what five did on my holidays
Woke up on saturday and it was sunny again! Yay! Blades Of Glory (Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Will Arnett) was on ATP TV. I'd become pretty tired of Will Ferrell films, but it was actually really funny, a good start to the day. I was determined to catch Jens Lekman having missed most of him the weekend before. He and his ridiculously enthusiatic all-female backing band were excellent, and he had amusing inter-song banter to top it off. An excellent hangover cure. Luckily upstairs, World's End Girlfriend was delayed so me and Martin went up, and found the others sitting at the back. WEG were really good in parts - lovely quiet stuff emanating from the laptop - but unfortunately it was kind of ruined by the loud bits. Partly it was the appaling drum sound, but also just basically fell into bog-standard post-rock territory.
Saul Williams next, one of my most anticipated acts of the weekend. I had spent a lot of time before exhorting the unenthusiastic to attend, since he had the most unique flow of any hip-hop artist I've heard, bordering on performance poetry (in a good way), and with great lyrics. Unfortunately he seems to have abandoned this style in favour of a sort of credible version of rap-rock, which although good, was not the kind of opinion-changing performance I was hoping for. His new buddy Trent Reznor has clearly had an influence. Everyone seemed to like it anyway though. It was reminiscent of Mike Ladd's performance at the Tortoise ATP - rocked up to appeal to the festival goer, and successfully so. One great section which did go back to the Saul Williams of old, beginning "Muthafuckas better realise..." and going on to a massive list of culturally important authors, politicians and locations. Being unaccompanied, he was able to escape the bonds of rhythm that tied him to the occasional hackneyed word patterns of the other songs, and allowed us to revel in the sound of his voice and its natural rhythm. It was the highlight of the set for me.
Lunchtime then, and I kind of regret not seeing Ghostface, but these things happen. Paul got tons and tons of pizza from Pizza Hut (all you can eat) and gave me some so I ate for free. Caught a bit of Okkervil River - they sounded better live than the (already quite good) record. Also heard the first Iron & Wine song - terrible. Reggae-tinged. Nuff said. What has happened to that band?
I'm used to ...Trail Of Dead trashing everything after their shows, so it was odd and almost good to see them not do it. The songs, this time, were catharsis enough. The last time they played ATP, Neil Busch launched his bass up at the lighting rig, this time there was no Busch, but a couple of extra members conspicuous mostly for the benifit of the music. Aside from a pretty terrible new song, it was a festival set - finishing with Mistakes and Regrets, Totally Natural and Richter Scale Madness - and it was one of the best things of the weekend. I really didn't think I'd be saying that.
Happily, dinner prevented me seeing another Dinsaur Jr. Sadly, dinner prevented me seeing The National. Rumours of a Fridge reunion unfortunately did not come to fruition: in light of Four Tet's and Adem's subsequent music, they were decidedly more than the sum of their parts. Thus I decided not to bother with Adem based on the assumption that it would be mostly stuff off his last record, which I don't really like.
Anticipated highlight of the festival next then, with Stars Of The Lid, followed by Battles. In the wait for SOTL, the bands Battery Poof Farm and Poo-hole Plowman Sings Magical Bumming were formed. Opinion is divided about whether this was good or bad scheduling.
I'm sorry, just have to hop back to the present here - someone just tried to sell me knock-off porn DVDs while I was working at Blackwell. WTF??? But hey, 3 for £10 isn't bad. It actually took me about 5 minutes to work out what he wanted, I thought maybe he wanted us to sell his DVDs in the shop or something.
I thought it was not too bad, although it was annoying having people who were just waiting for Battles to come on chattering away. Stars Of The Lid were incredible. It seemed to be an immoderate amount more sad and beautiful than their records. The early Silver Mount Zion-esque sparse string arrangements I'm sure converted more than one Battles enthusiast. The hour they played felt like 10 minutes. Amazing.
Battles were also fucking incredible. Sometimes I just don't understand why so many people like them (I got this feeling most strongly when they played shit Shania Twain joke song anthem 'Atlas', where the jumping crowd tested the structural soundness of the venue), but that night it was clear. John 'Machine' Stanier's hip-hop influenced uber-tight drumming would have probably won most people's ATP oustanding individual performance award, but even Tyondai 'The shit one' Braxton, who we had discussed assassinating earlier in the weekend, mostly earned his place. In case you were wondering, the other members of Battles are Ian 'Is he on drugs or is his face always like that?' Williams and Dave 'Smokin cigarettes and lookin tough' Konopka. EP tracks were in reasonable supply: 'SZ2' (second half), 'Tras' and 'Hi/Lo' to close the set.
Having not done any dangerous climbing the night before, I was determined to do a little on Saturday night. There should be a picture of me on the swimming pool roof at some point. I also retrieved a frisbee from the restaurant roof, which a random proceeded to throw directly into Steven's face by accident. He was not entirely pleased. Went to the beach with Dave, Mikey and Steven at about 5am, where a mini-party was developing. A large Irish man forced us to drink vodka and orange. We met the trolley skaters of the previous night. I recognised someone from Edinburgh, but it turned out we didn't actually any mutual friends that we could determine, so I must have just remembered him from the street or something. It was declared that "one is not a man until one has pissed in the sea". Bed 8am.
Sunday afternoon began with Polvo. For many of our number (including me), they were one of the main reasons for going to the festival. Apart from a sort of slight feeling that they were not putting all of their heart and soul into the gig, they were awesome. 'Feathers Of Forgiveness' and a new song were the highlights, plus they have a new drummer who was pretty impressive. After that, I couldn't bring myself to suffer the inevitable disappointments of Animal Collective & Atlas Sound, saw some Silver Jews and was bored (although the between song banter was excellent) so I went back to 'the flat'.
I'd planned to get to Broken Social Scene at the beginning, because I had a feeling they would play '7/4 Shoreline' first. However it was one of those occasions where everyone is just about to go (making it really antisocial to say "look, i'll see you there alright?") but people keep thinking of one last thing they need to do. I know what you're thinking: "Surely Alilloyd is not the kind of person who kowtows to social mores when good music is at stake" - well, new version clearly. That doesn't mean I didn't get anxious and irritated.
The bad news was, my instincts were right and they did play '7/4 Shoreline' first. The good news was that De La Soul pissed about for 30 minutes before they came on, meaning the Pavilion Stage was delayed, and we arrived just before BSS came on. I experienced waves of joy. The second song (I can't remember what it's called but it's a Do Make Say Think-y one that's brass heavy) was equally brilliant. After a few good to mediocre songs they brought Explosions and J. Mascis on stage for a horrendous Live Aid style version of the too-shit-even-for-Status-Quo 'Backed Out On The Cocks', reducing all of our party to horrible tears. I really resent them for it, because it meant I couldn't bear to stay and therefore missed 'Ibi Dreams Of Pavement'. So we left, ate, pissed about, and then headed to Reds stage for The Drift.
The Drift have a song called 'Uncanny Valley', which is the name of a Eunoia song. Theirs is thankfully not as good :-) but in general I enjoyed them. We were hoping for a similar revelation to that of Brokeback last year, based on the fact that they played at about the same time on the same stage, and were bound to be a bit like Tortoise. There was a bit too much trumpet, and a bit too much boring guitar for my liking. Envy were the last band to be announced, and the last band we saw. I was uncertain what to expect, given they've played amazing (Mogwai ATP, Nice N Sleazy) and, more recently, shit (Arches) in the past. But barring slightly dodgy muddy sound for the first two songs, and slightly too quiet vocals from their fuzzy Japanese bear of a frontman, it was perfect. An excellent selection of songs, pretty much the best from the last three albums.
After a couple of hours which saw us being as irritating as possible in the crazy horse (steve reich inspired nonsense chanting over the songs, Steven walking as slowly as possible to block people behind him etc), it was chucking out time. The smoking area outside was packed full of people who weren't yet ready for ATP to end. Somebody started cheering as if a band were going to play; everyone caught on and joined in, to the extreme bemusement of the security staff. This continued for quite a long time, until the bouncers, obviously frustrated, decided to start pulling people off the plant structure in the middle, clearly unaware that these were essentially gentle, polite music fans wanting to cause mischief, rather than wasted thugs who were a genuine threat. With several people having been thrown to the ground, the crowd dispersed a little, and then someone decided to go for the trampolines. Lots of people followed, one guy ended up getting practically thrown out of the enclosed area onto the metal steps leading up to it - I wouldn't be surprised if he was quite badly hurt. There followed much argument with the security staff about how they handled the situation. It reminded me a bit of the Cirque Des Clunes bit from Knowing Me Knowing You, where Alan Partridge, hopelessly misjudging what was going on, attempts to flex authoritarian muscle but just ends up looking completely idiotic.
Pretty fun though.
Met up with Al from Edinburgh, and went to his mates' chalet, then found my Irish neighbours still up at 6.30am, so chatted to them for a while. It was a nice way to end ATP (much better than having a strip-search from a Butlins official wearing latex gloves and then chucked out for possession of weed which I (partly) saw happening to a group in a chalet near ours). Total EB. Suffered extreme TP on the way back due to massive queues to get a bus from Minehead to Taunton, but I totally just made it.
Plus I didn't get post-ATP depression because on Thursday I got to see Heather for the first time in 2 weeks! Woo!