I am sick of them, and I am not going anymore. You know the ones, hundreds of tents as far as the eye can see, grass which gets ground to dust or churned into mud within a day, fields strewn with polystyrene boxes, paper plates and plastic pint pots, toilets as fearsome as the fucking Sarlaac pit.  I could (yes, yes, and do) go on, but you know what I mean when I refer to a green-field refugee camp festival.

I am not just being prissy about hygiene and personal comfort or anything like that – well, the toilets are pretty horrific – I just don’t like large groups of people.  In fact, off the top of my head, the only time I actively enjoy crowds is at a football match.

As well as attending quite a few for the sheer enjoyment, I ended up going to an awful lot of festivals last year as Meursault’s driver, and most of them really, really were fucking awful.  The funny thing is, though, from the band’s perspective the best shows didn’t always come at what were, from a punter’s point of view, the best festivals.  They had a riot playing T in the Park, for example, whereas from a fan’s perspective that’s a festival I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.

Still, driving them around did give me a pretty thorough overview of the UK festival circuit, and whilst it was fun to try lots of the big ones, including my first trip to Glastonbury, I think I have come up with some general guidelines for myself when it comes to festivals.

For example, five thousand people is already way too big.  The lineup at End of the Road saves it, but in every other sense it is just the same as all the other festivals – the same food stalls, the same venues, albeit in a different field – all these are just businesses which tour the festival circuit all year, meaning one festival looks pretty much exactly like the next.

I did think Truck stood out though.  For all the lineup wasn’t as strong as the likes of Green Man or EotR, all the stalls at the festival itself were provided by local businesses.  This meant not one single one of those depressing places which tour each and every UK festival was there, and this gave the place a real character of its own.  We were lucky with weather too, which helped, but this was one of my favourites.

Of the smaller festivals, well you all know how much I love Pickathon and Homegame, and the Fence Away Game last year was just mind-blowing.  At these smaller festivals the landscape tends to more in evidence, as it isn’t overwhelmed by the miniature city which lands on top of it for a week.  And I may be a city boy at heart, but a weekend in a tentopolis in a field doesn’t seem like a holiday, but a weekend in the Scottish mountains really does.

Equally, when the people are fewer it just feels more like an expedition and less like a stampede.  It feels like we’re visiting the countryside rather than barging across it, and I do think that breeds a slightly different mentality in the fans as well, and that they are more likely to be respectful of their surroundings under these circumstances.

I have also learned that I don’t actually care as much about lineups as I would have thought.  I could go to the End of the Road Festival twice and still not see everything I wanted to see, but on a couple of occasions that has led to me worrying about what I might be missing, rather than simply relaxing and having fun .

What I find is that, for all I obviously want at least some bands I really like to be there, when the lineup is a little patchier there is more time to just relax and enjoy being away from it all.  It’s nice to have little pockets of time where you aren’t thinking about what is happening on whatever stage.  I like there to be a few things I am really keen to see, a few things I am interested in taking a chance on and quite a lot of time I am not fussed about anything.  At those times I tend to just sit back and relax or go and see a band I have never heard of, which is really nice way to spend a weekend.

Without the experience, the infrastructure or the financial backing, these festivals can be a little hit and miss I guess.  Close to Edinburgh there are a couple – Kelburn Garden Party and Doune the Rabbit Hole – which look really interesting and which have been described to me as both brilliant and awful depending on who I’ve spoken to.  I’d still rather go there than Rockness though.

There are also a couple of interesting ones a little further afield.  One, The Insider, I know nothing about but is located up near Inshriach House in the Highlands near Aviemore and should be spectacular.  The Imploding Inevitable Festival seems to be quite similar in spirit, is taking place in Fellfoot Woods in Cumbria.  Both the lineups have that excellent combination of complete obscurity and a handful of bands I really want to hear, and both locations look really interesting.

The thing with these really small festivals, though, is that their PR reach can be a little limited, so there are no doubt dozens of others going on around the UK I’ve never heard of, but whatever they are they look a damn site more like fun than any of the big boys which, honestly, just bore me to tears these days.

Serendipity struck for Woodpigeon at End Of The Road this year, when fellow Canadian act Timber Timbre were delayed on the way to the festival, leaving a vacant slot to be filled on the site’s main stage, the Garden Stage.

Frontman Mark Hamilton was the only Woodpigeon to make the trip over from Calgary for the festival. Fortunately, however, he has a ready-made backing band waiting for him on these shores in the form of our very own Eagleowl – the two band’s origins are entwined with each other following Mark’s time spent living in Edinburgh a few years back – and the collective heroically stepped into the breach.

The band had performed the previous day on another stage, and – during a barnstorming set – had covered Withered Hand‘s wonderful No Cigarettes.

I was looking forward to a repeat performance when I heard about them covering for Timber Timbre, and thought it might be a good idea to film the song this time.

The video quality’s not exactly High Def because it’s only from my little Sony point-and-click instant camera, and it’s a bit shaky in places because - well – it’s me filming it; but it’s not too bad all things considered.

Bloody hell.

This time last week I was typing out a Friday Five and planning a couple of quite weekends before Away Game at the end of the month. I was thinking about maybe shopping for camping supplies.

In an odd turn of events, however, as you read this I’m standing in a field in Dorset at End Of The Road with M’So, the ‘Glowl and whichever other reprobates have shown up.

(As I actually type this it’s the day before yesterday at around 4pm. Weird, huh?!)

Anyway, it’s five time for you lot. Remember to delurk, and don’t worry if you don’t see your message pop up straight away, someone will get around to approving it soon enough.

1. Nicest surprise you’ve ever had.

2. Most fun you’ve had setting up a surprise for someone else.

3. What’s your dream road trip?

4. Have you ever had an unexpected turn of events that turned out okay in the end.

5. Pledge to do something you hadn’t planned this weekend. Tell us what it is now, then come back next week and tell us how it went.

Prefab Sprout – Life Of Surprises

Bob Dylan – Things Have Changed

Grizzly Bear – Plans

New Order – Shellshock

Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine – Panic

One thing everyone knows about Micah P. Hinson is the fairytale story of his fall and rise from the depths of a drug related incarceration after falling in with the wrong woman, to the valedictory release of his beautiful debut album Micah P. HInson & the Gospel of Progress back in 2004. He was saved by the music, we tell ourselves, fitting the whole thing neatly into a nice, Meg Ryan-friendly narrative that fits the kind of one-dimensional storytelling to which we are becoming increasingly adherent.

I myself had pretty much that basic story in my head when I met him at the End of the Road Festival, in September 2008. Fortunately, before I could stray too far down a path that seems to quite irritate him, Micah himself decided to make sure I knew that was bollocks from the beginning. “The music for me wasn’t like a saviour to pull me out of the dark spaces” he told me early on, after explaining that the narrative in most people’s heads is a pretty superficial charicature of years of his life, the actual story much less neat and tidy than that.

“Even on the new album [Micah. P Hinson & the Red Empire Orchestra] there’s songs, like Keep Having These Dreams that I wrote when I was 19 or something. There’s some other songs on the record that are quite old. On Opera Circuit there are some other songs that are pretty damn old that didn’t come from that exact time. By the time I recorded the Gospel of Progress record I had a lot more than just a couple of dozen songs. By that point I’d been recording songs for eight years. Not sending out demos or talking to labels of any of that shit, but I had a four track and then I moved up to having a computer. By the time I had the Gospel of Progress I probably had five hundred songs maybe, I mean a shitload of songs, and so the Gospel of Progress was when we went back through all of those tunes and decided what the best ones were and that’s what made up the Gospel.

“So the Gospel didn’t come out of a certain time in my life, it wasn’t like there was a fall and there was this rise and all these songs came out, it was nothing like that. And even getting signed to a record label, from the time I lived in the hotel and I was writing songs, and you know my life had fallen apart, and I was bankrupt and all of that shit, to the time that I actually got signed by a record label like at least three or four years had passed between those points.” Read the rest of this entry »

“I don’t think we’ll ever feel cool.” reckons David Tatersall of the Wave Pictures, despite their being recently signed to one of the hippest labels around: Moshi Moshi. Nevertheless, they’ve just played the main stage at the End of the Road Festival and had people bellowing requests at them left, right and centre. So cool, maybe not, but something is certainly bubbling away in the land of the Wave Pictures. It was the same last year at their show in the considerably smaller venue, The Local. They could have virtually played a whole show of requests.

“That was really strange,” admits David, “and again today, I don’t know how they get this crowd, they do such a good job. For all our friends as well, all our friends play bigger gigs here. Like Darren Hayman, say, and Jeff Lewis, and I don’t know where they all come from because most of the time we play in bars and nobody knows us and every gig is their first time hearing it. It does seem like End of the Road really know what they’re doing and really get an audience that’s into it. Like last year in the tent we had no idea what happened. There was lots of people and they knew songs from CD-Rs that I’d forgotten that we’d done, and it was really, really fun. These are CD-Rs that maybe 50 people in the country have, maybe 100 people at most, but it seemed like everyone who had them was there.”

The video is taken from our interview, and cut in with some footage of their live performance. The sound for the live show is appalling because the sound system overwhelmed the mics on our wee camera, but we’ve learned our lesson and won’t make that mistake again. The wavering crackle of their early CD-R recordings is replaced by a more strident, polished sound on stage. Simply put, they make a racket.

I think I got into The Wave Pictures, about a year ago or so, at the very end of their status as a CD-R band. I obviously caught something of a wave of interest, because within a month or two of my noticing them they had been signed to Moshi Moshi, and vinyl singles and shiny new albums were being discussed. I couldn’t help but wonder exactly what it was that finally made a band that had actually been around for a while seem so suddenly palatable to a record label. Partly, it must be said, it’s unfair to blame labels for not signing a band they probably just hadn’t heard. Read the rest of this entry »

I really have made you wait for this haven’t I. Ah well, no matter. So, another year, another End of the Road Festival. We drove down again, specifically renting a hippy VW camper for the journey, and Christ almighty what a fucking death-trap that thing was. As I wrote in the intro to the podcast about this festival, the thing steered like a bathtub full of water. Honestly, if you ever needed to react to anything unexpected turning the steering wheel was like trying haul a bucket of water out of a well. Throw in the rubbish high beams and the teeny-tiny windscreen wipers and we can count ourselves lucky we got there at all.

But get there we did, to be welcomed by pissing rain. Splendid. I’ve led a charmed life so far, as far as festivals are concerned, having encountered no more that the slightest of sprinkles in the five or six I’ve attended so far. Spoiled, you might say. Well no such luck here. I had the interview lined up with Micah P. Hinson and it was pissing down and they wouldn’t even let us into the photography pit at the front, as had been promised beforehand. I was struggling just a little to stay cheerful. Anyhow, Micah’s set was outstanding – his recorded music may be quite beautiful at times, but when he plays live he puts some real snarl into it.

The lineup is pretty basic – Micah on guitar supported by Nick on drums who plays occasional banjo, and Ashley, his wife, on keyboards – but they manage to dredge some racket out of it when they want to. During the set the sun finally broke through, and the rain stopped falling, and suddenly everything was good. Hinson’s slower songs get a bare and lovely outing with just a guitar, and his sightly abrasive on-stage manner never seems to strike a dubious chord with the audience. The interview went well, and will be posted here shortly, but safe to say that this gig seemed to be the turning point of the End of the Road Festival as far as I am concerned. Read the rest of this entry »

Well that’s Mrs. Toad and I off to End of the Road. We’ll be back on Monday evening to write the What’s On in Edinburgh post thingy. To go to the festival we’ve rented one of these vans – not the one in the picture, even older – so we will be travelling in the complete twat style but, well, whatever. I know that lots of trustifarian knob-jockeys buy these things but I’ve always kind of liked them and, well, Mrs. Toad isn’t really a girl for tents I’m afraid so the other option was a socking great Winnebago.

I’ve got three interviews set up for the festival, and there might possibly be another couple that happen as well, because a few bands that I know will be there. I am still a little unsure how much work I can really be arsed doing at these things, but I think three interviews should be manageable.

While I’m away I’ll be posting the record shop posts that people have written and sent in, I’ve a podcast pre-recorded for the weekend, and I think I’ll still put up the Five For Friday post because that was good fun last week.

This year’s festival isn’t so completely jam-packed with bands I am keen to see, actually. In fact I have never heard of half of them, so I think it will be nice to just kick back and enjoy making some new discoveries.

Cool bananas. Have fun and play nicely in my absence. I’ve got access to the press facilities – oooh, don’t I feel quite the big boy – so I’ll check in from time to time when I pop in to empty my memory cards and recharge batteries and stuff. And let’s hope the weather isn’t utter shite, like it has been at every other fucking festival this year (except Pickathon – ha ha, sucks to you, British music fans)!

Son Volt – Highways & Cigarettes (Acoustic)
Ryan Adams – Blue Sky Blues