Oxfordshire’s music online
Tuesday (1 April) sees the launch of new local music magazine Oxfordshire Music Scene - the magazine will be distributed throughout shops and venues across the county and will be available free. The team behind the magazine celebrate with a launch gig at the Jericho on 1 April, featuring first issue cover stars Little Fish, plus Not My Day, The Moneyshots and Baby Gravy.
Tickets for the eleventh Truck Festival go on sale this Wednesday (2 April). The tickets, priced at £60, will go on sale to local residents before they go on sale to the general public, and you can but them from any of the following outlets:
This year’s festival boasts a range of new stages and collaborations - the Barn Stage will be hosted by Vacuous Pop on the Saturday, with Lovvers and These New Puritans already booked, while Maps headline the Sonic Cathedral-curated Sunday Barn. Fresh Out The Box bring the dance tunes to the Barn on Saturday night, while local electro promoters Abort, Retry, Fail? host the Market Stage, with live music including Robots In Disguise. The Truck Stage has already confirmed acts including Noah and the Whale, Camera Obscura, The Television Personalities, Emmy The Great and Small Faces legend Ian Maclagan. Local acts to have been confirmed so far include Borderville, This Town Needs Guns, The Winchell Riots, Alphabet Backwards, Tristan and the Troubadours, Little Fish, Richard Walters, Morrison Steam Fayre and The Family Machine. For all the latest, stay tuned here and on the Truck website.
‘Bands, those funny little plans that never work quite right.’ So runs the line from a Mercury Rev song, and on Friday I knew what the writer was moaning about. My own group runs to a seven-piece and getting them all together, even without the Oxfordshire weather getting Biblical on our ass, is as easy as herding cats. Confound the confusion with suspicious spouses, musical differences, smelly rehearsal rooms and picosecond soundchecks and you occasionally wonder if it’s all worthwhile. So the attractions of a two-piece, on purely logistical terms, are obvious and unanswerable. Thankfully, the boy-girl combination, Little Fish, offer much more than just convenience: above all, they make excellent, taut rock music.
The band consists of Juju, a versatile singer-songwriter in the Polly Harvey/Patti Smith mould and Nez, once the drummer with Vade Mecum. They have gigged hard over many months, culminating in a performance at this year’s Glastonbury and the record is appropriately tight and urgent-sounding. The opening ‘Devil’s Eyes’ starts with a swinging tom-tom figure not unadjacent to the one in ‘Golden Retriever’ by the Super Furry Animals, soon reinforced by Juju’s muscular electric guitar playing. Credit should go to the producer, Richard Aitken, who has conjured up an incredibly beefy sound from a single guitar using multiple amp techniques, but the highlight of the track is definitely Juju’s vocal performance, particularly the howling, spine-tingling chorus. ‘Am I Crazy?’ is a more uptempo, straight-ahead kind of tune, with a spiky, punky, panicky vocal. Here Juju is closest to PJ Harvey and although the performance is superb, the melody and progressions are rather conventional and not very memorable. Harvey, although a living legend, is guilty of many tracks where the the energy of her rhetoric is not matched by the level of musical invention and this seems to be the case here. There is a return to the heights of ‘Devil’s Eyes’ with ‘Sweat and Shiver’, whose onomatapoeic chorus is again maddeningly hummable. In this one, Aitken’s iron grip relaxes a touch to allow some male back-up vocals, but as always the guitar, drums (augmented cleverly by an insistent cowbell) and voice could carry the track alone.
Juju’s previously-mentioned versatility is highlighted on the closing ‘Error in Your Sunrise’, a surprisingly melting ballad which sees her move from rangy rocker to edgy white soul singer, with more than a touch of Sinead O’ Connor in her delivery, perhaps due to an unusual mixture of emotional brittleness welded to technical perfection. The track itself has the druggy dreaminess of a great Pink Floyd track and brings to a close a largely superb EP. Bring on a full-length album.
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