Critiques

I was a lucky bunny and won the chance to photograph Field Day festival on behalf of Converse Music - AAA and everything darlings!!! It was wet, super wet, that day - not to mention exhausting ... but damn it was fun!!!
Festival Highlights
Foals
Simian Mobile Disco
Les Savy Fav (just awesome!!!!!)
The Mae Shi
of Montreal
Ritchie Hawtin
Lightspeed Champion
Modeselektor
Magistrates
Wild Beasts
Filthy Dukes
Festival goers

Sat 9 Aug – Field Day

Last year Field Day had a day of wonderful weather, perfect for sitting in the park, drinking beer and listening to great music, sadly they got the organisation horribly wrong and the result was a shambolic blend of loo queues, bar queues and bands you could barely hear.

Fast forward 12 months and here we are again having been promised a massive improvement and lured with cheaper tickets. Things had got better. There bars were better and seemed to have more staff, the loos, while still not perfect, were better and the sound on both the Homefires and Main stages a whole lot better. Sadly, what they didn’t have this year was the weather. It rained, it drizzled, it sheeted and then it rained some more.

In years gone by this wouldn’t have disturbed me too much, I survived Glastonbury in ’98 for God’s sake, but maybe I’m getting too old because disturb me it did. I think the relentless drip, drip nature of it just wore me down, that and the lack of enough quality acts to hold my attention.

I think if I’d been going from one interesting band to another I wouldn’t have noticed the rain so much, but there the waits between acts worth watching where up to an hour and this was not an environment to be just sitting around in.

Of the bands I did see, the stand out act of the day was by far Tunng. The absolutely rocked the smaller Homefires stage and captivated a surprisingly large and buoyant crowd. They seemed as surprised as anyone at the overwhelming reaction and this seemed to inspire them to greater heights.

After that we stumbled from one stage to another for a while, looking for shelter as much as anything. A brief stop for tea and hot donuts was one of the day’s high points and I think that says everything really!

Finally, just at the point of defeat, Efterklang briefly revived our spirits with a scintillating set, but even that wasn’t enough to persuade us to stay any longer and we trudged off in to Hackney in search of food and warmth.

I would love Field Day to be a success, I’m a big fan of the people that organise it and feel that London needs days like these, but after the last two years you can’t help wonder if it’s cursed and if it will make it to a third year.

Sat 9 Aug – Field Day

Well it rained when we got there, it rained while we stayed there, and it rained when we went home. Other than that, it rained. However, let us not allow a splash of water to get between us and the artists that we had come to see, n’est pas? After all, that is what the umbrellas were there to do!

The disappointing news from the night before was that Dan Deacon had pulled out (as well as the Mystery Jets - meh to that!). This meant a major reshuffling of the pack, ensuring that I went from having quite a nice schedule where I would see all but one of the bands that I came to see to having quite a number of clashes. If that was not bad enough, did I mention that it was also raining?

Anyway, one soldiers on bravely.

In rough order, we saw over the course of the day Magistrate, Howling Bell, Wild Beasts, Modeselektor, The Emperor Machine, Of Montreal, The Mae Shi, Lightspeed Champion, and Les Savy Fav. At that stage, wet, sore of foot, and tired of drinking watery beer, we opted for the Tube back to the city centre for some proper food and drink. The Field and The Foals (who I will see later this year) had to do without us. Besides it was raining.

Act of the day was probably The Mae Shi for me, although Les Savy Fav might well have sneaked that accolade had I managed to get a bit closer to the front of the main stage.

The Mae Shi are a punk band from Los Angeles who have been around for several years now. Their current album is the excellent HLLLYH. They present themselves thus on their website:

If you are just hearing of us now, you missed out on four records and 250 shows of busted electronics, spazzier-than-fuck drums, crazy-ass boogie guitar, distorted caveman bass and throat-destroying vocals.

I can assure you that not a single word of that is an overstatement. The band engages in a high energy show that is a cross between the intense guitar-fuelled hollering of Rage Against the Machine, the madcap antics of Enter Shikari, and a set of lyrics all of their own devising. Hugely entertaining, but be sure to be at the front to see them live. Any beer in glasses when they come on will not survive that way for long!

The other big crowd pleaser was Les Savy Fav. Tim Harrington has to be the sexiest man in rock, bar none. Well, bar everyone really. However, that does not stop this larger than life character from taking the crowd through a stomping, chomping, all things romping set of screamed-out vocals, various stages of undress, odes to the sun, and a running battle with those at the front as to who could chuck the most stuff at the other. Somewhere, in between all of this, they even fitted in some solid rock music.

As much good fun as this was, the amusing moment of the day had to be the huge amount of people in and around the Modeselektor performance who (like me) had heard that they were good live, but (unlike me) mostly just talked amongst themselves and paid scant attention to the show (psssst – you need to turn around to see them play!). Anyway, the hangers-about may have had a point, as I could really take Modeselektor or leave them as an act. The Emperor Machine, who played at the same time, proved to be a bit closer to my tastes!

Another act worth a mention is Wild Beasts. They are a band that have only come across my radar in recent months, but Devil’s Crayon is a great song. I imagine that I am not the first person to make this comparison, but lead singer Hayden Thorpe has a thing for Roy Orbison! Moreover, his falsetto can be a bit too much when left to do most of the singing. However, where it used more sparingly, such as joining in for choruses, it makes far more of an impressive impact. I like the band’s current album Limbo, Panto, but it did not translate brilliantly for me onto an outdoor stage during the afternoon. Also it was raining, if you can credit that!

To finish up then with a couple of quick dispatches - Howling Bells play an enjoyable enough brand of indie pop and have a fabulous looking lead singer in Juanita Stein. I feel that they are not adventuous enough yet to be a bona fide headline act. They could well have the potential though.

Of Montreal, on the other hand, are off the scale in terms of being adventurous with their stage presence. They have a brand of upbeat, colourful, and wildly eccentric pop music that was topped off on Saturday by a masked mime artist dressed in a body-stocking crawling around the stage. Last year’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is a fantastic album and they have another one coming already this autumn called Skeletal Lamping, from which they played a few numbers during the show.

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I write about music, film, and various other subjects at No Ordinary Fool.

Sat 9 Aug – Field Day

Head here http://mongoloidgash.blogspot.com/ for a post on Field Day and a couple of tracks from artist I saw.