REVIEW: Wakestock [Festival Fever]

REVIEW: Wakestock

Posted on June 29, 2008 3:41 PM
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Wakestock
Blenheim Palace
27th – 29th June 2008

Review by Matt Killeen

Wakeboarding. I had to look it up. Clearly there was some kind of watersport going on at Blenheim Palace but if you’re the type who owns their own wetsuit you should probably stop reading now. For me to attempt to cover the sporting activity would be a waste of material. While I could talk about the rumoured propeller problems and the fact that no riders could stay on their feet as a result, I can’t honestly claim that to know what I’m talking about. It might take me all weekend to figure out a Minnewashta from a Batwing and I’m afraid it just doesn’t seem as exciting as getting to bitch, from some position of authority, about the music.

Therefore lengthy analogies around the words Butterslide, Tantrum and Tail Rail have also been shelved in favour of some serious criticism. The bill was extremely promising in terms of both people I was looking forward to seeing and people who I expected to disappoint. The Mondays, Mark Ronson, The Streets...So who is who? Read on...or, as my editor says, bring on the scorn. Ah, I love the smell of dissatisfaction in the morning.

There wasn’t a discernable running order in advance so my best journalistic intentions were likely to dissolve with the weather. Furthermore the schedules I did get my hands on shifted like water. Queues for toilets or beer are also the enemy of organisation. Not knowing when someone is onstage meant I was certain to miss someone I really wanted to see and I would, at some point, see a band that I loved without ever knowing their name.

Also the nature of festivals itself imposes its own tyranny. Temperature and dryness, or the lack of it, directly affects your mood. The best performances are lost to the individual through hangover, at Glastonbury by distance and everywhere by fatigue induced apathy. It works the other way round as well. Finding someone in your favourite obscure band’s t-shirt after pushing to the front at 10am can make the worst performance golden. Having sex in a tent nearby also guarantees that you will remember a set fondly.

Unique in my experience is the several hours walking back and forth across the site looking for my press accreditation, chasing a ‘runner’ who has decided to not take his job title literally. It took one individual to go above and beyond to make things right and establish some kind of equilibrium in my mood, so thanks to Sam for giving this review a fighting chance at reasonable parity and fairness.

Thankfully Wakestock is otherwise small and well organised. Security are helpful and polite, stewards friendly and even the Police have taken some sort of anger management course. It is also, in audience terms, looking a little threadbare. Hyper, Trophy Twins, Devils Gun and Aynsli Jones all howl into a wind of technical problems and small crowds of clean looking teenagers with Rucksacks. DJs play pumping tunes to clumps of grass in dark marquees. Even the fifteen year olds haven’t had time to binge drink yet.

Nothing sums up the reality of a Friday afternoon festival slot and the authentic experience of starting out as a newly signed band than watching Cazals. Seen by an audience of dozens, some of whom are clearly their parents, the fresh faced children do their best to establish some kind of status with their mix of Editors-like ‘80s darkness. The singer is a curiosity, somewhere between Kevin Rowland and Micky Pearce from Only Fools and Horses wearing a shirt reminiscent of some kind of totalitarian dictator. It’s unclear whether he has the voice to match his potential stage presence as the sound precluded any reasonable assessment. They make perfect sense when they play a Spandau Ballet track, the first band of the weekend to reference the 1980s directly, and they’re possibly worthy of another listen.

Royworld, on the other hand, wear their influences much more obviously. They want to be Keane or Coldplay very badly indeed, seemingly unaware that those bands already exist and have occasionally written a memorable melody. The singer came across as smug without ever once coming across as worthy of such self-regard. I feel for them as the technical problems and lengthy hiatus mid-set cannot have helped the performance but I just don’t think they have it.

The fabled ‘it’. It is another factor at work in a festival setting that the sheer number of acts on show encourages the swift and damning judgement so beloved of the A&R man – after 5 seconds, you really can tell whether something is worth listening to or at least that is what you come to believe. I’ve fought such prejudice for years but whenever faced with quantity over quality it is the default human setting. Maybe Royworld have a diamond in their somewhere but when there is so much earth to shift to get there, wise miners seek elsewhere.

By this time Audio Bullys have managed to get a decent crowd together in the main tent but by virtue of the fluid running order are just finishing up when I got there. Like so many other acts on the big stage at Wakestock, the sound rendered the vocals indistinct and lost in the background buzz. Over the weekend the tonality of Simon Franks, Shaun Ryder and Mike Skinner were lost completely, as if the engineers had never heard anyone with a voice like that before. Sound is, of course, subjective – volume and equalisation depend entirely on an individual’s hearing but if the mixing on these acts sounded good to anyone, they have no business as a sound engineer. The Bullys were banging, competent but denied their true edge they were far from convincing.

By hook or crook, Groove Armada got their sound perfect. At their age and with their experience I would have expected no less. As the advert said, you do indeed know more Groove Armada than you think. In fact you know all of it, by virtue of having seen any TV advertising over the last decade. You may hate that kind of thing, this is an act which is, after all, currently signed to a brand of rum, but when it matters most they deliver. Their edges were sharp, vicious yet precise, in your face but not painful and they made many other bands this weekend seem very ordinary and rather amateurish. Walking the line between accessibility and edginess, it was the proverbial baby bear’s porridge. Even ‘At the River’, one of the most overused ‘chillout’ tracks in history – the M&S food ad to some of you – manages to be some kind of apotheosis. For a band so cynical in so many areas of their work, they do seem to believe that what they do is important and that it mattered.

Talking of apotheosise, Hadouken! were on the other stage at the same time. As I arrived, a tent full of pubescent new ravers with face paint and oversized ‘H!’ foam fingers were going ape to their final chords, aircraft floods illuminating all the excitement. Looked good but who can say? Did I miss them because Groove Armada were so good or because they once left me outside in the rain when I went to review them? I think it was an accident but a mental healthcare professional once told me there are no real ‘accidents’.

That left Pendulum to finish Friday night, the entire festival crowd that had made it until that point now crammed into a tiny marquee. They couldn’t possibly fail, could they?

I love my guitar frequencies and dance is fine by me as long as there’s fat distorted sounds driving it along. Pendulum fit that bill perfectly and I love their massively overblown, theatrical, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory sampling intensity. What I expected from their live performance, I don’t know but with it being drum and bass I thought something percussive, something with clean lines. What I did not expect was a metal band.

It made perfect sense, the only real surprise is why we haven’t seen more of it: a fully charged, guitar driven grunting monster coiling into ever tighter mobius loops, just coherent enough for you to see its passing. Very nicely done. Now normally I demand dynamics, a little light with my shade so I can truly fear the dark but here it just seemed right to carry on like the Ramones on speed. Of course they are Aussies and what Australia doesn’t tend to accept is bedroom widdling. What they had to do to survive was make their stuff work live and clearly that’s what they did. The band does have mid-tempo numbers but tonight Pendulum dispensed with all that. Stopping to breathe was considered simply unnecessary, like not having a singer just because they’re playing an instrumental.

It works. As yet another shrieking analogue synth riff ripped along like the devils kazoo I became aware that underneath it there was a low growling. It was the audience singing along to it. AND wrecking. Stunning.

Saturday 4am. I am awoken by a very familiar row. A woman is striding precariously through the guide ropes, slurring, ‘leave me alone, leave me alone’. This is followed by a stumbling male calling out, “no, just listen, listen...” I’m not sure what was worse, being awake at 4am or hearing that row from the outside looking in.

Fortunately, the morning at Wakestock is given over to wakeboarding so it is only the board riders who are invited to get up early. However, when the sun comes the hungover masses are driven from their oven-like tents by the heat. All those that do burn instantly in the sunshine. They survey the wreckage of the previous night and most of them leave it where it is.

The festival filled gently over the day and slowly loses the ghost town vibe. I couldn’t help thinking, however, that there weren’t enough people here. It remains to be seen if the organisers can take the hit this year. Having a festival the same weekend as Glastonbury would seem a little provocative but not everyone can go there, even if this year there were Glastonbury tickets available until the Thursday before.

Glastonbury’s ticket ‘problems’ were nothing to do with Jay-Z of course. This was a media stunt if I’ve ever seen one – there have been hip-hop acts at Glastonbury before and the headline act is never the sole reason for going. They didn’t sell out until the last minute because of the punitive and complex registration process. After a brief period of ultra-trendiness where some people would do anything, this has left most people believing they wouldn’t be able to get tickets. Now, most couldn’t be bothered jumping through hoops to get them.

This meant Wakestock has a certain refusenik status. Many of the same acts played, the queues for burgers were much shorter and all we missed was Amy Winehouse’s drunken antics, which Londoners will have to relive in the Metro for months to come anyway. For some, the board riders, this is actually where it’s at.

There are healthy crowds for those starting out on the Saturday, even those like Esser who are still having to move their own gear off stage. Like policemen, bands start looking younger every year and Esser look for all the world like children dressed in their parents’ 1980s clothes. Their bizarre Nick Kamen chic aside, they play an attractive pop / dance crossover, unpredictable and endlessly engaging. I’m concerned for them, as I can see that their music is probably just too clever for pure pop, too interesting for mass appeal. Time will tell but I fear a career as It Bites will probably follow.

Far more obvious and easier to categorise are I-Koma, a bog standard rawk band of limited scope. More than a decade ago The Almighty tried to make people believe that this kind of dirty LA rock was something new when in fact it’s just a patchwork of well-trodden influences. Do they really belief that no-one has the wit to see where their coming from? Even their press materials are riven with unintentional double meanings. You cannot ‘herald’ those who ‘came before’. How is it possible that they can’t see that doing a Stones cover just demonstrates their lack of vision and ambition?

For all his bluster, Davey Perry undermines their status by playing pally with the crowd. A true star doesn’t care what the audience thinks. Like a good military officer you have to lead, not by playing nice but by demanding respect. When he says, “This is a song about trying to find a prostitute at 3am”, I know it’s a crock. I don’t believe them, their songs, stories and dirty rock personalities, not for a second. They are just the Towers of London without the unintentional humour.

Watching them backstage living the vida loca like an LA hair band of the 1980s, I had to smile, the way you smile at a child playing at being a grown-up. I wonder if they have ever seen ‘The Decline of western Civilisation Part 2’? They would probably view it as a ‘how-to’ manual.

Operator Please are everything that I-Koma are not. They might not be anything especially new but they take what they have and ramp it up until it hurts. For everything they lack in gravitas they make up for in enthusiasm, reminiscent of the Voodoo Queens but with tunes and song structures. Their childlike glee and edge of tantrum anger is simply a joy to watch. Since the Eighties are the period de jour they play Salt and Pepa’s ‘Push It’ and actually make it work. The crowd is thick with women and girls and this changes the dynamics of the live experience. It might seem like a cliché but there is an inclusivity and supportive atmosphere at work here that makes a mockery of I-Koma’s machismo, without ever resorting to over-familiarity. For the first time this weekend, I am disappointed when a band finishes.

In Case of Fire want to be Muse. They aren’t.

I don’t get Mystery Jets. They look like Robert Smith in ‘Miami Vice’, the sleeves of their white jackets rolled up like it’s 1986. They play a Smiths-esque jingle-jangle pop infused with those DX7 keyboard noises. They can write a pop song, ‘Two Doors Down’ is an endearing piece of whimsy in the studio but today it doesn’t work. Watching them I don’t believe that there was / is a girl two doors down. This is a trick the Cure do very well – a man who has been seeing the same woman since he was 13 regularly tells stories of love and loss that resonate. The Jets have not yet learnt to do it. There are too many distracting irritants. Unless Blaine is disabled, the sitting down thing is an affectation that they could do without, but I’m not really sure why it wasn’t happening. Their twee vibe is lost in a sea of what I can only describe as smugness. Everything sounds like it’s happening in slow motion or underwater. I am not...feeling it.

The Blackout and Elliott Minor are the result of a decade of Green Day ascendancy. They play that kind of Sum 41 / Lit alternative metal that is already out-of-date, the kind of bands that small town America pumps out on a weekly basis. Even though they are from Wales and Yorkshire respectively they sing with trans-Atlantic accents.

Elliott Minor describe themselves as playing a ‘fusion of rock and classical music’. No you don’t, you stupid little boys. What you play is a fusion of piss-weak Americana and corporate greed filtered through watered down metal. The effect is somewhere between the guy who brought his new electric guitar to school – standing outside the music block trying to play ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ through a £5 crunch pedal – and Busted, just without the self awareness. These are people unaware that the Darkness were a joke.

I made a point of checking them out in the interests of fairness. This meant missing some of the Happy Mondays but that’s the job isn’t it? After fighting my way past a crowd of star-struck adolescents I found myself caught up, for a moment, in their boyish enthusiasm. Only for a moment, because a few seconds later they played, with grim faced determination, a solo that sounded as if they were indeed the only people who have ever heard Eddie Van Halen and expected us to accept his sloppy seconds. They are a nail-on for worst anything of the year so far, right up there with Boris Johnson or a botched colonoscopy.

The Blackout, who by all accounts might just have a sense of humour, escape my wrath as the bizarre scheduling changes that were the curse of the weekend meant that I missed them entirely. Their sentence is, of course, merely suspended.

I had never seen the Happy Mondays. Shocking, I know but I didn’t really love them at their peak. I had back-combed hair at the time and despite growing up in the alternative melting pot that was Birmingham in the late ‘80s / ‘90s, baggy didn’t grab me. It was too flared, too druggy and too casually reactionary in terms of their stance on women and homosexuality. In retrospect and without those flabby album tracks the Mondays clearly had some magic, a fact born out by the sparkling Black Grape debut that brought a touch of control and organisation to Shaun Ryder’s scattergun creativity. More importantly, the Mondays form a vital and intricate part of the soundtrack to my life. I was therefore looking forward to the experience, even though I knew in my heart that I was going to see a mess.

It was chaos and distressingly so. Baggy never got its live thing together, its proponents either too stoned or too cool to care enough. The Roses and the Mondays were particularly guilty in this regard and the double live album recorded at Elland Road was a testament to this laissez-fair attitude to playing a gig. Punk, rock and even pop can be more forgiving but dance music requires a certain precision.

The poor sound that had dogged the big tent throughout the festival allowed no margin for error, and the Mondays were way over the mark in terms of quality. Shaun Ryder wandered round the stage, utterly detached from what was going on, like a fat Shane McGowan. Bez did what Bez has always done – distracting from the Mondays’ many failings. It was like watching a bad Happy Mondays cover band. Playing ‘the Reverend Black Grape’ just indicated how far they have fallen, a great song by a good band played by some old drunk people. What was also apparent was that there was one member of the band missing who they couldn’t really do without.

In the final days of their original incarnation the band claimed that Shaun could leave if he wanted, they’d be fine with their backing singer thanks, much to the hilarity of the music press. We knew they were wrong but who could have predicted that they would miss Rowetta when she left?

Poor, crazy, unstable, talent show reject Rowetta, the woman so abused by life she can’t see that someone reached down and gave her the voice of the gods. Her replacement is not only short of charisma, but just doesn’t have the range or vocal quality to make this stuff work. So typical of the Mondays, so typical of Shaun William Ryder and the small minded approach that has cursed the band, that they clearly believed that one black, curly haired singer was freely interchangeable with another.

The volume, or rather the inappropriate lack of control in the use of high frequency noise was almost ear-splitting. Hundreds fled the tent to protect their hearing after the first song. The anger of the other journos and photographers nursing their ears outside the tent afterwards was palpable evidence of a genuinely gruesome and harmful sonic experience.

All in all, we watched a bunch of mid-forties hasbeens pissing away their legacy to pay for a lifestyle that has left them destitute. They even left the stage without ending on ‘Wrote for Luck’. I felt insulted, god knows what a real fan would have thought.

In comparison Calvin Harris, playing what is a very thin lo-fi dance music, shows how this stuff should be done. Taking his sound and turning it into Arena Rock without losing the essential mood was quite an achievement. While maintaining spontaneity the music was insistent, dark with humour and a joyful intensity. Calvin Harris also shows I-Koma how a frontman should really work. He participates with the crowd but does not beg, is great to watch but doesn’t resort to visual cliché. Most of all he radiates presence, an elusive quality that you either have or you don’t.

Mark Ronson is hot. Trendy. The big thing. I am therefore hugely suspicious.

With any media frenzy there is a big dose of exaggeration. In this case there is a revisionist history that is now attributing the success of Amy Winehouse, Lilly Allen and others to his tutelage. Chronologically speaking this rubbish of course, but his profile has now begun to eclipse his producees. Everything he touches turns to gold, or to be more precise, money. He is undoubtedly a good producer but his solo career is much more dubious.

Covers. I blame Nouveau Vague but they probably didn’t start it. Doing an acoustic or easy listening version of a song that is, shock, not acoustic or easy listening was interesting and funny for all of five minutes. The aftermath has resulted in all kinds of deeply unpleasant music, most of which has been used in mobile phone ads. The worst example is the child of satan who saw fit to cover Massive Attack’s Teardrop believing that his voice was comparable to Liz Fraser and that his desultory strumming equal to the original soundscape. This kind of narcissism is the driving force for this movement. Why would one assume that you could do better than the original?

There’s a reason that these things can work and Mark Ronson has lost sight of it. Lilly Allen or Amy Winehouse singing an Indie stomp is funny, it’s a contradiction, a contrast with the expected. When some unknown comes on and sings ‘Oh My God’ it is truly execrable. Use a random small woman with an average voice and you’re left with a poor copy.

Covers serve a purpose. They offer the chance to re-imagine something obscure or lost. They offer a band a chance to put their imprint over something familiar for a new audience. The choice says something about you and you can live and die by its execution. Mark Ronson covers Radiohead’s ‘Just’, one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written, an angry and imploring howl about domestic violence and all of its implicit inconsistencies. The song is already made listenable, already treads a fine line between a pop song and an expression of horror. He turns it into a joke and the result is frankly sickening.

Watching Mark Ronson in his white suit, with his ever-so-tight band playing ever-so-easy-listening covers, I am reminded of one thing. Mike Flowers Pops. This is not a good thing. Mike Flowers was joke. Also Mike Flowers was better than this.

By now the Monday’s related threshold shift sounded like someone sitting on a keyboard in my head. I retire but I cannot sleep, and instead listen to the muffled efforts of the girl in the next tent to get laid. Desperation proves itself unattractive and she is unsuccessful.

Sunday morning and fatigue is kicking in. Tiredness overcomes my eco-guilt and in order to carry on I have to spend a few hours asleep in my car with the air con on full. I emerge in time to watch Matt Costa, who is one of these acoustic singer-songwriter types.

To clarify, there is nothing wrong with acoustic music. However, contrary to popular belief it is much harder to do well than people think. Loudness, as in the case of electrified pop / rock and roll is inherently exciting by virtue of a physiological response. Your brain produces chemicals in response to loud noise to prepare you for fleeing or fighting and this is thrilling. The rhythm of your heart adjusts itself in response to high volume percussive beats. With an acoustic guitar and a single voice, you are relying on an emotional response, which is the work of your higher brain functions. The proportion of mediocre singer songwriters is the same as the proportion of mediocre rock bands, you just notice them more as their allure isn’t bulked out with endorphins. This is the case with Matt Costa who fails to trigger any response from my upper brain at all and denied adrenaline and natural opiates I get bored.

A Silent Film, on the other hand, have all the bases covered, providing amplification and something for my mind to do. As a reviewer I am grateful for the two signs at the front of the stage which tell me the name of the band and am entertained by the fact that at one point two of the band play them like drums. They are not the first or last band of the weekend who want to be Coldplay or Keane but in their case and at this present time, they are actually better than both. While Chris Martin insists on releasing the same song over and over again, there is definitely a place for A Silent Film. They also teach Mark Ronson a thing or two by covering Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ and totally nailing it.

Runners up in the ‘we had to get Monday off school to do this’ competition, The Dykeenies didn’t set any fires but were amusing enough, all boyish enthusiasm and smiles. They looked very much as I did at 15, right down to the clothes that have obviously become available again after two decades. Much as I wanted to like them however, I couldn’t take any of their songs away with me and that does not bode well.

Metronomy are on record as trying to make electro more interesting to watch. With their robotic dance moves and other gimmicks, they want to be Kraftwerk or Devo. The problem is they don’t look like they actually believe in what they’re doing. Using props from Ikea is just laziness. Dressing the same but wearing different trousers is a sign of a couldn’t-care-less attitude. The choreography is sloppy, not to mention dull and uninspired. At least it suits the music.

Winner of the Eagle Eye Cherry look-alike competition, Lightspeed Champion, grins in his furry hat. He plays nice songs and has an attractive female drummer. I am unable to figure out why it isn’t floating my boat. Maybe it’s because he is memorable but his songs aren’t quite so. Maybe it’s because I’m too cynical. In the end, I put this down to tiredness and a lack of concentration on my part.

Black Kids have possibly the worst band name I have ever heard. They also want to be The Cure. Not just sound like The Cure, or look like The Cure but they want to pretend that The Cure haven’t existed at all. They want us to hear ‘Teach your boyfriend to Dance...’ and smehow not assume that it’s a post-Disintegration period album track by Crawley’s finest. Hearing people talking up Black Kids I’m just astounded that they cannot see the emperor’s new clothes are a back-combed wig and smudged lipstick. Seeing them live I am struck by how 1980’s they look, how much they look like the Thompson Twins and how utterly contrived they are. They also play Don Henley’s ‘Boys of Summer’. They don’t call it that of course, they pretend it’s something else they wrote themselves. I shuddered as I imagined how this band are going to make my life miserable over the next few years. It turns out that two of Black Kids are Afro-American, for what that’s worth.

It’s an interesting time for The Futureheads, now an ex-next big thing. Recently dropped by their label, the on-a-platter marketing power of the majors is over and everything they achieve from now on will be with the sweat of their own brow.

The tent is full, the crowd mostly partisan so they would struggle to screw up and they prove themselves more than adequately. They come across less as the hollow Kaiser Chiefs Slight Return that we‘ve been told that they are and more as an archetypal Northern four-piece reminiscent of the Buzzcocks. They’re very good at it. The acid test was whether ‘Hounds of Love’ was the set highlight or just another good track. In the end it sat nicely alongside ‘Area’ and the best of their self-penned titles. If The Futureheads were forced to give up the ghost the world would be a little duller.

I had been waiting for The Streets all weekend so naturally I was going to be disappointed. Mike Skinner is a Brummie living in South London just like me, a Birmingham City fan to boot so I cut him a huge amount of slack. I believe he’s a poet, I believe he’s important and I think he uses humour and self-deprecation as tools to comment on essential truths about existence. Most of this was lost in the sonic mulch and his vocals sounded like he was rapping through a sock.

From the pit I saw him screaming at the monitor engineer and clearly he couldn’t hear himself any clearer than the audience could. He upped his game in an attempt to overcome the sound and gave it everything. His co-ordinated crowd surfing was a particular joy but I felt I was watching the whole performance through a window.

Estelle, the black female Mike Skinner™ got her sound right from the start, and played a decent set of R&B interspersed with commentaries on modern sexual mores.
She’s intelligent and that is, of course, going to cause her problems. Modern R&B rejects the idea of a woman as anything else but sexual object and that is the essential conflict in Estelle’s music. On the one hand the diva, on the other, the clever mouthy little girl described in ‘1980’. The crowd made her sing it and I would be cautious to jettison that track if I were her. Her desire to maintain her integrity has already cost her a record deal, an attitude for which I have great respect. However, she’s going to have to fight that same battle at every step along the way. She needs the people here if she’s going to survive.

Supergrass are one of those bands who have slipped under the radar down the years to become outstanding artists. As each of their songs have surfaced you felt that each one was OK and it was only looking back you realise that they have been consistently brilliant all along.

Truly beautiful moments in a live setting are rare, although the pedestal that we put musicians upon, coupled with the ceremonial quasi-religious nature of the gig does encourage them. I’m a sucker for audience participation but as Gaz began ‘Moving’ and the entire audience sang along, I was struck with a soaring and glorious feeling of awe and well-being. Sit in front of a Rousseau at the National Gallery for any length of time and the effect is the same.

It was only going to go downhill after that so I took the chance to take my exhausted body home down the motorway. It sounds sacrilegious but ‘Supergrass played and were brilliant’ isn’t really a story that needs telling.

So who were the winners and losers? Board Riders of all kinds were leading the pack as the friendly subculture they are until they decided to have a wet t-shirt competition and spoilt it all. Pendulum, Calvin Harris and Groove Armada definitely excelled, with Operator Please close behind. The losers? The people who had to clean up afterwards.