OxfordBands.com

I’ll leave aside any debate as to the ethics and point (or pointlessness) of band competitions, as that’s a dissertation in itself. Instead, I’m wondering why tonight’s Jack FM/107.9FM/SEA/Oxfordshire Music Scene Magazine/Wychwood Festival Next Big Thing final feels less like a gig and more like a Butlin’s Talent Show, with all the attendant forced jollity that suggests, including a Jack FM DJ, Trevor Marshall, as compere and with obvious designs on the Radio 1 breakfast show hot seat.

Mind you, irritating as he is, he’s not a patch on Quadrophobe’s singer, who spends their entire fifteen minute set gurning and mugging like a children’s party entertainer and squawking like a flustered  parrot, while his band kick out a passable but dated funk-rock-cum-ska-pop groove that marks them out as perennial college ball fodder. The brass section and keyboard player give it all a bit of life and muscle but while they possibly see themselves as the meeting point between Dexy’s and Madness, they’re really Jamiroquai fronted by one of the Chuckle Brothers.

By contrast singer/songwriter Beck Lanehart is genuinely funny, with a downbeat patter that involves a joke about funerals. Which she then spends half the rest of her set apologising for and thus ruining the whole effect. She’s got a great voice too, but perhaps too much of the kind you’d expect to hear coming out of the Brit School and with a tendency to over-emote in that Celine Dion way. She leaves her best song until last, but it’s ironic it finds her warbling about being reckless-because-it’s-all-she-knows, when really music doesn’t get much tamer.

Echoboomer and InLight are virtually interchangeable – creatively moribund rock of no discernible character, shape or virtue, just overly-serious arena-indie with occasional nods to Snow Patrol. No, scrap that, Echoboomer sound like Dire Straits and make up in bombast what they lack in actual tunes, while the slightly more epic InLight sound like Keane and rock out with all the off-putting passion of rutting rhinoceroses.

After which, Witches are a class apart. They genuinely rock out. With maracas and trumpet and a chaotic sense of joy that’s been missing all night. In fifteen short minutes they’ve covered bases as diverse as hardcore, Mexicana, alt-country and indie rock with a sometimes ludicrous sense of theatre, like a puppyish mash-up of Sonic Youth, Sparklehorse and Calexico. And then, after an interminable wait, and against the odds and expectations (and wishes) of the majority of the crowd, they’re declared the winners. Which demonstrates a heroic victory of taste and common sense for the judges. And also means the night, which threatened early on to be a triumph of commercially ambitious efficiency over real potential, ends on a high.

By Zoë Herriot