One, Two, Three – The Loves (Fortuna Pop!)

People Who Know love The Loves because they have a pick ‘n’ mix feel for all that is good on the great sweetie stall of popular song, slyly cramming handfuls of the tastiest treats into the secret pockets of their vintage overcoats. This new E.P. proves the point marvellously, with four very different pop nuggets, each bursting with melodic goodness.

The Loves’ bubble-gum pop odyssey continues apace with nifty slam-dunk glam stomp ‘One Two, Three’, a song that pretty much demands you do that bending at the hip with your hands wedged in your jeans pockets dance. It’s a classic nursery rhyming singy song-along (see also, er, ‘ABC’) with big boomy drums and backing vocals that sound like they’re being chanted by a stray Bay City Roller fan. Another instant pop smash from Simon Love and his hip to the beat gang. Also, in my head, ‘One Two Three’ keeps morphing into The 1910 Fruitgum Company’s ‘1,2,3 Red Light’, a song covered by The Pooh Sticks, a band The Loves reminded me of the first time I ever saw ‘em (it was a good thing). See, what goes around comes around in the big day-glo daisy chain of pop.*

Oh look here’s a live version of The Loves’ perennial girl-pop ditty ‘Chelsea Boy’! It’s all slinky with oceanic cymbals and little-black-dress atmospherics. Imagine a single tear falling from panda-eye make-up, tracing a glistening path down a pale, powdered cheek. There are bee-hive hairdos, pearly lipstick, and the Kray Twins are probably at the bar. Best bit is when the unlikely line ‘I’d batter you’ is sung in an emotingly straight-faced heartfelt way.

‘When I Get My Gun’ sees Simon Love getting all red-necked and vitriolic, threatening to ‘Skip with your intestines / Play football with your head’ to a twangily, toe-tappin’ chunk of cow-punk, nasal-voiced nastiness. You probably deserve it, mind. That just leaves us with a cheery charge through Jonathan Richman’s ‘Pablo Picasso’ which chug-a-lugs piano-thumpingly with Velvets in the basement vivacity. Nice.

(*Check out the top bendy knees dancing and double tambo action in this olden film of The 1910 Fruitgum Company. Plus! footage of traffic lights - just to get the message across)

Ectogram – Fluff On A Faraway Hill (Klangbad)

Ectogram come from Wales. They have close links with legendary German avant-garde music makers Faust. I mention these things in case they strike you as relevant. Some other points: Ectogram are a band of three people who sound like many more. On their web site, they are referred to as ‘Wales' premier post-tonal dronedelic noiseniks’. ‘Fluff on A Faraway Hill’ is their sixth album.

Ectogram songs build scrabbly, twiggy nests in your head, then scuffle about up there like critters in the loft. Ectogram songs are elemental - they feel like their component parts consist of unidentifiable organic matter; of mysterious dusts and curious stones, eerie weather and unusual mosses. They are constructed of discombobulating layers of textural noise that have a stick-in-your-teeth chewiness. That’s not to say that they make for ‘difficult’ listening though, these are strongly melodic works – you can hum along as sparks of sound snag in the curtains and tendrils of tune whip around the bookcases.

The tracks: ‘Devisor’ warps and drones with a mystical Eastern undertow over bendy skew-whiff notes, whilst vocalist/guitarist Ann Matthews ululates in a girlish tone. For nine minutes ‘Unterrock’ is an exhilarating headlong race through a bewildering forest of pulsing sound, where branches whip back and belt you in the face with little shrieks, with scribbling guitar and lyrics intoned as a mantra. ‘Aspic Liner’ bends and bows in a curiously soothing manner, you can imagine giving yourself up to its rubbery embrace and falling backwards into the dense mattress of sound it weaves from relaxedly epic guitar lines, hypnotic drum rounds and layers of Ann’s voice chanting buried-deep lyrics. It’s good that the album comes with a lyric booklet as it's intriguing to read what’s going on in these songs, ‘a dream of times swollen when crusts made hair curly’ or ‘deer stalker, forest running, algae blooming’, and ‘curmudgeon with his knees bent double’.

The dizzy-making ‘Spanner’ is pleasingly disorientating, its elastic guitar stretching and snapping back in a cheerily sickly manner. Noir-ish night-mare jazz-inflected ‘Toolbox’ slithers on flanging guitar and lullaby rhythms before cracking up into flying scraps of tune that flap about like bats on strings and you try not to get them in your hair. ‘Strategy Theme’ has lovely bell-like Dungen-style guitar ‘licks’ (if you will), that gallop and shudder across a bedrock of rattling, echoy drums and serenely gliding vocals. It sounds like the sun shining too brightly and is a sublime note on which to end.

‘Fluff On A Faraway Hill’ is playfully exploratory, packed with noise-making ideas skilfully interwoven to create some fearsome, tough-sounding psychedelia. An immersive sound-scape for hiding yourself in, camouflaged amongst the strange plant-forms. Not dreamy, more the sound of nature red in tooth and claw.

http://www.centralslate.omnia.co.uk/

Eggs and Chips - Manic Cough (Purr Records)

Manic Cough have a hamper-load of irresistible, barmy tunes and it’s always exciting when they unpack a couple more and set them out on the picnic rug for you to wolf down whilst swatting at buzzy wasps. This time round you get served a stream-of-bonkersness, energetic knees-up which starts as it ends with a tippy-tappy-tip tickling of the drums, and in between whirlwinds jauntily around with the Cough’s trade-mark skankin’ boisterousness.

"Eggs and chips and Weetabix, what a good mix in the morning" you’re sagely advised and at first you’ll be thinking "Coo! Slits-y free-falling jerk pop!" then you’ll suddenly get reminded of Elastica when they were cheeky and good. And no this isn’t ‘cos you’re listening to ladies singing and thus feel the need to compare them with another band with, y’ know laydeez in, it’s ‘cos Manic Cough suddenly start shouting "st, st, st, STUTTER!"

The wonderous thing about Manic Cough is that they manage to sneak tremendously toe-tapping melodies in amongst their dayglo rioting sticks and stones sound, they’re oddball but irresistible. Oh, and for the love of God, make sure you get yourself the bonus download-only track ‘Blue or Red’, a giddily sinuous wriggle-athon rave-up of "yee-has!" that features the genius clarion call ‘Oi! Oi! Saveloy!’ A must-have pop moment.

www.myspace.com/maniccoughh
www.purr.org.uk

P.S. Note sumptuous record sleeve photography by Bob Underexposed

Kontakte / Freelovebabies / Tamborines - 6 October 2007, Melange

Tamborines photograph: Bob Stuart

Aah! This is most agreeable. I'm clutching a beer, lounging in a lumpy old armchair in cosy surroundings that suggest 'Moroccan-influenced hippy pad circa 1968 meets art student squat circa 1988'. To one side Kate of The Guild of Further Art is delicately creating a psychedelic action painting full of purples and greens, eyelashes and Pre-Raphaelite tresses. Around me, the air is juddering (yes juddering!) courtesy of Kontakte, three blokes boxed into the bijou, be-curtained stage in the corner. They are alternately cajoling and abusing their guitars into creating great sirens of drone-laden sound. Naming ones band after a Stockhausen composition suggests a group with lofty ideals, but you really don't need to think much to get Kontakte - they're pretty visceral. Just turn off your mind, relax and join their trip to a spaced state. The likes of 'Pulse Machines' push humming guitar tones and reverberations up against a backing track of imploding spacerock so the room can't help but be pulled in by the music's traction, warping and nodding amongst the Krautrock embers. Their are no vocals, as there's no need for words. Singing would be a distraction here, lyrics would knock your journey off course. 'Motorik' (they don't want you to miss the point do they?) throbs with heartbeat thumps and a spiralling guitar line that echoes back on itself over steadily rising waves of fuzz. The growling bassline calls up the ghost of late, great drone meisters Loop. Aww, I miss Loop. But never mind, 'cos Kontakte take hunks of rhythm and puresoundwaves and make me twitch with glee.

Free Love Babies are Will Carruthers and assorted chums playing sinuous, seedy, snake-eyed blues. They glimmer amidst a fug of dry-ice, sending out lazy smoke rings of sound. Will is something of a charmer with a fine line in raconteuring (as witnessed on the last UK BJM tour), twinkling sardonically in the gloom. And the man can actually sing! Who'da thunk when he was twanging away on his bass behind Sonic and Jase in the Spacemen that he was the one with the interesting stories to impart and the vocal chords with which to impart them?

The Tamborines are never ones to outstay their welcome, ripping through their fab set of cute, but snarly psych pop soundz with single-minded viciousness, but this time their set really does take the cake. Thanks to a toppling mic stand and consequent equipment malfunctions that eat up all their playing time, we only get three songs. This is a terrible, terrible shame as what we do hear is an all-engulfing roar of fuzz pop - it sounds like enormous cracks opening up in the floor to let the sound woosh out. Structural damage not-withstanding, the band heroically complete their set and we squeeze past the dozens of black clad, leather jacketed scuzz boys copping cigs on the doorstep and on into the Hackney night.

I’d like to find a field between the hills: Fave Tunes August/September 2007

Mostyn A Diego – Radio Luxembourg The sound of early Super Furries rolling on the lawn with Gorkys = sunshine goodness. Plus the single has an exciting interactive sleeve.
www.myspace.com/radiolux

Get You Out Of My Head – The Sparkling Fountains Of Magic Reality Hoo, boy! Maxed out fuzz all the way. Why don’t all songs sound like this?
www.myspace.com/thesparklingfountainsofmagicreality

Outside - The Asteroid #4 Sky-looping dreampop crash-lands in a field of Barretty pastoralism.
www.myspace.com/asteroid4

Gift That Keeps Giving - Super Furry Animals SFA obligingly release album of summer-pop psych-dream lusciousness in time for my summer hols. The harmonies on this track make my head turn inside-out.

Horse Riding – Euros Childs Groovy old Euros tickling the ivories like a good ‘un, so you have to jiggle about in your chair with a a stoopid grin on yr face.

Secrets – Tuung Some of the ‘Good Arrows’ album is a tad Sunday Supplement, but this is all twinkling and regretful and sounds like dew-soaked medieval meadows.

My World – The Go! Team Cover of olde schools tv theme has freaky regression therapy effect on my brain.

Presidential Suite – Super Furry Animals Sitting under a tree hypnotized by ticklish Greek waves, I remember how much I love this song. "Sparkling like dragonflies".

The Fire In My Head - Voice Of The Seven Woods Dementedly sinister twangy Eastern mysticism with some serious tambourine bashing and gloopy rhythms.

Derek - Animal Collective Especially the moment when the big thumpy, shuffling bass drum sounds burst out from the skirling loopiness. Also, ‘Derek’ is an amusingly unlikely name for a song.

Tapestry Goes West - Margam Country Park, Wales 11th August 2007

Yesterday, we frolicked under a benign sun that warmed us with gentle afternoon rays (after the rain had briefly tried it on, whistling in a fine mizzle into our cheery faces for a few minutes). Today we roll up at Tapestry Goes West under a feisty fireball that attempts to frazzle all pasty Celtic skins in the area. Lucky I have a face-shading peak to my Robin Hood hat.

Ways in Which Tapestry is Not Like Other Festivals: first business of the day involves a jousting display by medievalists The Knights of Arkley. They are accompanied in ramshackle style by the Tokyo Dragons who crank out any old rubbish with a vaguely discernible tune. Really, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a comedy ‘black knight’ being humiliated in battle to the strains of the ‘Grange Hill’ theme as played by a scraggy bunch of rawk hoodlums. Yes, it’s fab. And quite thrilling when the horses thunder past a bit too close to the security, er, rope that ‘protects’ the audience from their flailing hooves.

Post-joust, it’s time for a spot of mead at the Crimson Moon. Mmm, I’m savouring the honeyed alcoholic goodness, when lawks! Pete Molinari materialises on Stage 2. I’m mightily pleased by this, as I thought I’d missed him on Stage 1 yesterday (dodgy line-up listing again). The thing that always crops up in Pete Molinari discussions is his voice, which is fair enough because Pete Molinari’s voice is a thing of amazement; keening and perfect, sending weird sensations down your spine as it twines itself around songs strummed out on acoustic guitar. These are songs that place Molinari at some mid-point between Chatham and Greenwich Village; blues-lorn country-folk songs that seem to mention whippoorwills and being lonesome quite often. It’s all very relaxing, Pete perched on a chair, looking like he’s stepped out of a Bob Dylan record sleeve circa 1966, dressed in brown corduroy beat-gear, chatting with the audience and gliding through a short set with that lullaby-eerie voice. A contented mead haze settles as we get a final heart-break-sweet cover of ‘So Lonesome I Could Cry’.

Breaking from my reverie, I decide it’s time to investigate Stage 1. There’s a handy slope that looks down on Stage 1, where everyone is sprawled out in the sunshine whilst below us The Redlands Palomino Company do competent, but uninspiring lady-sung country rock. It all gets too much for me (er, the sun does) and I have to go and hide in the shade until Instant Flight come on to do organ-driven power-psych. The singer is looking the part in stripy trousers and a top-hat. Apparently, Instant Flight double as Arthur Brown’s backing band, ah! that explains a lot. We get mod-ish Carnaby Street pop, psych-pomp splendour, bluesy harmonica squawlings, cool, circling psychedelia, a great ‘Incense and Peppermints’ style groove and at one point it all goes a bit Procol Harum. I feel like I’ve time-travelled into one of those old film clips of a ‘60s freak festival. Only, thank the Lord, there are no naked dancing hippies here, just Rob ex-14 Iced Bear lying on the grass and Michael Circulus wearing a big hat.
Ways in Which Tapestry is Not Like Other Festivals: Michael Circulus blends in with the crowd, despite the fact he’s wearing a big hat and his usual middle-ages filtered through 1972 garb. This is the only place such anonymity is likely to happen to Michael.

I wander back to Stage 2 just in time to see The Cherry Bombers playing ‘The KKK Took My Baby Away’, its snotty punk blast is a refreshing sorbet before we are plunged into Wolf People’s world of flute-adelic prog mightiness. They play blues rock with puffy ‘70s flute embellishments and added flights of fancy – ace! There are beards and hair and ‘Fill Your Head With Rock’ stylings, but I’m disappointed that the band are just some blokes, not really Wolf People as such, not even a bit lupine or mystical. They say "the next song is a rock opera, but it only lasts three minutes." Swizz! Progged-up, we wander over to see Diagonal who are wearing tight trousers and necklaces and again with the hair and the beards. They’re having a right good noodle, courtesy of a groovy-lookin’ geezer in a hat, worrying a Korg keyboard and ERK! a man in a head-band playing a saxophone. Can someone hurry up and invent punk now please?

Ways in Which Tapestry is Not Like Other Festivals: On the hillside, a moody gang of stags gathers, horns akimbo, gazing haughtily down at proceedings before deciding to high-tail it away from such nonsense.

The Lea Shores have some sound probs, but when they finally kick-in with a rain of swooping axe licks they are the perfect accompaniment to the light show being provided by the steel-works in the distance – tongues of flame shooting up into the twilit sky. The Lea Shores create a maelstrom of early evening swirliness that’s kind of The Cure go shoe-gazing, like single ‘Guillotine’ with its drifty daydream Ride-isms (including Ride-style iffy lyrics: "She’ll cut you down like a guillotine"). As the night-time smell of damp grass creeps into our nostrils, The Lea Shores hit the moment brilliantly, but it’s now time to cross the site to seek out Circulus on Stage 2.

Circulus and Tapestry were made for each other and an eager crowd has gathered to acknowledge this fact, keen to frolic in a medieval frenzy. What’s more Tapestry Lord and leader Barry can be seen onstage, clutching a guitar, clad in a fetching pea-green hooded cape. Much as we adore Circulus, though, we ‘re a tad disappointed to find we’re not getting a ‘greatest hits’ set of full-on loopy lutey loveliness this evening. Instead, Circulus have brought along Alison O’Donnell, one-time member of Mellow Candle. Yes, THE Mellow Candle of legendary ‘70s folky album ‘Swaddling Songs’ fame. I’m enough of a folk nerd to be quite excited by the sight of this elegantly grey-haired lady taking over the stage alongside current collaborator Isabel Ní Chuireáin, but as they calmly unfurl their ethereal music (partly with a few Circulus types, partly alone), the crowd starts getting itchy for a spot of hey-nonnying. It’s great that Circulus are trying to do something a bit special here, and there is a magical mist to proceedings, but the best bit is when we get a few stripped down Circulus faves. There’s no Lo Polidoro supplying sky-diving vocals tonight and no Moogy mooching, although thankfully, there is some mighty crumhorn action. Such is the strength of everyone’s pent-up need for a hoe-down that there’s a giant explosion of energy when the band issues forth with acoustic renderings of ‘Cuckoo’, ‘Miri It Is’ and prog-med anthem ‘Power To The Pixies’. It feels like we’re caught in a village fayre gone dangerously wrong, which is really the best place to be caught.

By this point, night is drawing in and it’s as good a time as any for another trip to the mead tent. This time I try a Strawberry Wine, mainly for the My Bloody Valentine-ness of it. It’s a whirligig trip into a dreamy world of strawberry-filled wonderment. Yum.

Now, I find that wherever you happen to be, there always comes a point in proceedings when raucous foreign garage rock is called for. As the moon and intoxicant levels rise, That point has very much arrived. I savour the strawberry wine’s syrupy-goodness, and ponder the spectacle that is Los Chicos; a demented, thrashing, Spanish garage band who are doing their best to demolish the stage in the name of dirty old fun. With a long-suffering look, the soundman patiently holds up a precariously rocking speaker as vast swathes of the audience mingle on stage with the caterwauling band. Best of all, a random man dressed in a be-feathered bird costume flaps around gaudily, before launching himself in a flurry from the stage. It’s a heart-warming sight indeed.

As a finale we don’t get Cathedral bells in our ears, but the funk-thrash-prog-rave-metal-disco construction that is Chrome Hoof. The earth, or at least this particular patch of it, tips alarmingly and shucks us all into another dimension for the duration of the Hoof’s appearance. They are terrifying and vitalising at once, the band clad in their knights of glam chain mail, flanked by two deeply disturbing dancers who remind me of the Blue Meanies from ‘Yellow Submarine’, only more vicious. Traumatised by the sound of everything we hold dear being torn into bloody shreds then rebuilt as an almighty monster of doom, we make twitching, palsied attempts to keep a grip on the demonic time signatures being thrust in our faces. A glowing-eyed, horned ram-devil looms onto the stage and the crowd cranes forward, appalled and delighted as Chrome Hoof slay the beast before solemnly chomping into its blood-spurting heart. The music churns on, gut-wrenchingly, thrillingly. By the end I’m raving in a dense mass of contorted, grinning faces, amongst them a cackling Will Who-Used-To-Be-In-Spacemen-3.

Ways in Which Tapestry is Not Like Other Festivals: The whole festival has gone scarily feral, choosing to re-enact scenes from ‘The Wicker Man’ by unquestioningly following the Hoof up a hill to gaze at the ram-headed effigy being set alight and devoured by leaping flames. Seriously, the whole crowd are under the Hoof’s spell, and as I dance a crazed jig arm in arm with a complete stranger, I imagine this motley gathering of monks and wenches, archers and serfs being lead deep into the black Welsh night, never to be seen again. Lost in the festival that ended all festivals.

(photos by Bob Underexposed)

Tapestry Goes West - Margam Country Park, Wales 10th August 2007

"We took a fabulous detour from the world we knew / Not to soon / Across a wire to a golden afternoon / Cathedral bells were sounding in our ears that day / It was like the middle-ages never went away…Who needs perspective when you’re in a Tapestry?" (The Relationships -‘Mediaeval Day’)

Tapestry Goes West - it's the festival that’s not like other festivals. Let us investigate the ways in which Tapestry is different...

Having been dropped by the side of a road in the middle of Wales by the Swansea-Brigend bus we march a mile to the entrance of the "1000 acres of glorious parklands" that is Margam Country Park. Here we discover a charming, hand-painted sign pointing us to Tapestry Goes West – a mile back in the direction we’ve just walked from. Clasping sword and shield, we trundle back along the roadside. Eventually, we arrive at a back entrance to the park, where a friendly man gives us wrist-bands and offers us bin-bags for rubbish.

Ways in Which Tapestry is Not Like Other Festivals: There’s no queue, no brain-dead security bossing everyone around, no confiscating of food/drink/vital medicines. There’s no corporate sponsorship or other such distracting bollocks. It’s laid-back and friendly and there’s oodles of space with grassy pastures (cows hang out near Stage 2, not caring) and rolling fields stretching back towards craggy hills. As a backdrop, there’s also the fire and smoke belching steel-works in nearby Port Talbot – let’s pretend it’s a dragon, eh?
I sit on a hill taking it all in. People potter about setting up camp, wibbling by on bikes, staggering past carrying tents that they have erected in one place but that they now want to put in another place. Everyone says hello to me. Maybe because I’m dressed as Robin Hood.

Ways in Which Tapestry is Not Like Other Festivals: Tapestry Goes West has a medieval theme – and dressing up is very much encouraged. At first most folks mooch about in civvies, but as the weekend progresses, and with the arrival of a costume hire company onsite, there are more and more damsels, knights, wizards, archers, monks (lots of monks), er, castles, random cardboard constructions, a ‘def leper’, etc etc. In the end, the people not dressed up are the ones that look a bit mental.
We meet Delia and The Panther Girls who are being given a lecture on armour by a medieval enthusiast bloke who is presiding over a display of interesting olde stuff. Delia tries out a helmet and a sword and we have a quick sword fight – setting a precedent for the weekend. A form of Tapestry etiquette arises whereby if one meets somebody else carrying a sword (usually plastic) it’s rude not to have a quick skirmish.

Nothing much has happened yet, but it’s all very enjoyable. Eventually, a band gets going on Stage 2. In direct contradiction to the stage times list we’ve been given it’s not Piney Gir but The Poppies, who, according to the list are playing on Stage 1 tomorrow – oh well. How very Tapestry. They have some equipment problems, but manage to rattle out a few jaggedly cranky, leather-jacketed, new-wave tinged rock ‘n’ roll songs. A small audience lounges peacefully on the grass – as it will do by Stage 2 for most of the festival – it’s the kind of stage and the kind of grass that are perfect for lounging peacefully in front of / upon.

I’m hungry now, so I wander over hill and dale to the baked potato van near Stage 1. Unless you want to eat hog-roast sandwiches (not really my thing) this is the only place you can get food, unless you fancy the several miles trek to Port Talbot Tescos. I like this removal of choice, it simplifies things splendidly.

Ways in Which Tapestry is Not Like Other Festivals: There aren’t endless noodle emporia and stinky burger vans and marquees vending outrageously-priced overly frothy shit lager. There are, however, two medieval taverns, The Crimson Moon and The Dark Side of the Moon, proffering a dizzying array of ales, country wines, fruit wines and meads. These wonderous places provide both worm-holes back to the 1400s and drunken taste sensations in one convenient candle-lit, tapestry draped experience. Yum!

Nothing’s happening yet on Stage 1. It’s all very dozey. I start to fall under the Tapestry spell, shrugging off my London go-as-fast-as-you-can-at-all-times, what’shappening? andnowwhat’s happening?? buzzing head and replacing it with a go-with-the-flow, oh-look-a-tree vibe. I return to Stage 2 and stay there until night starts to fall.
The Threatmantics are playing. What they’re playing is oddball queasy pop filled with a crazy, crashing viola noise that barges over the sound of skiffley-twanging guitar, treacherous drumming and one-handed keyboard playing. It has a crunchy grooviness possibly reminiscent of Gorky’s more mad-eyed moments.

There’s new people on the stage!" a miniature knight tells his mum, excitedly. There are, too, it’s Piney Gir’s Country Roadshow. The sun shines and Piney shakes her petticoats, flashes her oversized superstar sunglasses and leads the band through a rollicking set filled with swooning pedal-steel guitar, heart-string-twanging accordion and tumble-weed banishing good-time tunes. Now and then, she’s joined by The Panther Girls who twirl, shimmy and kick their way through cute ‘n’ kitschy dance routines. It’s all crackin’, candy-coloured, country fun topped off with old fave ‘Greetings, Salutations, Goodbye’ which imprints itself on my brain for the next week or so.

I ‘test’ some of The Panther Girls’ peach wine (kindly donated by Tim Purr). It’s amazing – alcoholic essence of peach drowning your tongue and squishing your brain. By now The Panther Girls are off duty, but Radio Luxembourg are so chock full of skewy sunshine melodies that they can’t help but carry on dancing by the side of the stage. They’re joined by erk! Death! Yes, it’s him – in a long black cowl with pointy sleeves. Happily, he’s clearly charmed by Radio Lux’s mix of sherbety psychedelia, fuzzing garage crunchiness and fruit-looping monster pop, and frugs merrily with the girls. I discover I love Radio Luxembourg. They have a single that comes in an interactive sleeve and sounds like Super Furry Animals rolling on the lawn with Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci whilst Olivia Tremor Control throw confetti. Once heard, this song will proceed to visit the inside of your head at odd moments, like a big flappy multi-coloured parrot. Radio Luxembourg say things like ‘The next song is about a pony’. They bring their own ‘trippin’ in the jungle’ hand-painted stage set which they construct with their very own hands and tools that they’ve brought along especially. I’m impressed by such all round workmanship.

Next, The Research. The last time I saw The Research they were supporting Sleater Kinney and their sprightly synthy pop got a bit drowned in a cavernous Koko. Things are different now though. For a start, the stage fits the band, so the songs burst out super-bright and showering sparks over our smiling heads. Also, singer Russell is no longer parked behind a squonky keyboard. He's...he's...playing a guitar. This goes against the grain of what we understand The Research to be. Indeed, a drunk girl beside me laments the keyboard’s passing. Happily though, The Research : guitar version are GRATE! Maybe it’s down to the fact that the evening sun is shining right in my face, and addling me into a Beach Boys universe, but now-with-added-guitars The Research sound like Beat Happening having a tea party with Dinosaur Jnr. Russell’s voice has a vaguely J. Mascis type whine to it and the tunes are all exuberant crunch pop. By the end, I’m so enamoured of the sun-filled joyousness of it all that I’m dancing with The Panther Girls and waving my sword in the air like I just don’t…

Hot Puppies! It’s The Hot Puppies! I’m still dancing about, sword akimbo and The Hot Puppies, dressed as knights and damsels and such, are spilling their darkly groovy music all over the shop. Sometimes they sound like Blondie, but mostly they play scratchety riffin, synth-infused, soaraway songs and their classy pop tunes make everyone get up, smile a lot and get on down like fools. We do an invented-on-the-spot dance routine to the monster boogie majestic sweep of ‘Clarinet Town’. What larks we’re having!

Now it’s dark and somehow I’m over at Stage 1 jumping up and down, pointing my sword in lieu of a devil hand-gesture, to The Tokyo Dragons. The Tokyo Dragons are in no way complicated.They do LOUD ROCK SONGS and dirty jeans and long hair and aren’t afraid of holding their guitars aloft like MIGHTY AXES. They wear trucker caps in a proper grease-monkey backwoods way, not a Hoxton twatster way. They are exactly what is needed right now – thunderous, berserko, legs akimbo, proper manly ROOOCCCKK!! Yeah. Argh. They’re great. At the end of their set we’re rocked to the nines and decide it’s time to run away and get a St John Ambulance man to ring us a cab.

(photos by Bob Underexposed)

When the going gets weird the weird turn pro: Fave Tunes June/July 2007

If You Gotta Go – Jim Reid: Cute spangly strumathon with Jim in fine voice. Ser-woon! There’s a good bit where he sings "Listen to the…" and your brain goes "girl as she takes on half the world" because ‘Just Like Honey’ is hopelessly imprinted there forever.
www.myspace.com/jimreid

About You – The Pastels: Gorgeous twinklingly warm and fuzzy version of the Reid brothers’ already v. swoonsome track. The line ‘People die in their living rooms / but they do not need this God Almighty gloom’ has been making me laugh for the last twenty years.
www.myspace.com/thepastels

Bats Over Barstow – Pete Greenwood. Fear and Loathing folky darkness.
www.myspace.com/petergreenwood

Swami – William Penn V: From The Essential Pebbles Vol. 1: The Very Best of American Garage

Up The Hill - The See See: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young meet The Essex Green. Hoo yeah!
www.myspace.com/theseeseeband

Let’s Live For Today – Living Daylights: From Rubble Vol 1: The Psychedelic Snarl. God Bless Bam Caruso.

That Girl Suicide – The Brian Jonestown Massacre: After their mighty performance of this at Islington Academy, it’s become this month’s BJM obsesso-tune.

The sound of Crumhorns: not fussy what the song is really, get hip to the Crummy sound, it’s what all the cool Medieval kidz are digging.

And I Was Blue – Sunforest: Medieval psych-folk from 1969 – how can you go wrong?

Navigator - The Lovetones: The Lovetones have gone a bit grown up on their new album, but the kind of grown-up that involves delivering daze-dreams epics, so that’s alright then.
www.myspace.com/thelovetones

The Truck That Never Was

Friday 20th July 2007 1.30pm: Hurrah! We’re on the coach to Oxford. We’ve printed out the line-up and chosen which bands we want to see, I’ve super-glued down the flapping sole on my boot and worked out exactly how much vodka to tip into Volvic bottles to keep us drunked up for the weekend. This year’s Truckin’ adventure has begun!
3pm: The coach still hasn’t left London, we stare slightly forlornly out the windows at Brent Cross and the miles of tailed-back traffic ahead.
4.30pm: We’re in Oxford! Once London spat us out at Hillingdon, we sped up here in no time. Mrs Williams has welcomed us back to our usual room in her guesthouse, and we’ve unpacked the water-proofs.
4.35pm: A phone call from Jim: Truck is cancelled. Truck. Is. Cancelled. Thanks to the crazy, biblical non-stop rain, the river has burst its banks and flooded the site. How inconsiderate. We are distraught in Oxford.
Saturday 21st July 2007 9am: A text from Jim: The show is going on! A spot of emergency Trucking is taking place today and tomorrow with various bands playing at Brookes University in Oxford. We ponder the line-up (hmmm, BJM…tempting), but our spirits are broken. We board the coach back to London, it speeds along through unbroken sunshine.
1.30pm: Back home. Lovebox Festival is taking place in the park next door. I unpack my unsullied festival gear to the sound of Super Furry Animal’s set. Oh the unbearable pathos!
SFA play ‘Hello Sunshine’. It pisses down. We have a cup of tea and sit on the sofa identifying Super Furry tunes. This is as good as it gets.
8pm: A thunderous version of ‘Call Me’ rattles the window frames. Deborah Harry and Clem Burke are in our ‘back garden’, standing on bits of grass that we've walked across countless times. That’s quite weird.

Electric Pop Group at The Luminaire 30th June 2007

How to melt a Kitten’s heart on Another Rainy Saturday:

• Line up four Swedish indie-pop boys-with-guitars across the stage (you can always tell they’re Swedish, they have this certain je ne sais quoi that Swedish indie-pop boys have about them that makes you recognise them as such).
• Make sure those guitars shimmer with hints of the Jesus and Mary Chain at their most melodic.
• Get them to play a succession of songs that are sheer sound-of-1986 chiming pop wonderment.

Why has nobody informed me about The Electric Pop Group before? I know their name has cropped up here and there, but nobody emphasised their fabness. I just assumed they were another bunch of Scandos in thrall to the much misinterpreted ‘C86’ sound (let’s not even go there, okay?), and there are only so many of them a girl can investigate.

The band name is so obvious, it’s perfect – clean, elegant, effective design; how very Swedish. The Electric Pop Group play their guitars to an iPod backing track and they all look exceedingly discombobulated by the fact that they’re on stage, but we’ll let them off ‘cos their songs are great. There goes ‘Popgirly’, with its jangly JAMC ‘Happy Place’ chords, the song around which the band was formed four years ago. It's sugary, chiming, nothing-new-under the-sunshine pop and I love it.

When we were 17, at our stripy tee-shirted, anorak-wearing, ice-cream eating indie-est we were self-diagnosed ‘pop-kids’, aiming to be like The Brilliant Corners’ ‘Emily’ who ‘made a skirt from a curtain, plays the tambourine’. If it had occurred to us though, we definitely would have taken on the mantle of ‘popgirlies’ and worn the name with dippy pride, alongside our Soup Dragons badges. So hurrah for the Electric Pop Group and their time-travelling shmindie-pop. Exult in the sheer fringe-shaking, knock-kneed spangly jangle of their tunes.
www.myspace.com/theelectricpopgroup