http://www.thebristolfestival.org/

Saturday night is alright!

Dear Vistics,

Hello there. Being a lucky man, I caught your gig on the bandstand at  Glastonbury on that rainy Thursday night.

One of the high joys of  festival life is tripping over excellence by accident. Over the years  at Glastonbury, I have learned to keep an eye on that bandstand.

What  first caught my ear through the slanting evening rain was an electric  lead line straight out of The Doors, pure Bobby Krieger, like hardly  anyone knows how to play any more, flashing diamond light against  black emptiness. That’s one hell of a first impression. I’m not sure  if 53-year-old rockers, old enough to remember e.g. The Allman  Brothers (1974) and Pink Floyd (1975) at Knebworth are in your target  audience, but having listened to rather a lot of music over the years,  I’m not easily impressed, and this is about the highest praise I can  muster. An accurate first impression, too. I stayed for the rest of  the set, as it suddenly seemed very important to catch this  performance.

Galvanising lead guitar, of course, but with that extra  edge of urgency and total commitment that seizes and holds the attention whilst speaking straight to the adrenalised heart. And those  beautiful, blistering keyboards! Sticking with The Doors, an oblique  echo of The Master, Ray Manzarek, but also all the long way back to  Doug Ingle with Iron Butterfly, when the 60s Underground was young and  confident, and so much more challenging and frightening to the  established order than Punk could ever be. All this, and a rhythm  section to die for. Love that bassist; totally involved, right out
there on the edge with the lead, the shadow behind the lightning;  that’s how rock bass is played. And in the engine room, a drummer as  tight and sharp as any I’ve ever heard. Put all this together, and you  have a band that could take The Pyramid by storm and put that famous  field into orbit around Jupiter. Anyone with half an ear knows that  this outfit has to get onto a bigger stage at the next Glastonbury.

I bought the “Neither Hope Nor Fear” CD out of a suitcase in the  pouring rain, ears ringing, at the end. Sorry, in a way, that those  keyboards are missing from that album. But what range for what I  imagine is a debut recording! The fast tracks are all that I expected,  but I didn’t anticipate the dark electric finger-picking brilliance of  “Cold Hearted Baby”, a noir Tantric Dylanesque take, a first-class  graveside lament which echoes the great original archetype, “St James
Infirmary Blues”. That combination of bleak message with upbeat tune  is pure Steely Dan (think of “With A Gun” on “Pretzel Logic”).  Similarly, “Let Me Live” is a complete surprise. It’s easy for such  songs to slip into mawkishness, and it’s a measure of the quality of  this song that it so clearly summons up the spirit of Neil Young  without making one of the false moves for which Neil is so famous.

Over a Glastonbury weekend during which I experienced two of the most  important performances of my life; from Buddy Guy and from Leonard  Cohen, I still prize the memory of your bandstand set. The old fart  raving down the front at Trowbridge (our 23rd) will be me, and I will  be bringing several rock-literate friends with me. Set it alight and
take it apart, guys: you clearly know how to do it.

Review by Dave Young