Truck Festival
Hill Farm, Oxford | 18-19 JULY
Friday
Truck’s quaintly-named Market Stage actually looks more like an ostentatious circus big top, but that doesn’t stop Empty White Circles from kicking off our festival with an exceptionally down-to-earth performance of warm, Bright Eyes-ish folk rock. Their matrimony of acoustic instruments and overdriven guitar is bolstered by brotherly harmonies and sounds impressively tight. Fickle Friends continue the sunny vibes with vintage synths and bouncing beats over at the main stage, where Truckers are knocking back pints of strong local cider in the vague hope it might keep them hydrated throughout the weekend’s hellishly muggy heatwave. Not a chance, but at least the accompanying band make music as sweet as the fruity booze that’s on tap.
The Dreaming Spires, formed by festival founders Joe and Robin Bennett, pull in more sozzled punters from the nearby bar with Americana stylings, but their smalltown sound fails to fully project across the expanse of scorched grass in front of the stage. Luckily Catfish and the Bottlemen have the amps to make up for it, and you have to give them props for sticking to their trademark all-black with skintight jeans uniform when the weather’s pushing 30 degrees. Alt-rock upstarts Canterbury are equally toasty in the Barn, a converted cattle shed that smells like faeces but hosts some of the weekend’s most memorable noisemakers, including this well-rehearsed four-piece.
Kids In Glass Houses have always been a bit wanky in their post-emo radio pop pretension, and continue be during one of their last ever performances on Truck’s main stage. “You’ve probably never heard of us” bemoans spoilt frontman Aled Phillips before shrugging his way into the next single. The band’s obvious boredom hints at contractual obligation, and you can’t help but feel for the mosher kids who hoping for a magical send-off. Still, there’s a cool looking ferris wheel nearby to cheer the young ‘uns up.
Peace are next: they want to be The Cure, and patently aren’t. While their sound is solid beneath reverb-saturated chords and understated vocal melodies, it feels clinical in its delivery. We need a scuzzy rock show to reignite our energy; luckily, Los Campesinos! are on hand at the Market Stage, belting out plenty of their shout-along distro-pop dance numbers. Predictably, it’s the day’s standout performance.
Friday’s last rock show arrives in the form of The Cribs‘ top slot. They’re a band who seem to have acquired legendary status among indie audiences without doing all that much, apart from that brief stint when Johnny Marr inexplicably played with them. As it is, the Northern three-piece swagger their way through a set that’s enjoyable enough set but fails to encapsulate the day’s glorious summer vibe as a festival headliner should. The evening draws to a decent close with a visit back to that stanky barn: back-to-back DJ slots from the energetic Jaguar Skills and effortless Julio Bashmore equal massive farmyard rave.
Saturday
Headaches are aplenty on Saturday morning, and we don’t help ourselves by paying the aptly named Brawlers a visit; the Leeds punks go mental on the newly decorated Rio-themed “Barnival,” tearing down bunting and kicking beach sand in people’s hungover faces. Admittedly, the bolshy band are a solid unit and provide the wake-up call we need to keep on Truckin’.
Kevin Devine is quiet in comparison, but no less impactful. This remarkably polite bloke from Brooklyn sets the Barn’s artificial paradise alight when he steps away from the microphone to deliver an impassioned, unamplified vocal performance during his devastating ballad Brothers Blood. All rather emosh, and Truck veteran Sam Duckworth capitalises on the crowd’s collective broken heart during his farewell performance; best known for his work as Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, his set is packed with favourites from debut album Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager. The nostalgic set is a fitting goodbye from a musician who frequently defined Oxford as his spiritual home.
Good things end as others begin. Alphabet Backwards are a local band who have failed to gather much recognition in the past, but today pull out the best-received performances of their career on the Veterans and Virgins stage. An encore call is a signal that the synth-pop collective might soon find themselves on bigger stages beyond their home county. Superfood are another excellent addition to Saturday’s so-far-stellar line-up, impressing the main stage crowd with a consistent playlist of post-Britpop cleverness and snarling groove-driven jams.
Over at the Market stage, ex-King Blues frontman Itch is bouncing about and physically lifting audience members arms in the air to his stale cockney hip-hop, backed by a Freudian nightmare of a DJ who wears a giant silicon mask depicting a screaming child. After feigning interest in the Londoner’s underwhelming street poetry for half an hour, it’s easy to understand the infant’s pain. A much more fun rap set comes from Californian Oxford student MC Lars. The “nerdcore” icon spits lyrics about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, while sampling Tetris and Mario games and repeatedly using the word “Fresh!” to describe the situation. Uncool it might be, but the performance is rapturously received and provides an infectious energy boost to remedy the danger of an early evening slump.
Gnarwolves keep the fiesta booming in the Barn with their filthy, riotous pop punk, a perfect warm-up for the hyperactive fireball that is Andrew W.K. Slamming notes on a piano over powerchord backing tracks and shouting “PARTY!” is the sum of his gameplan during this headline slot, delivered with an excess of enthusiasm that keeps every occupant inside this sketchy metal structure jumping.
The main stage closers are White Lies, providing some of the biggest sounds of the weekend with their epic, electro-infused anthems. The best view comes from the top of the ferris wheel. As we rotate at an alarming speed around the flimsy steel structure, the sight of an accomplished band playing animatedly to a crowd of grateful punters makes us realise that death by festival wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
Having survived that rickety ride, and Truck 2014 in general, we’re already psyched for next year’s offering. Here’s to another weekend of barnyard bangers.
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Words: Matt Ayres
Photography: Ross Silcocks
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