the main stage, despite slightly poor weather. No marks to the area of crowd immediately to my left who were good at singing choruses in the wrong places.
Pretty Girls Make Graves mostly made it onto the must-see list because they were playing an in-tent stage and it was raining. They seemed much more attention-grabbing than last time I saw them, with their slightly agitated sound and choppy vocals.
Franz Ferdinand seemed like a good band to aim for, since, well, they're Scottish and I was expecting a large and bounding crowd. As it turned out, they were markedly less popular than Kaiser Chiefs, which rather surprised me.
Goldfrapp didn't look as expected. I thought it was a duo: Alison Goldfrapp (the visible one) and her bloke (the invisible one). Except there seemed to be 4 or 5 people on stage, before you even counted the immactulately outfitted dancers. So I'm not quite sure who they all were. Goldfrapp seem to come in three flavours (one for each album), and their set was definitely most-recent-album flavour: glossy dancefloor stuff that made me boogie about (with my carton of Thai chicken with ginger). I think this was probably the slickest, most professional "show" of the weekend.
Bedouin Soundclash are a lot less foreign than their name suggests, they are in fact a Canadian guitar/bass/drums trio who've knitted themselves quite a nice sound based round reggae and dub influences.
Paul Weller is, in my head, a very whiny singer. However, he's also the former frontman of a band I've a lot of time for, so I waggled my ears at him for a few songs until my headliner of choice came on. It seems he's not actually whiny, after all.
Sigur Rós make the sort of music that glaciers listen to. They're one of Iceland's great exports, producing strangely haunting music that's full of weird noises, strange babbling vocals and epic sweeps of cold sound. As we walked into the Pet Sounds Arena, they were already on and were playing with a thin gauze curtain across the stage. Shadows of the band were just visible, a monochrome projection played across the curtain, and a mixture of smoke and the waving flags of the crowd produced a really impressive overall effect. If anyone's seen the sleevenotes to their album () then it actually looked strangely like that, come to life.
Although the curtain was eventually drawn aside, the lighting remained odd, throwing huge, towering silhouettes of the guitarist (playing his guitar with a cello bow) onto the backdrop. Later, the shadows of various band members appeared scary and distorted across the curved surfaces of the tent roof.
Sunday
The Crimea win the prize for knowing how to handle an audience - or lack thereof. Opening the largest stage, to a minimal audience, in poor weather, what do you do ? Well, you get the band on stage, but put the singer on a long lead in front of the security barriers and down among the audience for your first song. The you quickly follow up with a well-known cover (Fleetwood Mac in this case), then launch into one of your catchiest songs. It worked a treat.
I'm a big fan of the Crimea's album, but seeing them live was slightly odd, as they're an unstable mixture of pure pop and complete mentalism. The singer seems to have discovered his inner Ian Curtis, but they're still producing pretty, poppy tunes which are clear summer winners.
Sandi Thom, I admit, was someone I wanted to see merely because she recently released a single titled "I Want To Be A Punk Rocker (And Wear Flowers In My Hair)". Which is a great name. Sadly, it's not a great song, which was rather disappointing. Her voice is nice enough, but the music utterly failed to grab me.
The Spinto Band were on at the wrong time; we were really aiming for My Latest Novel and missed. Four blokes across the front of the stage (3 guitars, 1 bass) and drums - some jump up and down fun, but nothing that sticks all that thoroughly in my mind.
Captain were billed as being ideal summer pop music. Sadly, through no fault of theirs, I mostly remember the fact that it hosed it down in the middle of the set. With really impressively big raindrops. I think I was enjoying the set, but I got a little distracted by the weather.
The Proclaimers made the sun come out. The Proclaimers. On a Sunday afternoon. In the sunshine. In Scotland. Enough said. Pretty much the entire festival turned out and sang along.
Regina Spektor was high on our must-see list, but actually turned out to be not quite enough to keep us from slinking back to the Proclaimers. She sings and plays piano, sounding (to me) a little like Tori Amos' deranged and faintly drug-addled little sister. I do like her music but, despite being impressed by her ability to drum and play the piano at the same time, she didn't quite work in a big venue - the huge Pet Sounds arena swamped her. I'd very much like to see her at a small venue, though.
Coldcut were what happened to be on when we tracked down the Slam Tent - the utterly massive Siamese twin tents where the big DJs hang out. Coldcut had one singer, plus four people doing various unidentifiable things with decks and boxes o' twiddly knobs. The overall effect was impressive, with a vast array of samples and live vocals weaving together to form a track. Despite it being 'not my thing' I enjoyed the bit I saw - and was quite taken with the live video-editing they were doing, too.
Gomez proved to be unexpectedly popular. King Tut's Wah Wah Tent (isn't that a great name ? The Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow is involved in the running of T) had people spilling out of its doorways as we approached - which surprised me, since Gomez seem to have more or less dropped off the radar in recent years.
From the one Gomez album I own, they appar to have quite a gentle, almost acoustic sound. Live they appear to have generated about three extra layers of noise, acquired more drive and turned everything up to 11.
Hard-Fi had to compete with a fairly complicated and precarious burrito. On balance, I remember rather more about the burrito than I do about Hard-Fi.
Arctic Monkeys are another band that sound a bit like your mate playing at a local pub. Not a bad pub band, admittedly, but not much special.
Feeder were on form with their shiny summer indie sound. Like a lot of the sets, theirs seemed terribly short.
Go! Team were definitely the highlight of the festival. I've heard their album and not been much moved, but I remember
lnr's glowing review of them live a few months back. She's right. As far as I can tell, Go! Team were formed from some sort of charity collection at a festival where bands were asked to donate spare members. A hiphop outfit donated a singer they no longer needed, a Japanese riot girl band gave a guitarist. A glam rock band could spare a bassist, and there were (as ever) a few pasty-faced indie boy-bands with more members than necessary... this hapless collection decided to make the best of it, and have munged all the above (and more) together to create something that actually doesn't sound at all like anything else.
However, by far the best bit of seeing them live is that, with the exception of the main vocalist, everyone seems to play everything. So, at the end of each song (or occasionally mid-song), everyone scurries round the stage swapping instruments. So, when I mentioned a Japanese guitarist above she also sings, plays various bits of tuned percussion, plays the melodica and, er, I don't think she drums but I'm not quite sure. The drummer plays bass, and the bassist plays drums, and the both play (the same) keyboard when the the other drummer comes out to sing.
Oh yes: they have two full drum kits, always a winner. And they have their name on both bass drums.
The Who didn't really seem right to me. I didn't watch the whole set, so don't know if an aging, greying guy in a short-sleeved check shirt sang "I hope I die before I get old". I can see how seeing The Who is something that means a lot to many people, but to me (not a big Who fan) it was just some people trotting out songs.
Mind you, the oo-oo, oo-oo bit of Who Are You? did lodge itself unmovably in my head for most of the next day.
Primal Scream were in full swing when we wandered up from The Who, but had police on every doorway blocking people from entering. It was, incidentally, slightly unnerving seeing the police there - although they'd been wandering the site all day, they only seemed to be decorative. Here, they'd been roped in to bolster the cordons of the ordinary security guards and keep grumpy Primal Scream fans out. I'm not quite sure why - but shortly after we arrived, the stage lights went off and the band stopped playing, repeatedly asking the people climbing the tent structure to come down. Most did, but a couple stayed on their perch, dancing and flicking Vs at the band while the crowd bombarded them with empty (and full) plastic glasses.
Eventually, they dropped down again, the gig resumed, and a couple of songs later people were let in again.
Primal Scream have remembered how to rock. I approve. I've not heard their most recent album, but their set seemed mostly the rock-based, dirty-sounding end of their repertoire. They finished, predictably enough, with Country Girl and Rocks, but I was delighted to find Swastika Eyes squeezing itself into the setlist too.
I also have a variety of opinions, which I'm sure everyone's terribly interested in, on T as a festival (complete with inevitable comparisons to Glastonbury). In order to avoid this post becoming monstrously long, they will be put off to a more convenient season. There will also be a few photos, when the nice people at Bonusprint have done Things With Chemicals for me.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 11:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 03:22 pm (UTC)No, not bold in that sense. Bold in the "missing </b> sense". Might want to look into that. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 05:37 pm (UTC)You are not alone. I didn't know what the T stood for. That's horrible.
At least it wasn't Lion Red.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-16 02:23 pm (UTC)Sadly, my main memory of them is all the guitar players in my immediate vicinity breaking into spontaneous laughter. ChrisC kindly explained that the guitarist had had to count up the frets in order to know where to put her capo. I believe they sounded better than that would suggest, though.