Jeff Mangum ATP Part 7: THE FINAL PROGRAMME

I am still going on about the Jeff Mangum curated All Tomorrow's Parties Festival, in Butlins Minehead.

And then to Group Doueh. As noted in the Executive Summary, the SADR sensations were a bit less trippy than on the record I have, but they did serve up an appealing stew of desert guitar music. Mr Doueh took a relatively modest role (apart from when he nonchalantly played guitar behind his head), letting the band's two women singers front things. They also did a bit of getting down and dancing, which was endearingly odd considering that they a good bit more modestly dressed and round than is the case with western dancers.

After Group Doueh had finished we were about to drift off to see Sebadoh (largely for the want of anything better to do) when some excitable fellow said to us that he had heard that there was going to be an All-Star Jam taking place down here. At first we were unsure, but as the place started to fill up with hipsters – and as the supposedly finished venue made no efforts to throw people out –we wondered if maybe he was onto something. And yeah, he was. Members of bands such as the Sun Ra Arkestra, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, a Hawk And A Hacksaw, Roscoe Mitchell and many many others appeared onstage and started banging out a chaotic yet enjoyable barrage of music that seemed largely to be based around an Arkestra groove. I felt a bit trend being there with all the people taking photos of everything to prove that they had been There, but it was one of the most fun ATP things ever.

That is largely that for me and the Jeff Mangum ATP. I did not see enough stuff on the ATP TV channel to say much about it except that i) the Rutland Weekend Television stuff reminded me of how impressive Eric Idle's technique is and ii) the production values in The Life of Brian were much higher than I expected; I particularly liked how they decorated the walls of Pilate's study with copies of the murals from the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii [so called because the confusing audio guide makes finding its famous wall paintings a rather mysterious process].
I did find the lack of chalet-mate sociability a bit of a drag (my beloved can be so grumpy!), so I would not be too keen on the two-person chalet again, for all that they do the job. I must therefore give a shout out to ILX superstar Aldo Cowpat, his lovely wife and their friends (who all have names but it is more exciting on the internet if I make them sound mysteriously unnamed) for having us round for tea and cake. And vodka, they are Scottish after all. We watched a bit of that Sherman's March film (a documentary about this guy who starts off trying to make a film about Sherman's march through Georgia but ends up using the "Hi, I'm making a documentary" line as a way of meeting but not actually copping off with loads of women).

And so my account of this festival trails away…

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 3: Bands I Did Not See

Being a continuing account of the occurrences at the Jeff Mangum curated All Tomorrow's Parties

By now you if you are still reading you will not have come across any discussion of bands I had seen at this event, apart from the Executive Summary. Let me keep it like that for a bit by talking about some of the artists playing the festival that I did not see. First up we have Charlemagne Palestine and Robyn Hitchcock. They were not playing together, which would have been awesome, but they were playing at the same tyme, so it would have been necessary to pick seeing one or another, but as both of these fascinating acts were playing before our bus arrived at the festival this was a choice we did not have to make. We were talking to a Glaswegian gentleman who was at Charlemagne Palestine and he was being annoyed by some people who were yapping away to each other through it, so he had to use the magic of being from Glasgow to say in a threatening tone something like: "Good sirs, I have politely requested you once already to refrain from disturbing me with your inane chatter. Now I am asking you again, with the warning that if you continue to upset me with your prattling I will not request your silence a third time but will have no option but to take my cane to your persons and administer several sound thrashings". That did the trick, but he did feel like he had done the reputation of Glasgow no favours.

I also did not see Sebadoh. I think maybe we were on the point of drifting off to see them after a wonderful set by Group Doueh when someone said to us that they had heard that an all-star jam featuring all the forward thinking bands on the festival line-up was about to take place, so we stayed for that instead. It would have been nice to see Sebadoh again, but fundamentally less appealing than seeing the Sun Ra Arkestra playing with Boredoms and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.

We went for a pizza when Magnetic Fields were on. I mean, come on, I have to eat. I suppose we could have got a takeaway pizza and sat at the back eating it, but maybe we needed a break from music. And ultimately, while I like Magnetic Fields, I have seen them quite a few times and do recall getting diminishing returns from their live appearances. And don't they play really quietly now as a result of some hearing problem Stephin Merrit has? So we probably would not have been able to hear them over the sound of our munching (and nor would anyone else), so it was probably best for everyone that we stayed away. I'm sure they were great.

I stayed up really late to see some of the kewl Oneohtrix Point Never, but as soon as they started I thought "I am too tired to enjoy this", so I went to bed.

And I also did not see Jeff Mangum. I do not really know too much about Mr Mangum. I understand he used to be in a band called Neutral Milk Hotel, who were around in the early 1990s or something. They somehow passed me by, but the ATP programme says that people liked them a lot. And people did seem to be very interested in seeing Jeff Mangum play, as both times there were huge queues to get in to see him, queues sufficiently long that we decided not to bother and go see something else instead. It did not help that anyone we knew at the festival said nothing more compelling about Mangum than that he was "alright", so I am not sure if we were missing much. I may at some stage acquire a copy of the classic Neutral Milk Hotel album (which has a nice cover) to see if I might just have missed the gig of the century.

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 2: Introductory Chit Chat

Let us go back. I have long been saying that I would love to go to another Spring All Tomorrow's Parties. The Christmas ones are great and I always like going away then, but that time is often a bit busy for work and I am always afraid that I will be told at the last minute that I cannot take time off. Spring is much better work-wise, and the stories I have been hearing of the fun people have had at the Matt Groening and Pavement ATPs have reminded me of how nice it could be to travel to a festival then. And then they stopped doing Spring ATPs, so it looked like I would never get the chance to go to one again. So, when the Jeff Mangum curated ATP was suddenly postponed from December to March I decided that this was a once-off opportunity that had to be grabbed, particularly given how much fun we had at the recent December ATP. Also, I found myself with the creeping sense that the whole ATP thing might just be coming to an end, making it important to grab any last of their festivals that look interesting.

I was fortunate in that in this matter my beloved's thoughts were similar to my own, so I did not have to try and bunk in with strangers or put together a full chalet at short notice. And we did leave it pretty late to commit to going, so we had no time to look for chalet-mates and instead booked one of the two-berth non-self-catering chalets. The festival mocks you as you approach these, as the way to them brings you past the really swish elite chalets the bands are in. "Maybe we have been upgraded and put into one of those", we wondered, before turning a corner and finding ourselves in the part of the campsite dubbed [REDACTED] by one of my friends.

We were slightly lucky in that we were given a four bed instead of a two bed, which meant more room, and I would have to say that the chalet did the job of providing a comfy place to sleep and so on, but it was not the kind of place you would hang out in, which meant that we spent little time lounging around watching ATP TV and lots of time out seeing bands – ROCK. Oh yeah, one final thing about the chalet – if there are four of you, do not under any circumstances ever get a four berth non-self-catering chalet at ATP, unless you like only being able to access the bathroom by walking through one of the bedrooms.

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 4: Real Festival Write-Up Starts Here

My adventures at the Jeff Mangum curated All Tomorrow's Parties continue

By now you may be wondering – did I actually see anything at this ATP? Well, yes, I did. See Executive Summary for a full list. But let me talk about a few of these acts in a bit more detail, starting with some people who were completely new to me.

Feathers proved to be an interesting proposition, being an all-woman band playing music that nodded back to synthpop of yore without sounding like electropop revivalism. They also were striking in their visual appearance, being done up to look quite glamorous, none more so than their lead singer Anastasia Dimou. Now, I am a bit suspicious of bands comprised entirely of beautiful women ["O RLY?" – Reader's voice], but there seemed something a bit different to this lot that made them come across like a fascinating art project than just something for the dads. It also helped that in Ms Dimou they have a striking and unusual front person. I feel this band would repay further investigation and I note that they have a some songs people can listen to on the YouTube.

I had not heard of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble either, but they do what they say on the tin, being an ensemble from America and playing contemporary music. But of course, you have to be wise to the lingo – contemporary music does not mean all music that is contemporary, so they were not playing Katy Perry covers, but rather it is contemporary classical music [And yeah, I know some people do not like the term "classical music", but do they have an alternative?]. And they were playing at midday on Sunday morning, so it was like one of those concerts at the Hugh Lane Gallery I sometimes go to. They played a couple of pieces, but the biggie was this Gavin Bryars thing called Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which features a sampled voice repeating some little song about how Jesus' blood has never failed him yet, over which the musicians play their stringy modern sounds. It was very involving and in the darkened environment of the Crazy Horse venue it made for an affecting and otherworldly experience.

Now let me move on to talk about people I saw at ATP whom I have seen before. Maybe you have seen them before too. We wandered along to see The Fall with no great expectations – they had been a bit below par last time we saw them in Dublin. People always seem to tell me that The Fall are patchy live but up until that time they had always been exceptionally good, so for me a below par concert raised the worrying prospect that this once great band are in terminal decline. But they turned out to be great, huzzah. The line-up was apparently more or less the same as when we saw them before, I think, so maybe they have just become more used to Mr Smith and his funny ways. In fact, the band generally were great, playing out the songs well with a great "who gives a shit, we are not long for this band" demeanour. And the latest Mrs Mark E. Smith on keyboards seemed less visibly terrified of him than the last time, which was nice. Mr Smith himself was flying, rambling incoherently in a most engaging manner. An emblematic moment was when between songs he muttered "[something-something] Joanna Newsom [something]". Could he be already lining up the elfin harpist as the next Mrs Mark E. Smith?

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 1: Executive Summary

I went to the recent All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead, curated by Jeff Mangum. For the benefit of busy people I present these very brief accounts (23 words or less) of the artists I saw.

Matana Roberts & Sebastian Rochford: A jazz saxophonist roffler playing with winner of the ATP White Afro Competition 2012. Skronk-tastic and a great opener.

Young Marble Giants: Austere music from the post punk legends coupled with the guitarist's endearingly lame attempts at humour.

The Raincoats: The wrong kind of ramshackle. Songs too formless and tuneless even for the Under Fives Tin Drum Improv Orchestra. 'Lola' the only highpoint.

The Fall: An enjoyable performance, with the band now used to Mark E. Smith and his ways; but what did he say about Joanne Newsom?

Thurston Moore: Thurston solo is a bit Sonic Youth-lite. I wonder what or who that 'Queen Bee' song was about?

A Hawk And A Hacksaw: Faux folkies accompany a strange Soviet-era film about funny Ukrainians in a darkened room with invisible subtitles. Spectral.

Boredoms: Ten drummers and twenty guitarists, but are they really all that?

The Apples In Stereo: They play songs that sound like other people's songs.

Feathers: Art project all woman synth band fronted by Anastasia Dimou. Fascinating and worth further investigation.

Joanna Newsom: Impressive technique from the elfin sensation who is clearly not the idiot savant some might see her as. A slow burn.

Low: More sublime miserabilism from the Carter Family of our times. The only band to mention Syria. They invited everyone for a morning run.

Blanck Mass: I am not certain that I actually saw this band.

Mount Eerie: Quirky singer songwriter fellow with odd songs that sounded almost like works in progress and which ended very abruptly, whereupon he would curtsey.

Scratch Acid: The hardest rocking band to ever play ATP but not as interesting as that sounds.

Demdike Stare: Vaguely hauntological electronic music from Finders Keepers associates, combined with fascinating Apollo Rising type visuals.

American Contemporary Music Ensemble: By playing classical music at midday on Sunday they transported me back to the Hugh Lane Gallery. 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet'.

Boredoms: OK so maybe they are all that but still have not surrendered to them in the way my friends have.

Roscoe Mitchell: Old jazzer still has it.

Sun Ra Arkestra: More old (and some young) jazzers, this time space jazzers, who still have it.


Rafael Toral: Possibly analogue electronic post-free jazz improvisation or something unwisely scheduled at same time as the Arkestra. Interesting.

Tall Firs: Two rofflers who play guitars and sing songs. And whose fanzine talks about how Thucydides is freaking awesome.

Group Doueh: Desert guitars. Less trippy than on record, but Mr Doueh still awesome. Nice to see modestly dressed not thin women strutting their stuff.

All Star Jam: Various bands of the festival appear on stage together and serve up some crazy Arkestra-style space jazz. The right kind of ramshackle.

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 5: Syria

More Jeff Mangum curated All Tomorrow's Partiesaction

I have surprisingly little by them on record, but on the strength of their live appearances Low are one of my favourite bands. As you know, they are a clean-living husband (vocals, guitar) and wife (drums, vocals) joined by a succession of hell-raising bassists [libellous supposition, your honour]. And they make music that is basically a bit miserable. I think of them as the Carter Family of our times. It seems like an age since I last saw them so I had almost forgotten how good they are, to the extent that I suggested to my beloved that we would be well advised to rest our little feet by sitting at the back while they were on. That stupid idea lasted about two songs and then we had barged our way up to the front. OK so I then had to put up with some fuckwitted Dutch people near me having a stupid conversation about some foreign language shite while Low were playing 'Sunflower' (current candidate for greatest miserable song ever), but being close to my heroes more than made up for it.

One thing you may have noticed from the news is that in the faraway country of Syria people have been engaging in protests and the government has been killing them. Around the time of All Tomorrow's Parties this had escalated to a new pitch, with government forces using heavy artillery to flatten the disaffected city of Homs. This has attracted relatively little attention from the kind of people who protest about things, I suspect because events in Syria do not fit the narrative of seeing everything bad that happens in the world as being the fault of the US government and its British catamites. Where is this going? Well, Alan Sparhawk of Low mentioned the Syrian crisis a couple of times on stage and seemed genuinely quite cut up about it. He was not saying anything like "We should send in the Marines", more stuff like "That shit is fucked up". And he is right, it is. No other performer mentioned Syria or alluded to any political event occurring outside the festival.

more festival action coming soon

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The March of Progress I: All Tomorrow's Parties

Could we soon be bidding farewell to the All Tomorrow's Parties festival? Late last year we had the unedifying spectacle of the Jeff Mangum curated ATP being postponed at almost the last minute with no explanation being offered. That event went ahead in March (and was greatly enjoyed by me, as previously noted) but was not that packed out. Then there was the sudden moving of next December's ATP (to be curated by The National) from Minehead to the much smaller Pontins in Camber Sands. And then there was the news that the ATP organisation was being wound up for non-payment of tax and stuff but then was rising from the ashes as some new organisation mysteriously controlled by the same people. And an American ATP festival was moved at short notice from New Jersey to New York.

None of this really augurs well and I would not be too surprised if the whole enterprise disappears this year or next. And this would be a shame. I know people like to scoff at All Tomorrow's Parties, but I have had a lot of fun at their festivals. The recent ones have been particularly enjoyable, so it is not like the events themselves were sliding into shite (creatively). So I hope they pull through their current difficulties and continue their heroic efforts.

The Magic of ATP

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The Fall - live in the Button Factory

I went to see the Fall to celebrate the end of a particularly busy and stressful period at work. Also, they had been great at the Jeff Mangum ATP earlier this year, so I thought "if they were great at a festival, then surely they will be even greater playing a full gig on their own?". In this I was to be somewhat disappointed.

Arriving I was struck by how many older men there were in the audience. As you know, the Fall have been around for a long time. They are famous for having a rather fluid line-up. On this occasion, however, it struck me that the band's membership has stabilised somewhat. The guitarist and keyboardist were with them the last couple of times I saw them. Internet researches suggest that other members of the band have also been around for several years too. And I think the singer has been with them for a while as well.

The band are also famous for being a bit erratic live. For a long time I had managed to avoid duff Fall gigs, but when I saw them a couple of years ago in the Tripod they seemed a bit below par (or maybe it was all the trend people in the audience harshing my buzz). But they were so on form at ATP that I was prepared to write that off as an aberration. This time I would not describe them as being musically off-form, but I was struck by how short a set they played. They were gone less than an hour after they started, and if you factor in the time they spent between the main set and the encore then they may only have been onstage for 50 minutes. This provided me with somewhat poor value for money, so I retaliated by not buying another t-shirt or many of the fine albums they had for sale.

What they did play, however, was great. When people talk about the Fall, they tend to focus on their singer, Mark E. Smith, the band's only constant member. That focus tends to overstate the importance of vocals and lyrics to the band, underplaying the importance of the music and the band's playing. And the music is great. The musicians are great at laying down a motorik groove and chugging away. I did maybe sense a certain disengagement from some audience members whenever Mark E. Smith was not present onstage, but for me the band's playing was more than sufficiently entertaining. The musicians also radiate a great "don't give a fuck" attitude, suggesting an acceptance that Fall membership is not a life-sentence. The possible exception to this is the keyboardist (and current Mrs Mark E. Smith), who actually seems quite excited about playing in the Fall. Maybe she was head of their fan club before she was recruited.

I know surprisingly few Fall songs and recognised almost nothing of what they played. One song, I realised, was 'Strychnine' - an old 60s punk cover or blues standard or something? They also encored with a song whose lyrics made me realise that it was the 'Theme from Sparta FC'. This seems to be one of their big tunes, does anyone know what album it comes from? ["What am I, your Google bitch?" - Reader's Voice] I think they might also have played 'Guest Informant' from The Frenz Experiment, with the keyboardist really going for it on the shouty vocals.

One other fun thing was that when Mark E. Smith gave a mic to some guy in the audience, after shouting "Mark E. Smith! The Fall! McGonagles 1981! I was there!", the guy then started providing surprisingly good improvised backing vocals on all the following tracks. You might have had to be there on this one.

Hip Priests and Pandas

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Jeff Mangum ATP Part 6: More Music Action

Previously

And now to bands that I had heard of but was seeing at the festival for the first time, beginning with A Hawk And A Hacksaw. I think my Frank's APA pal Mr Henry the Cow likes this lot. Well, now that I have seen them, I like them too! The faux folkies were providing musical accompaniment to a showing of the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by the roffling Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. It tells the story of people in the past in Ukraine or somewhere like that, only because we were seeing it in Crazy Horse the flat floor and low stage meant that the subtitles were largely invisible and the story impossible to follow. However, from having seen the film before I can reveal that even with the subtitles the film is not very plot-oriented, so it is best appreciated as a succession of beautifully shot scenes of people doing folkish stuff. The Hawk And A Hacksaw musical accompaniment (tinges of Balkan and eastern European folk music) worked perfectly like this. And again, the sheer darkness of Crazy Horse made this all a rather magical experience.

Joanna Newsom was one of the big draws for me at this festival. I had hitherto been relatively uninterested in her oeuvre, seeing her as one of those quirky voiced beautiful women who sell truckloads of records to people who think they are sensitive. But I liked the Joanna Newsom track Scott put on one of his end of year discs (a song which would have been the first Joanna Newsom track I have heard in its entirety). So I became keen to check her out.

I found her live set a bit of a slow burn – at first it seemed merely quite good, but by the end I found the performance mesmerising. I was struck by her technique, both as a musician and as someone who can work a crowd, the whole idiot savant thing being clearly a pose. I was also fascinated the basic instrumentation of the songs (with her playing the harp or piano being the sole accompaniment to her vocals). At the end of the day, the harp is an instrument that makes beautiful sounds so it is easy to like Ms Newsom's music.

Two things struck me about Joanna Newsom's vocals. Firstly, her lyrics often dwell on animals, always a good thing. Secondly, some of the tunes featured wordless vocals, with her singing voice sounding far less mannered on these. Make of that what you will. Her normal singing voice is a bit odd but I can see why people both like and dislike it. Overall, though, there is something about the songs that gets under the skin. And, unlike my beloved, I do not think that Ms Newsom would be improved by a face transplant from Mark E. Smith.

NEXT: The Final Episode

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The Raincoats at ATP - a short further discussion

Do you remember when I wrote about the Jeff Mangum-curated All Tomorrow's Parties earlier this year? I dismissed the Raincoats in the executive summary, because I did not want to waste time going on about disappointing musical experiences. But some people have asked for further detail on this. As I am well known for my willingness to please, I provide here this brief expansion of my previous curt dismissal.

The problem with the Raincoats live was that they embraced big-time the shambolicity of their sound and came across like a bunch of talentless no-marks who had somehow found themselves playing a stage at a festival despite an inability to rehearse or play properly. It all reminded me a bit of legendary punk act (and rough Raincoats contemporaries) the Television Personalities, who delivered a similarly ramshackle and tune-free set at a previous All Tomorrow's Parties. With the Raincoats themselves, I am insufficiently familiar with their recorded work to know whether they were pissing on their legacy or actually representing it only too well. Other people present, or at least some some of them, did seem to enjoy their set, so maybe my views here are eccentric. Or maybe they were on an outing from a home for the cloth-eared.

I am now a bit wary of making any further explorations of the Raincoats' recorded output. People do recommend it, but I worry that it would turn out to be amateurish tuneless nonsense. But I still love their cover of 'Lola' enough to think that maybe I one day I will acquire more of their music.



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