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Sticklebrick Festival
Festival season
barely begun, and already one little gem to be added to the do-you-remember
list along with the inevitable highs of Glasto and lows of V2.
Those who were lucky enough a) to be resident at the Durdham Hall of Residence
on the edge of Durdham Down at Bristol Uni, or b) to have noticed this internet-only-promoted
brainchild of chemistry graduand Declan Fleming, were treated, over the second
weekend of June, to a couple of days of indie heaven, dangerously cheap drinks
and horizontal bungee-duelling.
I went on the Saturday: a fine, sunny day, with just enough of a breeze blowing
off the Downs to ventilate, which was fortunate, because the marquee company
had brought the wrong kind of spikes, so the open-air stage in the hall's
disturbingly bland Barretts central quadrangle was just that, with no contingency
plans whatsoever.
As Dec explained, Sticklebrick was something that had just growed and growed,
like Popsy, from a fortunate French connection (someone who knew someone who
knew the astoundingly glorious neo-orch-folk four-piece Cyann and Ben who
agreed to play early on), to another early agreement from Bristol-based Gravenhurst
(newly signed to Warp), and snowballed thence into a pre-Euro-thrash entente
cordiale involving the likes of the post-rock/neo-dub Parisian Don't Look
Back, the rapidly rising star of the Franco-American partnership, Berg Sans
Nipple, and the more locally familiar luminaries - Crescent, Mole Harness,
Hot Chip, North Sea Navigator and all points west.
Of course, there were sound problems. (I took Jack along – the younger
of my 12-year-old twin sons - and his "Is this still the sound-check,
dad?" became the day's conspiratorial Coke-enhanced leitmotif.) Those
quieter acoustic acts unfortunate enough to have been located in the second
stage (the bar) were, depending on how many increasingly happy people were
playing pool and/or table tennis and/or iToy at the time, accessible/audible
only to the ten people sitting closest to them: I'd have liked to have heard
more of a gentle Finnish soloist called Drowsy, for example, who sounded delightful,
but I gave up.
Few acts were immune from equipment and/or connection failure at some point.
Cyann and Ben were particularly badly affected, which was a pity. But there
were acts for whom this was not an issue: I particularly enjoyed the anarchic
loopiness of Brick - a true lolopping eccentric who lulls you into a false
sense of security by tinkling with toy xylophone loops and recorders and strumming
a half-size violin before ambushing you with the sound of several live jacks
being shorted at the same time then re-looped into an ear-splitting feedback
howl (which it probably was - deliberately, I assume - who knows?): the sort
of thing that's usually associated with nasty-smelling wisps of smoke curling
up from eviscerated tweeters in less robust systems, but here merely had your
drink jumping involuntarily out of your glass.
Bristol-based Glue - a new-ish three-piece with an alternative two-piece acoustic
persona - who were completely new to me - were outstanding, not only for some
very promising original material, but for a repertoire of superbly realised,
refreshingly non-ironic covers: a Hendrix whose title eludes me, Pink Floyd's
'Breathe', and - one of the day's golden memories - Carly Simon's 'Nobody
Does It Better'.
For many (judging by the surge in audience numbers when they started) the
other Bristol-based three-piece - Gravenhurst - was the day's headliner. The
enigmatic Nick Talbot fronts, together with Paul Nash and Dave Collingwood,
this rising sonic folk ensemble whose new album - Flashlight Seasons
- is about to be released on Warp, of all things. Their set was a lively taster
of songs from the album - an oft-times surreal (warped?) experience, hearing
these intensely private, sometimes distressingly intimate lyrics against the
barely brushed-in background of Talbot's distinctive guitar-pickings in the
sunny open air like that - they belong so obviously in the flicker-failing
fluorescents of an all-night waiting room reeking of piss; but the final number
was a rousting, angry corker of a thing (I missed the title) that just built
and built into a toxic avalanche of electronic noise like a pathological rewind
of the uncollapsing Walls of Jericho.
And finally - Berg Sans Nipple. I'd been looking forward to hearing Shane
Aspegren and Lori Sean Berg play live ever since my jaw locked into a permanent
gape on first hearing their debut album, the 2003 Form
Of... I'd heard their live set was something special, and indeed it
is: they work together like a pair of veteran street jugglers, casually but
meticulously tossing these complex packages of riffs and beats to and fro
whilst simultaneously weaving between them a fascinating exotic carpet of
melody constructed on ancient pieces of kit that look like junk but are clearly
priceless instrumental treasures. It was a fabulous set, cut brutally short
after barely fifteen minutes and three numbers by a security man with a neck
the girth of a small sequoia tapping Shane on the shoulder and announcing
to a disbelieving audience that the licence only went up to eight PM so that
was it thank you and good evening. The stickler in the stickle. 'Festival
security'. Another of those phrases, like 'military intelligence', that have
acquired oxymoron status on the back of certain recent events. But hey.
So that, indeed, was that. BSN fared slightly better, at least, than The Shadow
Project, poor sods, who had barely begun to set up their kit on the other
stage in the bar than they were told they had to go back home to Felixstowe
because the licence had run out, thank you and good evening.
The sum of such an event is always greater than its parts, however, provided
the parts have been assembled with as much love as, clearly, was Sticklebrick.
I doubt that anyone's disgruntlement lasted longer than the inevitable hangover.
As a certain Mr Eavis learnt a long time ago – it’s not really about
the music – it’s about who comes to listen to the music. Roll on
Sticklebrick II - with more Brick and less stickle, maybe.
15th June 2004
