All Tomorrow's Parties, 2000Friday

It’s a festival, kids, but not as we know it.

It takes a day for the shock to subside, and the civility and relative sophistication of it all to sink in. You’ve got a bed, a shower, a roof, and even your own film channel, even if most of them do rather suspiciously look as if they’ve been recorded off the television. There is however a catch. You know how at your average festival when half of the bands are shit, you always seem to miss a few that you want to see? Well, within the post-rock sanctuary of Camber Sands, you’re just going to have to accept the fact that you’re going to miss a lot of good bands, so before we go any further, apologies must be extended to Labradford, Pram, Plone and Tarwater; and also to Scott4 for having finished their set while we were still driving round in circles somewhere in Sussex; and the Radar Brothers for having to play while we stumbled around the site looking for our chalet.

This means that it’s left to the Delgados to belatedly start proceedings for our weekend, as their whimsical, fragile folk tries it’s hardest to hold our attention. Unfortunately a predominance of songs from ‘The Great Eastern’ means that their bittersweet melodies and vocal interplay is prevented from stimulating the senses to the same extent as a particularly haunting rendition of ‘Pull The Wires From The Wall’, and their decision to play acoustically does little to lift the subdued atmosphere.

Luckily Stereolab are waiting just round the corner to bring us another broadcast from the socialist manifesto that you can dance to. Given the rather select crowd before them, Tim Gane and his comrades opt to leave the pop numbers at home and dive headlong into a display of whirring noises, krautrocking keyboards and lilting harmonies which get the party, and maybe even the Party, moving again as Laetitia takes this opportunity to show off her new hairdo, which leaves her looking rather scarily like a hepcat Hilary Swank.

Not to be outdone by Stereolab surreptitiously slipping in a bit of French, the Super Furry Animals treat us to a predominantly Welsh set, which, despite our complete inability to understand a single sodding word, provides fresh hope that ‘Guerrilla’ didn’t signal an end to their previously undisputed creative genius. New single ‘Ysbeidiau Heulog’ shows a return to the frazzled and fazed sound of their early Ankst days; while ‘Northern Lights’ bounces along like the big plastic reindeer on Gruff’s amp wishes it could, and the frantic blast of ‘Calimero’ stakes their claim as outsiders to steal Pavement’s vacant throne. Having thankfully chosen to leave out ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’, the Super Furries end the day accompanied by the man who probably can’t get a fuck, as Stuart Braithwaite joins them onstage to twat about with a tambourine while standing nowhere near a microphone. Still as the saying the saying goes ‘it’s my festival, and if you won’t let me play, then I’m taking it home’.

All Tomorrow's Parties, 2000Saturday

After a night of luxury spent cooking sausage and beans on toast without the risk of getting grass in the saucepan before settling down with a bottle of wine to watch the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Exorcist and Hellraiser, the last thing you want to be greeted by the next day is the promise of yet more carnage and spilling of blood. However, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead prove to be a much more appetising proposition than their moniker suggests, even if you can’t help but get the impression that you’d probably find them a lot quicker if you followed the trail of old Sonic Youth albums. The vibrant assault of ‘Richter Scale Madness’ takes their influences and throws them in the gutter, before jumping in there with them and rolling around a bit, as their filthy swagger and frenzied guitars exceed anything that Leatherface or Pinhead could have imagined in their most despicable dreams.

As a rule, Clinic just shouldn’t work. Not so much a manufactured band, more of a ‘here’s one I made earlier’ Blue Peter style invention created out of the leftover pieces of others - a droning bass line from here, a staccato guitar burst from over there, and that incoherent, slightly reluctant sounding vocalist that you found down the back of the settee, all held together with a cyclic drum beat and a bit of sticky back plastic. On paper they sound bizarre, a rambling mess of frustrated ideas and half-finished songs, but on stage it all makes sense, as krautrock and the Velvet Underground fall victim to a William S. Burroughs cut and paste job, as he invents the perfect band, before ripping them apart and putting them back together in a different order.

It must be hard to live up to expectations when your previous band has helped alter the course of American alternative music; but having done so twice, firstly with hardcore icons Squirrel Bait, and then with Slint, you’d have to forgive Brian McMahon if he chose to hide away from publicity and the public eye with the For Carnation. With each new incarnation, he seems to get quieter and more elegiac, and has now become so minimal that you have to hope that the For Carnation are his last band or we’ll all be buying records almost completely devoid of sound, but tonight their sparse instrumentation and funereal pace require too much hard work and concentration to be fully appreciated, especially when encountered in the middle of a marathon trawl between bands and stages.

Thankfully Shellac can be relied on to bring the noise, with their taut, angular onslaught resembling the aural equivalent of a brain haemorrhage, and their precise, jagged rhythms show why Steve Albini remains so well respected after so many years. Despite of the image that seems to have been built up of Albini as petulant and elitist, Shellac are willing to accept their position of entertainers as readily as that of as musicians, and Bob Weston even takes a break mid-set to take questions from the audience.

At a festival of bands so heavily indebted to them, surely we can expect the loveable, middle-aged noiseniks of Sonic Youth to use this opportunity to reaffirm their position in our hearts, to show their contemporaries how it should be done. You can feel the expectation in the room, as the opening barrage of ‘Contre Le Sexisme’ encircles us, building layer upon layer of noise, sounding like the end of the world. But then the contrary buggers go and ruin it all by continuing in the same vein for half an hour, and then follow that with another hour of static noise, before limping back on with their single concession to the desolate fans huddled at the back of the hall, and stumble their way through the still graceful ‘Sunday’.

Despite the tragedy of it all, you’re left not really sure if you should be complaining, having seen your favourite band perform what is likely to be a rare set of experimental songs, and relishing the opportunity to further establish themselves as avant-garde pioneers, while issuing a challenge both to their fans and peers. Even while accepting the valid arguments that you can’t expect someone to continue to play the hits every time they tour; that ultimately the only people they should aim to please are themselves; Sonic Youth need to remember that there’s only ever a thin line between art and arse, and tonight they only served to disappoint their faithful following by exposing them to a tortuous display of ignominious self-indulgence which is bereft of any function or purpose.

All Tomorrow's Parties, 2000Sunday

Fortunately Sunday offers Sonic Youth’s, Steve Shelley the chance to save face, as the droning alt.country of his other band, Two Dollar Guitar, and the laconic drawl of their Harry Dean Stanton lookalike singer gently ease you back into another day of music. Which, after having shared an invigorating absinthe breakfast with Bearos Records (or rather, sat in the sun with Bearos while taking advantage of the kind offer to drink their absinthe), is a good way to kick things off. Unless, of course they happen to followed by the Bardo Pond, which they are, who seem determined to mess with your head once more as their shoegazing cacophony meanders about for a bit before realising that they would have been better suited to 1989, and buggering off back to their time machine.

After Sonic Youth you could be forgiven for turning your back on instrumental music, but Papa M are all that it takes to show you that true beauty can be achieved without words. Whereas Thurston and his cronies were content to ramble tunelessly for an hour and a half, Dave Pajo understands the need for a driving force in the music to take the place of vocals, and therefore the instrumentation is always building towards a specific point, the guitars working off each other to create a new eloquence, and as such, even their 15 minute rendition of ‘Turn Turn Turn’ sounds as articulate as the original.

It’s a rare occasion when Pajo can’t be considered the most influential musician on the bill, but Wire not only can be held responsible for shaping the sound of as many of this weekends bands as Sonic Youth or Slint, but have been around long enough to have been an influence to those bands themselves. Following the blanket slagging of their recent Royal Festival Hall gig you’re expecting to be disappointed, so what follows is nothing short of a revelation.

Maybe they read the reviews, maybe they saw Sonic Youth and felt the need to prove that middle-age doesn’t necessarily make you artistically redundant, but Wire take to the stage as if they believe it’s 1978 and they’re at the 100 Club for the first time. In short, it’s like punk is still happening, and right before our very eyes Wire are taking steps towards injecting it with an art-school sensibility. Shorn of the ‘80’s detritus that they relied on a month ago, much of the set is drawn from ‘Pink Flag’ and ‘Chairs Missing’, as the syncopated beats, awkward riffs and robotic drumming immediately dismiss any notions of granddad rock, and the crowd are left mesmerised by Colin Newman as he screams and rants his way through their very own definitive history of art-rock.

You’re left wondering just how Mogwai are going to follow that, how Stuart Braithwaite’s mob can justify their position as headliners, and what the cheeky little scamp is going to have to say for himself tonight. Fortunately they seem to have risen to the occasion, and are filled with a much greater sense of purpose than when they last dragged their bloated forms around the country, as if the string quartet have forced to them become more disciplined, and any feelings of awe they may have playing to so many of their idols are soon put behind them. ‘Christmas Steps’ and a reworked ‘New Paths To Helicon’ are devastatingly brutal, building in volume to levels that would have Kevin Shields reaching for the earplugs, but they still find themselves hamstrung by their tendency to draw songs out for too long, until ‘Ex-Cowboy’ finds itself flailing about pointlessly going nowhere.

Yet the new songs are capable of keeping people riveted for half an hour at a time, recalling the Omen’s sinister score as the strings ricochet off the dense barrage of noise, it’s just a shame that, just as we were beginning to forgive him for being such an arse all the time, Stuart then goes and ruins it all by calling Ken Livingstone an evil cunt. But then ‘Fear Satan’ brings the weekend to a final close, and it’s time to grudgingly admit that there may be life in the cretins yet. If only Stuart can learn to keep his mouth shut long enough to prevent anyone from kicking the crap out of him first, it’s just possible that we may fall in love with the stupid buggers yet.