Essential Festival, 2002Rock Day

There’s supposed to be two sides to every story, but it’s not often that those two stories are so blatantly contradictory as those flying round at Ashton Court this weekend are. The promoters have cited safety issues as the reason that they’ve had to close two stages and pull about 14 bands from the bill. A fair enough suggestion at first until it becomes clears that those safety reasons are due to the waterlogged conditions. While that might still sound vaguely reasonable (I was at Glastonbury one of those years that saw in excess of 80,000 swimming through pig shit for three days and there’s no way I’d go through that again), it does seem that little bit strange that not only have they pulled a couple of the headline acts from the bill, but that the ground has miraculously been deemed dry enough for the other two other days of the festival

The other story in circulation is, say we say, just that little bit more interesting. This second account says that advance ticket sales have been so poor that the promoters couldn’t afford to pay the advance fees, leading to a number of bands being pulled off the bill by the bands’ agents. I would use the word allegedly at this point, if it were not for the fact that the promoters have finally admitted that they fucked up big time.

So anyway, this pantomime of farce and rumour means that no one actually knows which bands are supposed to be here anymore, and there’s a lot of lost and confused kids wondering around not knowing where, or if, there favourite band is playing. But hey, it could be worse. There is some good news: Reef aren’t playing anymore, but there is also some bad news – the Levellers have pulled out, and just to rub it in even more, now they’re even headlining a one of the fucking stages. Seems that there’s nothing quite like the prospect of a shit-stained mudslide of a festival to draw the Levellers’ hell-spawn gout-ridden crusty fucks of a fan-base crawling out into the daylight. Today’s other major surprise is the absence of co-headliners Therapy?, though I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

Of course, you’re faced with the problem that the bands have now been scattered across the four remaining stages, and the chances are that the bands you wanted to see now all clash with each other. Still, we’re here, so let’s just make the best of it.

Over on what may still called the third stage, Kids Near Water take a break from their chubby emo-kid angst to announce that their t-shirts won’t available on the merchandise stall as they didn’t want to their fans to get ripped off by the extortionate prices being charged. Now, at this point we could be cruel and say that in that case their fans would have been better off waiting for the Get Up Kids to tour, but it’s sunny, I’m really appreciating being back at an outdoor festival after the sweat-pit hell of All Tomorrow’s Parties, and while they may not be breaking any new ground, these Kids are alright so I’ll leave the cutting wit for someone more deserving of my rancour.

Such as your new new favourite band. The Bellrays have been grabbing press like a Manchester United metatarsal bone, but you wonder if anyone would have noticed them if it wasn’t for Lisa Kekaula impression of an afro-sporting Divine after successful hormone treatment. Given that half the bands appearing today seem to play some form of down and dirty garage rock, we may as well just listen to ‘Respect’ ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ‘Kick Out The Jams’ on our own time. Sahara Hotnights also fall foul of this trap, a setback further exacerbated by the fact that Essential is the only place in Britain today to feature more Swedes than the Everton midfield.

Down towards the spongier end of the field, Jello Biafra is proving that occasionally angry young men do indeed grow up to be angry old men. Thankfully Jello has spent his later years of life reading up on world evil so instead of spouting random bullshit, this man most definitely knows what he’s talking about. As the lecture starts you have to wonder if anyone is paying him any attention, but he can at least claim full marks for effort. As much as I want to hear what he’s got to say, to make sure that my rage towards consumerist-culture doesn’t prevent my from enjoying a day I spent a fair amount of my hard-earned wages on, it’s time for me to run away to the less contentious climes of a Cave In gig.

Having done so, I find myself surrounded by children. I don’t know what it is about Cave In’s prog-tinged post-hardcore, but not only do the majority of people around me look too young to get served alcohol, if the badly scrawled band names on the bag of the girl in front of me are anything to by, some of them are too young to have been taught how to spell. Time to seek adult company, time to go listen to some more of Mr Biafra.

I arrive back just in time for his tirade about the inadequacies of US airlines, and how while America may look own on the Arab states at least they go to the effort of protecting their planes with reinforced hulls and by placing an under-cover anti-terrorist commando on every flight, while America claims to rule the world, but is content that airport security has one of the highest job turnover levels in the country. He’s like Bill Hicks without the jokes, and with so many impressionable young kids wondering around that’s just what we need right now. Jello says ‘question authority, fight the fucking power, just don’t listen to the Dead Kennedys while you’re doing it cos they’re not the band they purport to be anymore’. Ohhh, tetchy.

But hey, we’ve been educated, now it’s time for some rock’n’roll, and the Dirtbombs are happy to oblige. But they’re struggling with bad sound. For a band that’s always fairly stripped-down, this is disastrous. Thankfully though, they gradually they start to claw it back. Mick Collins throws a few high-kicks, and their fiery soul-punk begins to win though.

Following closely behind the ‘Bombs, the (International) Noise Conspiracy should be in a position to win over the crowd, as their choreographed communist chic explodes onto the stage. Unfortunately, no matter how much I want to love this band (of course I want to love them, they’ve spent three years trying to be the Make Up), I have a problem with it all. It all seems so fake and forced. They’ve spent so long perfecting their moves that they can’t connect with the crowd at all. It doesn’t matter where they are, or to whom they’re playing, nothing ever changes. It’s the same moves, the same ad-libs. The first time you see them it’s a revelation, the second it’s just frustrating. On record they’re an overtly political band, but that doesn’t come across live. If it weren’t for the fact that singer Dennis Lyxzen used to be in Refused, you wouldn’t even know that the Noise Conspiracy had a socio-political agenda.

Thankfully Rocket From The Crypt have what it takes to save me from my despondency. On a day where confusion reigns, it’s good to know that Speedo and the boys can be relied upon to pull out the stops. Forget the White Stripes, the Rocket boys have been doing that matching outfit thing for years, and even though last year’s ‘Group Sounds’ album didn’t exactly propel them back into the charts, there’s still no one that can touch the magnificence of their rock’n’roll revue. As they crash into their tried and tested closing triumvirate of ‘Middle’, ‘Born In ‘69’ and ‘On A Rope’ it becomes all too clear that the majority of bands that played today will never be this good. Speedo is a god, and everyone that is stumbling around crying about the non-appearance of Reef has got a hell of a lot of worshipping to catch up with. Time to get down on your knees, non-believer.

All Tomorrow’s Parties, 2001

It’s already been marked down as the musical event of the year; the post-rock party where everyone invited is a friend of Tortoise, a nirvana for people who used to listen to Nirvana. A lost weekend in a sterile holiday camp that, thanks to the inclusion of most of the Def Jux roster, has somehow managed to be more hip-hop than hi-de-hi. So much so, that if you weren’t there, you’re possibly already either fabricating stories so you can convince easily-impressed acquaintances that you were, or invent some watertight alibis that place you at some equally exclusive happening that very weekend.

So, maybe it’s time for those of you who find yourselves in this predicament to seek some consolation, to take heart that maybe you’re no the only ones constructing lies and exaggerating stories, because, when it really gets down to it, All Tomorrow’s Parties wasn’t actually very good this year.

Yeah, you heard that right. So perhaps some of you consider that blasphemous. That maybe it had nothing to do with the bands involved, but that maybe I just didn’t get it, that in the face of such illustrious heavyweights as Tortoise, Television and the Sun Ra Arkestra, I buckled under the strain of non-conventional chord structures, and gone running off to my chalet to play with the oven and sofa-bed.

Well, bollocks to the lot of you then. If that’s what you think, than so be it, just don’t claim to be anything other than narrow-minded, musically-elitist, post-rock wankers who think that the sun shines out of David Pajo’s arse and sets on Doug McCombs slap-headed dome.

Last year’s ATP was a celebration of alternative music that promoted the talents of brand new British music alongside their American brethren – led by a transatlantic triumvirate of Mogwai, Sonic Youth and the recently rejuvenated Wire. If you add the mostly excellent company of my chalet mates –including former Signal bassist James Dart, who at one stage managed to convince the lot of us that he was eating his own shit (it’s a long story, I’m not going into it here) – and it’s immediately obvious that ATP2000 was going to take some topping.

Unfortunately, what started out by looking like a promising line-up soon proved unable to rise to the challenge laid down by their predecessors. Instead of the 40 or so bands that showed up last year, Tortoise only invited their mates, which wouldn’t have been so bad, if only they actually had a reasonable number of friends to ask along. The late exit of ESG means that there were only 23 bands on offer here, and no one had been scheduled to take to the stage until 5 o’clock each evening.

To exacerbate matters further, some fool decided that we were bound to want to see every band that was playing, the running times were arranged so that while one band was playing upstairs, chances are that there was no one on stage downstairs. So if you happened to think that The Ex were nothing other than a piss-poor third-rate hardcore band, there wasn’t anything else to do other than go and sit in the pub. Factor in the large number of misguided idiots that ran away from the hip-hop under the belief that it wasn’t real music, and this suddenly becomes a very common occurrence over the weekend. In fact, if Trash can lay claim to have more people wearing Prada shoes per head than any club in London, then ATP2001 wins the prize for highest per capita incidence of people muttering about how it might not be necessarily be bad, it just isn’t their kind of thing.

But maybe I’m just moaning too much. It’s possible that I was alone in thinking that US Maple that, compared to the syncopated discordance of their early albums, were little more than bitterly disappointing pub-rock shambles; that the hip-hop should have been spread out over the entire weekend, instead of being lumped together on one stage on the Friday night; and that the Sun Ra Arkestra’s brand of jazz sounded about as free as an incarcerated paedophile.

I may also have even been the only person that thought that Lambchop really could have played some tunes instead of a barely audible dirge; that no matter how good the Sea & Cake are, we didn’t really want to stand still and watch them for two hours; and that Boards of Canada provided a worthwhile alternative to getting wasting on tequila and absinthe with the Doc from Birmingham’s Bearos record label.

Maybe everyone else thinks that Rick Rizzo and Tara Key from the normally enjoyable Eleventh Dream Day were anything other than excruciatingly painful to watch; and that, despite Television sounding surprisingly fresh and vibrant for a bunch of pensioners, waiting 90 minutes for them to play ‘Marquee Moon’ could have been more entertaining than watching Roman Polanski’s 1962 movie ‘Knife In The Water’ while finishing off the weekend’s supply of beer and pasta in a guacamole dressing in the comfort of a chalet. But given all this evidence, you’d probably have to be in Tortoise to have disagreed with me on every point.

In fact, if a passing stranger tries to tell that any of the bands other than Tortoise, Mike Ladd, the Def Jux posse, Yo La Tengo and Broadcast were worth seeing, chances are that either they weren’t really there to witness post-rock’s eventual post-mortem, or they’ve got their chin-stroking head stuck so far up their miserable arse that their opinions don’t really count anyway.

Bristol Community Festival, 2000

Despite having spent the last few years in the not inconsiderable shadow of Portishead, Massive Attack et al, it’s time for the local post-rock and hardcore scene to put Bristol firmly on the map. Having appeared at last year’s In The City extravaganza, Assembly Communications quickly set the standard for much of the weekend. Their emotive barrage sounds like the Red House Painters played by Slint fans, and brings forth a tidal wave of tumultuous effects and brutal guitars which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Ride’s first album. If that isn’t already a contradictory enough proposition, they also somehow manage to simultaneously batter the crowd back into the ground while Nick Talbot’s mesmerising voice - equal parts Nick Drake, Art Garfunkel and chain-smoking choir-boy - succeeds in lifting the avid onlookers ever higher, and ‘Fires In Distant Buildings’ shows that hardcore needn’t rely on bludgeoning the senses into submission.

Then Crashland turn up to prove that not everyone in Bristol listens to good music, as the punk-pop Shed Seven run through their motions like the tired old has-beens they’re rapidly becoming, and not even their ‘New Perfume’ is enough to entice the more than a passing disinterest, before Toploader show that it doesn’t matter how much money your record label is spending on promotion, it can’t make up for a blatant lack of talent and charisma. It’s always a worrying sign when your band is better known for the singer’s haircut than their records, and that’s the Achilles heel that they should really be worrying about right now.

The lock-groove rhythms of Kiska make the most of the outdoor environment, swelling to fill the open spaces until the hills are echoing with their Tortoise-shaped percussive rumbling. Their Korg and guitar duel provides the perfect backing for multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dewey to get his cornet out on ‘Broken & Unfixed’, before managing to switch instruments mid-song during their finale, first joining Rob Nesbett on keyboards then finally returning to his drum-kit.

With each passing day, Mogwai’s claim to the post-rock throne becomes ever more precarious, and local heavyweights the Signal are the latest name to join the list calling for abdication, as the discordant syncopation of ‘Sentinel 2’ shows an urgency and drive that Stuart Braithwaite would die(t) for, while the thundering motorik of ‘Dance Of The Fool’ recalls such hardcore luminaries as Fugazi and Shellac.

Having to follow such self-assured unsigned bands would give most people more than a mere headache, but Seafood seem incapable of taking a weekend off right now, so there they are once more with their sordid orgy of Sonic Youth art-rock, Sebadoh riffs and Pixies dynamics. Recent months have found Kevin Hendrick stumbling in the right direction down the path from geeky indie-kid to surrogate Thurston Moore, as he hurls his bass around and gashes his hands open in his exuberance while David Line perches himself on the very edge of the stage, roaring though 'Porchlight' and 'Folk Song Crisis', the intensity and volume builds to cacophonous levels behind him, before staggering off on their never-ending journey around Britain.