Bristol, UK – This is the third year now that the 6 Music Festival has taken over a city – a different one each time – and got a certain type of music fan, in that city, very excited. Well, momentarily excited anyway, before then feeling crushingly depressed because they’ve failed to get tickets to a hugely popular event held across a series of relatively small rooms. These rooms seem to have been at least partly chosen considering which will look good on TV. However, so if you like, all you need really do in order to get the full BBC 6 Music Festival experience is watch the performances we’ve embedded in this review, go to your fridge to get a couple of cans of beer, and then throw £6 in the bin.
It’s 6:30pm on the Friday of the festival, the crowd at this point is still sober. Will anybody do a better job of winning over an indifferent seeming audience as Savages lead singer Jehnny Beth? The band now attack their gigs in an attempt to get everybody on side. Beth even takes in a spot of “crowd-kneeling” – literally kneeling her way over the audience. It’s a pulverising and excellent set.
Not meaning to be rude, but the crush – even towards the back of the room – in the hour before Primal Scream come on stage makes you wonder about their, shall we say “older” fanbase. One assumes security count the same amount of people into rooms before each act, but there’s just not quite the same tetchy, fighting-for-space atmosphere later in the weekend when Foals (more on them later) headline the same room, with their young, svelte-like fans. It raises the question: is it about time music venues started selling, say, 10% less tickets for the Primal Screams and New Orders of this world? They could probably offset this by selling, one guesses, 10% more tickets when Zayn Malik comes to town.
It’s a matter we’re only really left thinking about because this Primal Scream set, truth be told, is taking a while to get going. Unlike the younger bands playing the festival, there’s the faintest sense of disinterest in being here. Entertainment, then, tends to be derived elsewhere. We enjoy watching upset, got-too-drunk-too-soon twenty-somethings falling on nearby punters, and then hearing nearby 40-somethings reminiscing, upset about “how that used to be them, but not anymore.” Keen to explore how the core fans are finding the show, we press for more detail: “What do you think of the gig so far?”
“Only okay,” comes the reply.
“Why only okay?”
“I’m not drunk enough, and it’s not 1998.”
Still, with “Swastika Eyes,” “Country Girl,” “Movin’ On Up,” and “Rocks,” few can deny they can put together a highly enjoyable closing run. This being a BBC festival, there’s also the prospect of more nourishing fare in the shape of day time talks and such like. An Underworld interview provides some choice moments, such as “You don’t have to like each other to make music. That might be why you make such good music,” as well as “acid house was more punk than punk. Punk under-delivered. Acid house actually delivered on its promises.” Also, a quick word about the comedy session: TV regular Mark Watson is on reliably angsty form, but Cerys Nelmes is the genuine revelation, being a superb, wildly puerile new discovery. Upstairs, the local Women’s Institute have brought a cake and tea stand along. They’ve named their cakes after a few inspirational musicians present at the festival. We can highly recommend the “Carroots Manuva Cake” and the “Foals Flapjacks,” but we also witnessed this crucial top tip: flirting sometimes gets you money off your order.
The WI’s Foals Flapjacks. Photo: Mark Muldoon
There can be little question that Bristol’s Colston Hall plays a certain starring role in the weekend. Specifically, it’s sleek, modern atrium. Acts perform on the ground floor concourse, but they’ve also tooled out the space with speakers aiming upwards; so on Sunday Gilles Peterson proves himself as reliable a selector as ever, but for sets like “Roni Size & DJ Crust present Full Cycle” this means the surreal and brilliant juxtaposition of heavy drum and bass reverberating around this gigantic, polished space.
Gilles Peterson DJing in the atrium of Bristol’s Colston Hall. Photo: Mark Muldoon
Arriving at the O² Academy, it’s nice of seven people* to show up to see the Mystery Jets. It gets busier throughout their set, but there can be no question that the place never exactly packs out. Given that they open with Telomere, those that arrive on time could feel justly rewarded. It’s always been difficult, though, to shake Mystery Jets as being the kind of act a Radio X listener would list as one of their favourite bands, if they were trying to appear cool. “Flash a Hungry Smile” still seems like quite an annoying song. They seem to be at their best when they shoot for swirling, epic guitars, rather than chasing after catchy, danceable indie-pop tunes.
However, it’s not just the Mystery Jets. Throughout the weekend most people seem not to bother making the short walk to the O² Academy, whilst the majority of sets in Colston Hall’s main room seem to reach capacity early. On Sunday afternoon Guy Garvey is an oversubscribed option, so organisers opt to cut off “2 Kings Records Soundsystem,” who are playing in the atrium at the time, so that they can instead relay Garvey’s live audio to those outside the main room – which is an interjection of gentle Sunday morning indie you can imagine feeling suddenly rather jarring for any fans of 2 Kings Records who were having a perfectly nice time dancing away to their DJ set at the time.
During Underworld’s set, people are being turned away from the main hall even when things are getting remarkably roomy down the front. They miss out on a set with plenty of highlights: “Rez” morphs into “Cowgirl,” and then is expertly reprised right at the end of the – by now monstrous – 10-minute track. The band are way off the pace visually in terms of what their contemporaries are up to, and by their own admission they could be less rough around the edges; “We are bricking it. We have barely rehearsed for this,” as frontman Karl Hyde puts it. But it would be impossible for tracks like “Scribble” and “Two Months Off” to fail when presented here, as a festival headline set to a crowd mostly made up of 30-45 year olds. Even “Born Slippy” – a song that by this point in your life you’ve probably heard about 250 times too many – isn’t grating in this setting of communal, historical celebration.
One such electronic artist offering superior visuals to Underworld is Floating Points, despite him only playing to a far smaller room of about 400 people, give or take, at 3pm the next day. This set, however, offers the kind of complex, steadily-building soundscapes that mean you’re better off ignoring what you can see anyway, in favour of a close-your-eyes-and-be-enveloped-by-the-music strategy. Floating Points – aka Sam Shepherd – has brought his full 11-piece band along today, and the complexity on display here shows.
Even before the set starts, there’s “shushers” amongst the audience reprimanding anybody talking - which is a good sign because anybody taking this much care to ensure they can enjoy a show, is likely to be doing so for something particularly worth enjoying. It’s a set that is confident enough to dispense as its second track a song as perfect as “Silhouettes (I, II and III).” Improbably though, there’s zero drop in the remarkable level of quality going on from this: there are glitchy, ravey moments. Moments of heavy bass. Even scuzzy guitar riffs. This is a great little 11-person setup Shepherd has got here. It’s the highlight of the weekend.
Floating Points at Bristol’s Trinity Centre. Photo: BBC.
Here’s a weird thing about the festival: there’s a minimum 60 minute gap between each band. Clearly those BBC sound technicians only demand the most precisely brilliant sound for their broadcasts. And fair enough, you might say, even if it’s killing the atmosphere somewhat in the more self-contained venues. The 90 minute gap between John Grant and Laura Marling feels more questionable, however, and the situation reaches a nadir later in the weekend with a gap of 1 hour 45 minutes between Bloc Party and Buzzcocks’ sets at the O² Academy. Perhaps the intricacies of the Buzzcocks live setup are eluding us, but it would surely seem somewhat unlikely that we’re dealing with a level of technical complexity here, on a par with say the “Last Night Of The Proms.”
We don’t see Bloc Party’s set, as by coincidence, we’d already been due to see them the night before the festival, in Brixton. So are you interested in hearing how that gig went? Well: they’re certainly not as tight as they used to be, but given that it’s still a new line up, that can perhaps be expected. 7/10. Rat Boy is also on the festival bill, and he was supporting Bloc Party in Brixton. That set too, you wonder? Okay. He was able to command a theatre sized-crowd impressively, for a new act. 7/10 also. And hey, whilst we’re all here, the night after the festival we happened to be seeing Julia Holter in East London’s Oval Space. It was a beautiful, intricate show. You’d be suspicious of anybody who called it their favourite gig of 2016 – and you’re unsure of how it would have translated to the bigger 6 Music Festival stage the day before – but it still makes for a lovely evening. 7.5/10. Thanks for asking, by the way.
Foals are taking an evening’s break from their first ever arena tour. It’s an opportunity to prove how far they’ve come since their days playing club rooms of the size they find themselves back in tonight.
As one of the great singles bands of their era, few could doubt Foals were ready to step up to bigger rooms. Sure, they never seem to be fully convincing over the course of an album, but singles? Masters of the format! It would be fair to say the audience are up for the occasion, too. They will pogo along to just about anything – even attempting a “go-low“ as “Spanish Sahara” begins. I don’t know how familiar with the classic Foals track you are, but it’s not a song that reaches any kind of crescendo until four minutes in. Whichever way you look at it, that’s quite a long time to be squatting on the floor waiting for a song to kick in before you can have your moment of mosh pit madness, isn’t it.
Credit to Foals; they’re devastatingly effective throughout. “Inhaler,” for example, has been extended perfectly for maximum live effect, in a level of attention to their live performances that still not enough acts seem to do, despite it being just about as sure-fire a route to gig success as is imaginable. They’ve slowly been honing themselves into a perfect live act.
Find out more about the 6 Music Festival, and watch clips (and in the UK, full sets) from the event, by visiting the 6 Music website.
*bit of comedic exaggeration, there.
Pictures by BBC and Mark Muldoon.
Mark Muldoon
He also judges the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award and Glastonbury's Emerging Talent Competition, is never ever without his camera, once backpacked Syria, and also likes Burning Man, the Nottinghill Carnival, BBC 6 Music, India, Taylor Swift, Japan and blueberry muffins.
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