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Date -
8-10/12/06 |
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| Readers' score - 10/10 |
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| Reviews |
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Gigs |
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All Tomorrow's Parties
@ Butlins, Minehead
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| Geek curates geek festival. Geeks attend. |
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All Tomorrow's Parties is unlike any other festival. Even though it has expanded this year to 6,000 people, the majority of our population has no idea it exists. It couldn't feel more different from the Glasto/Reading festival model. For a start, it happens in cold midwinter and cold spring, in the incongruous setting of a tacky holiday camp, and the Kaiser Chiefs aren't playing. Staying in a chalet means you can shower, sleep and drop a log too. It's almost civilised. And there's a certain type of clientele that's drawn to ATP: each group of festival goers includes four malnourished art rock nerds (two with glasses, two without) and one female with a Karen O haircut. At least three of these people will be in a band, or involved in a "musical project". With this in mind, it's fitting that this weekend's curator is the architect of geeky mixed gender art rock, Thurston Moore. And as you'd expect, he's filled Butlins with white noise, proto-grunge leering, millennial psychedelic freakouts and greasy haired geeks.
Friday
Flipper play on a clement afternoon, which is probably not the best time to take in their punk sludge. It's the same kind of thing that Black Flag did in their later, shitter years, slowing everything down into a pungent soup of growling. Oh look, the bald bassist is Krist Novoselic.
Next up, two drummers and two drumkits arrive on stage followed by two huge haired guys in black mumu outfits. They plug in and BOOM! it's The Melvins. They unleash the best parts from this year's (A) Senile Animal and give 'Let It All Be' a mighty beatdown. The two drummers take the final ten minutes of the set for themselves, one moment doubling each other for extra hairy balled fatness, the next swapping beats and endless rolls. It's rock at its purest and it's fantastic.
Sorry, did I say that was "rock at its purest"? It was, almost. Because The Stooges are about to take that and boil it down into something even stronger. Let’s put this in perspective: every band and every audience member here sleeps with a copy of Funhouse under their pillow, and Iggy's not here to disappoint any one of us. Squint and it really could be 1969: Ig still has the body of a teenage junkie and performs in nothing but a tiny pair of jeans, shaking his ass all over the stage, humping amps, smashing spotlights with a mic stand and demanding mass stage invasions. He makes every other frontman on earth look lazy. The Asheton brothers and the Minutemen's Mike Watt wisely hide in the shadows while Iggy flips out. They play most of the first two albums (including 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' twice!), then a few tracks from Skull Ring and the new album, augmented by Funhouse sax. In the years since the Strokes and the whole garage rock thing we've seen so many Stooges copyists that it's shocking how much better the real thing is. The word 'primal' has been over-used in describing them, but the Stooges' rhythms are so prehistorically potent, so hard-wired to human DNA and the only possible reaction is to shake and scream for more.
So how are Sonic Youth going to top that? By starting with 'Teenage Riot' and ending it in a clanging guitar swordfight. The feedback whirls through the crowd and up into the ceiling, but doesn't hide the fact that even with Kim Gordon shimmying in a silver dress, the Youth just don't have the charisma to follow Iggy. Reports are that they were better the next night, following Dinosaur Jr. But I'm still reeling too much from the Stooges to think about it.
Saturday
Deerhoof's show is as delightful or as annoying as we've come to expect. I'm going with the former. The weeny Satomi Matsuzaki's bubbly melodies and nursery school miming have their perfect foil in the band's disassembled post punk. And when guitar problems stall the set, the seven foot drummer bounds out from his kit, bending double into Satomi's mic to tell us it's all gonna be ok as she giggles in the corner. Then she sings a song about bunny rabbits. They're the one band of the weekend that you'd really want as your friends. Somebody slap me.
Wooden Wand's alt. country is an oddity at this year's ATP, as he plays pretty straight. The guy next to me murmurs appreciatively that "this is the first proper song I've heard all weekend." The gentle charm of the set serves as a well needed break from all the madness.
Back to the madness, then. Like the Stooges, Gang Of Four are a reunion that could go either way. And it does, but brilliantly so. Those influential funk punk anthems are as taut and menacing as ever, while more avant garde moments take hold of the middle of the set, with Andy Gill playing a solo by bouncing his guitar on the floor, and singer Jon King playing percussion on a microwave with an iron bar. I'd always assumed GO4's complex riffs were played by two guitarists, but the simpler explanation is that Gill is a genius, a punk axeman of the Tom Verlaine class.
There's only one way to follow such a venomous guitar torturer, and that's with a merciless six-string execution courtesy of J Mascis and Dinosaur Jr. While the years have been good to his peer Thurston Moore, turning him into a venerable art rock uncle, Mascis has remained the greasy haired misanthropic wizard rocking out in his garage. Live, he's the perfect image of what rock's all about, framed by Marshall stacks, his lank grey hair flying around his lurching Fender. He still can't write or sing a vocal melody, but that's blown into irrelevance by the force of his wild musicianship.
So after watching a guitarist shred his balls off, a visit to the second stage yields Comets On Fire offering up twice that. It's satisfying how much Ethan Miller looks like that feral Bee Gee, or how he might look if he showered in sweat and ate hallucinogens for breakfast. They pull out a set that could have come from any of their albums, or some crackly Hawkwind or Floyd record from the early 70s. It makes no difference: everything they do tonight is psychotic psychedelic noise and it goes down a treat. The drummer and bassist periodically drop into compulsive two-second loops, the kind hippies used to put at the end of LPs, while Miller and Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny spin out everlasting solos. It's epic.
Sunday
Three free-noise bands start the day. My Cat Is An Alien are two Italians playing Light Sabres and plastic rayguns alongside electronics and percussion in the hope the gimmickry will hide their utter bollocksness. Lacking any sense of texture or dynamic, it's just white noise.
A jog to the third stage reveals a different kind of improv on a jazzier tip. This is White Out, whose skittering drums and underwater keys create layers of subtle sound.
Back on the main stage are the current darlings of noise, Wolf Eyes. They're the first band to properly address the audience, even if it's only to say variations on "Fuckin' yeah, dudes!". A friend of a friend is allegedly staying with them and reports that their chalet's an all night frat party of beer kegs and high fives. If only they'd applied that party spirit to their music: an ugly dirge with an undercurrent of blunt beats. It isn't shocking or provocative or cathartic. Instead it winds up being dull. Maybe the albums reveal more subtleties, but live it's all a bit Nathan Barley.
Time for a jog back to the third stage, where Alexander Tucker's looping himself on a range of instruments and his own voice, creating broad strokes of ambience and lightening the darker passages with sprinkles of fingerpicked acoustic work. His set is hypnotic and affecting.
Six Organs Of Admittance plough similar ideas of repetition and folky drones, but shake them up with drums, bass, and a healthy dose of rocking out. The live show's closer to the rock of Ben Chasny's other band, Comets On Fire, than any of Six Organ's albums, yet there's still a thoughtful resonance that makes them stand out, with folk guitar, eastern drones and winding psychedelics blending with 70s heavy rock for a heady, noisy brew.
I'm not going to say anything about the No-Neck Blues Band because they're annoying the shit out of me. One of them is wearing a box on his head and is singing through a plastic bottle. A man next to me shakes his head and says "I've seen one too many of these bands this weekend" and heads for the door. People follow him like the Israelites followed Moses, except this guy's not going to wander the desert for forty nights, he's going to see Be Your Own Pet.
And thanks to him for that. Here's the antidote to just about everything, ever: four raging teenagers going nuts on stage. The bassist's afro is astonishing, the drummer looks like a toddler, the guitarist is flipping out and Jemima Pearl is the frontgirl to end all frontgirls, like Iggy's spiritual granddaughter. Their racket speeds by with songs running together until you have no clue what they're singing about, but it sounds damn important. The only lyrics that cut through are something about adventurers, and that's what these kids are, touring the world and sending everyone crazy. Their set dissolves into an awesome battlefield of feedback and crashing, searing noise that's been earned in the way that ‘LA Blues’ on Funhouse earned it: by winding up the tension so far that the only possible release is a release from everything. Structure, melody, rhythm and other bullshit niceties are tossed off the stage and all that's left is noise and four maniacs leaping into the audience and trashing their drums. Their label boss Thurston Moore runs on like a drunk uncle at a 16th birthday party, playing bass with the bassist's afro and joining in with the chaos. It’s a fitting end to the night, and to the festival. |
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| Mat Croft |
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