venta

Next stop in this summer's festival whirl: Derbyshire's finest tiny festival, IndieTracks

Friday

[Fever Dream], The School, Cinerama

We drove up to Derbyshire in flippin' 'orrible rain and rubbish traffic. We'd dithered over whether to get a hotel room (as usual) or camp (possibly more sociable) for so long that camping sort of ended up being the choice. There is no fun in the world like putting a tent up in the rain, so we did that (at which point it stopped). We could hear the Indietracks main stage but couldn't quite work out how to walk there. Fortunately other people were having the same problem, and pointing, and eventually we found the right path and strolled down chatting to a bloke who'd left his family at the festival and done a return trip to pick up extra jumpers.

We more or less missed Fever Dream, but hoovered up curry and bought drinks and found

metame and Steffeny in time to be all ready for The School. They're excellent 60's-inflected girl pop, and even seeming a little lacklustre in the rain they had a very enthusiastic crowd.

I was confused when I heard Cinerama were headlining... who? Turns out they're some of the Wedding Present (critically, really, David Gedge) who, among other things, have re-recorded the last Wedding Present album. In, err, sort of easy-listening style. They're kind of inoffensive in a sort of easy-listening way, but I can't say I'll be dashing out to buy albums.

I was kind of knackered and wimped out of the disco in favour of going to bed.

Saturday

[Chorusgirl], [Rory McVicar], Evans the Death, The Free Fall Band, Mammoth Penguins, Desperate Journalist, Tigercats, [Colleen Green], Steven James Adams, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

After last year's accidental discovery of the Levi's shop in the nearby "designer outlet village" I requested a special trip there. I managed to pick up two pairs of jeans in my size and nearly in the style I wanted for £50. Which, when I bought a top as well, came to £45. (The shop has a capricious policy of giving you a 25% discount if you buy three items. So, when buying two things which cost £x, it becomes an exercise in finding a third thing costing £y such that 3(x+y) < 4x. I didn't really need a black vest, but hey.) ChrisC got carried away buying Cadbury's misshapes, which he brutally inflicted on everyone we met for the rest of the day, causing biliousness and Pulp songs in approximately equal measure.

We squeaked back just in time for Chorusgirl - a band about whom I know nothing, but I really enjoyed their song on the Indietracks compilation.

Some friends of ours were nearby (collecting their abandoned children from the grandparents) so elected to join us for Saturday. Sensibly, they picked the one day of nice weather. (An early morning message from Jo asked if conditions underfoot were "Cons or wellies?" Actually, neither. But I eventually suggested Cons, and it turned out not to be a catastrophically bad suggestion.) After catching up with them, they went off to tour round the museum and we apparently watched Evans the Death, although I retain very little memory of the proceedings.

Saturday afternoon was, bandwise, the chunk of the festival I was most looking forward to: Mammoth Penguins, Desperate Journalist and Tigercats. They're all well worth checking out, in their different ways. Mammoth Penguins are fronted by indiepop celebrity Emma Kupa, and are a straight up guitar-bass-drums trio with raucous songs. In another attempt to flex my journalistic muscles, I interviewed them for the festival (as it it turned out, very little flexing was required; the interview was by email and they sent back beautifully-written answers which required me to do nothing more than forward them). You can listen to the lead single from their first album.

I've been trying to catch Desperate Journalist in London for ages, but they've been eluding me. I was a little surprised by their inclusion on the Indietracks schedule, as they're not really my idea of indie-pop, being more of a dark, shimmery and slightly 80s pop persuasion. They were excellent, but somehow very out of place. ("An inappropriate whiff of professionalism" was how someone described them.) I'd be happier seeing them on the bill at WGW, really. Or, you know, just in a pub back room somewhere.

Tigercats are a five piece with extra saxphones, playing enthusiastic, infection indie-pop that you could do worse than listen to. Even if they did have the weirdest cameo ever, of Darren Heyman coming onstage to look catastrophically bored before playing a massively uninspiring saxohpone outro.

Steven James Adams (ex of the Broken Family Band) gave a characteristically charismatic performance, holding everyone in the church spellbound even as he wandered around ignoring the mic. He ended up by leading everyone out of the church (singing the outro to St Thomas as we went) and finished his set outside in the playground.

Weird lyric of the weekend is won by a track by The Wave Pictures, played in the disco after the last band: A sculpture is a sculpture. Marmalade is marmalade. A sculpture of marmalade is still a sculpture, but it isn't marmalade.

Sunday

The Catenary Wires, [Bill Botting], Colour Me Wednesday, The Tuts, Laeitia Sadier, [The Luxembourg Signal], Euros Childs, Martha, The Go! Team

We started Sunday with the indie-pop quiz, scarily entitled "YOU! ME! QUIZZING!" I think it might have been busier than other years, as it was in a marquee[*] and thus not in the rain. When Metame, Steffeny, ChrisC and I showed up there were no tables left, and we crowded rather awkwardly round a TV-and-speaker thingy that was rather oddly in one corner. At the last minute, a chap called Ian asked if he could join our team, which was just as well because he improved our score from "frankly embarrassing" to "plausible middle of the road". I thought he was just a passerby, but it turned out he was tenuously connected. (As Chris put it: he knows me, I know Metame, and Metame knows Steffeny, and she knows David, and he knows Ben, and Ben's girlfriend is Annie, and she knows Ian.)

Anyway, we tried to identify song intros played on a xylophone, recognised lyrics, and made educated guesses at black and white photos of bands. Mercifully, we got away without winning the One Direction autobiography for the lowest score.

It was still raining rather miserably, so we went and hung out in the station café with Metame and Steffeny for a very late brunch. The weather cheered up enough that watching the Catenary Wires (a Magnetic Fields-esque duo made up of bits of other bands) from under a brolly was plausible.

Bill Botting (of Allo Darlin') was playing in the merch tent, but not doing a good job of commanding unamplified attention. We milled around considering purchases, before venturing out for Colour Me Wednesday. They're very entertaining, and provided the first serious contender for Cover of the Weekend with the (surprise!) Bryan Adams song When You're Gone; the next was The Tuts (whom I also interviewed!) with a mildly approximate rendition of early 90s favourite Two Princes. I hadn't realised that Colour Me Wednesday's guitarist was also The Tuts' bassist, she had to do a certain amount of scrambling between stages.

(I am sure there was a third contender for cover-of-the-weekend, but I can't remember it. I am dismissing Desperate Journalist using a chunk of Elizabeth, My Dear as an intro, and very definitely dismissing (with extreme prejudice) the excruciating verse of My Heart Will Go On that Martha sang with Niall-from-the-Spook-School. Plus various other covers that happened but that I didn't recognise. Aha! ChrisC reminds me that the other cover was the Pains of Being Pure at Heart unexpectedly serving up James' Laid.)

The wet weather led the organisers to move Sunday night's bands indoors, scooching Euros Childs and Go! Team into the indoor lineup. Euros Childs, all earnest hair and boogiewoogie piano was more fun than expected, and Martha were an absolute riot. Even allowing for a little while chilling out in a train carriage (and talking to two of the cooks from the curry stall) there was a very long wait, as the moved-from-the-other-stage Go! Team carried out interminable line checks. It's a long while since I've seen ~~Goat Me!~~ Go! Team and, while they didn't have quite the impact of other occasions, they're still good value - and Ninja remains an amazing frontperson. If you can watch her and not at least feel a little energised, you're very probably dead (although one of the giant balloons that bounced over the crowd during their set did have written on it in black marker pen "dance you twee indie fuckers").

Sadly, the DJ set was cut (by lateness) to but a few songs. Dancing (like a person of many elbows) with ChrisC to Deceptacon, suddenly there was another person dancing with us - Ninja had escaped from backstage, and was busy working the crowd like a pro, dancing from group to group. We wandered back to the campsite through the damp evening, those of us who had taken the Monday morning (rather than the whole day) off work work vaguely aware that we ought to get to sleep :)

[*] I'm thinking of having this currently rather anonymous tent renamed Smith in future years so we can call it Marquee Smith.

Earlier this year, there were news stories about how this year's festival line ups would look with all the all-male bands removed. (Clue: the answer is 'a bit shit'.)

I figured I'd see how Indietracks would do.

Here's the bands I saw:

And here's the list with the all-male acts removed (including four male soloists, two of whom weren't even really on the bill and were playing acoustically in the merch tent):