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An unusual gig is taking place on Friday 14th at the Wheatsheaf: Piggies, a collection of Oxford musicians including Smilex’s Lee Christian and Nought’s James Sedwards is putting on an evening of Beatles songs, all of which were written by the late George Harrison. Also on the bill are Thousand Mile Highway, and Billy Ray Cypher.The proceeds go to Harrison’s various charities. More details are listed here.

The Follys kick off this weekender at 8.00p.m. tonight,  at The Black Horse pub in East Hanney. The ‘Outside’ stage (tomorrow and Sunday) is actually the Royal British Legion a couple of hundred yards from the pub. Bus timetable from Oxford is here. There is no cover charge, but donations are welcome. All proceeds either to Cancer Research UK or Hanney Pre-school.

The clutch of new festivals around the county continues next week with Hanneyfest, three days of local music kicking off on Friday with tuneful punk pop from The Follys and sardonic prog-rock from Drunkenstein. Highlights on Saturday on the outside stage include sweet bluegrass from The Roundheels, electronica-flavoured pop-rock from The Halcyons, and emotional indie rock from Lost Transmission. Performing inside are punky festival favourites Smilex and Gothic rockers Mary’s Garden. The festival closes  on Sunday with merry chav-jazzers The Original Rabbits-Foot Spasm Band. The festival is free but donations are encouraged, all proceeds towards Cancer Research. For further information click here.

Oxford filmmaker extraordinaire and Videosyncratic supremo Jon Spira has whipped together an excellent ten-minute highlights package of the best Oxford bands playing at this year’s Truck Festival. It features The Candyskins, Dive Dive, Stornoway, Alphabet Backwards, From Light To Sound, Supergrass and loads more.

Stay tuned for more news on Jon’s feature-length documentary about Oxford music, Anyone Can Play Guitar, which is due for release at the end of 2009.

Wristbands are now on sale priced four pounds for Charliestock, a new music festival taking place on the weekend of 31 July at The Black Horse pub in Kidlington, north of Oxford. The wristband, obtainable from the pub,  allows entry to the entire event, but tickets are available on the door for each day at the same price. Friday’s highlights includes melodic punk from Secret Rivals and The Scarletts, Saturday sees alt-folk trio Ute take centre stage alongside post-punks Vixens and excellent garage rockers The Elrics. On Sunday there is delicate country from The Roundheels and shambolic rocktronica from Thin Green Candles. Proceeds go towards ‘Children in Touch’, a charity which supports local children with autism.

Borderville are a great example of the kind of diverse and wildly imaginative music Oxford throws up now and then. On first glance, new single ‘Glambulance’ suggests they’re a fairly straight-up kind of indie rock band with a bad line in puns. But nothing could be further from the truth. Their attention to detail, highly original themes, enticing arrangements, and the canny ability to be extremely silly and overblown while maintaining the straightest of faces mark them out as one of the bands this town should be most proud of.

Surprisingly, Glambulance has been around Borderville’s set for a number of years already and it’s great to hear a good recording of it at last. It bears all the hallmarks of a well worn-in number whilst escaping the trap of sounding like a tired updating of an old song, and it’s probably the closest they get to a sing-along. The band storm through the deceptively tricksy arrangement with speed and ease, although it’s actually one of their less theatrical numbers and lacks some of the baubles, filigrees and grandiosity present elsewhere in their repertoire. This isn’t a bad thing though, as there’s still plenty of little ticks, teases and shifts of emphasis to keep the attention throughout.

Vocalist/guitarist Joe Swarbrick comes across like a manic combination of Bowie and the Cardiacs’ Tim Smith, tripping through a slew of lyrics that wryly document the kind of scene Noel Fielding inhabits. All drainpipe trousers, boys with straightened, razor sharp hair and everyone taking themselves far too seriously whilst looking entirely ridiculous. Musically it’s ballsy but quite stripped back, a predominantly drums/bass/guitar arrangement, with stabs of outrageous wibbly keyboard sounds keeping it from falling too far into chart indie territory. That’s not to say this wouldn’t catch the imagination of the less conservative pop consumers though – it still has plenty of the unique Borderville character but when taken out of context it isn’t a million miles from something Foo Fighters or even the Black Hats would knock out.

I haven’t caught Borderville live for a while, which isn’t surprising given their recent focus on out-of-town gigs, but early on in their career songs like Glambulance, the eponymous Borderville, One Solitary Violin and Lover, I’m Finally Through were all part of a grand universe they were creating for themselves. A place where the songs and the band inhabited one another and pulled back the tattered curtain on a debauched vaudevillian existence.

With that in mind, Glambulance is much more accessible than some of their other songs, less stylised and requiring less listener buy-in to the Borderville Experience and all that goes with it. It’s therefore a great choice of single, despite the relative age of the tune, as it draws the first-time listener in with enough hints and pointers towards the more involved songs without overloading the senses. We like.

Borderville Myspace

Single on free download here

By Tim Lovegrove