Indie Tracks Festival Report

[Uncle Ants]

Its taken a while to recover and get the work up to date but I spent the weekend at the Indie Tracks Festival, which was at the Steam Railway Centre at Butterly, near Ripley in Derbyshire. It was an Indie Rave Up Bowlie style.

It was one of the best and most eye opening weekends I've been to. just short of 40 bands over two days and a massive crowd of about 500 ... of which about half were in one of the bands or another, one of the stages in a large engine shed, the other in a small 19th C wood lined chapel.

I'll say right now apart from Darren Hayman (who used to be Hefner), I hadn't heard of any of the bands, but there were some cracking moments - best for me were:

• Robert Church and the Holy Community a bunch of very nice Swedes (good band, iffy name), hypnotic looping guitars with nice understated harmonies singing either profound stuff ... or nonsense, I couldn't quite figure.
  
• Arthur and Martha - Kraftwerk influenced synth pop - seriously good I thought - I especially liked Martha's (her real name is Alice) theramin karate chopping solo at the end of the set.
  
• Bearsuit were pretty much what I think the B52s would have been like if they had come from Norwich and had a cornet player. Barking mad stop start fun, with lots of ladies shouting. Mad but good.
  
• The Parallelograms - Twee indiepop in excelsis for fans of C86 type stuff. Three blokes throwing big rock shapes with a lovely speccy lady in a flowery frock playing a toy glockenspiel.
  
• The How Does It Feel disco in the big engine shed at the end of Saturday - Indie and Northern Soul and a lot ofpeople dressed up in their finest.
  
• The Train rides

Lots of other stuff some good, some bad. Darren Hayman was excellent, but then when he was Hefner he always was. The sound in the chapel was excellent, more variable in the big shed but some of the bands managed to get it right. Oh and if you like trains, its the festival for you.

The thing that was most heartening about it was the fact that there were so many good bands here who are just getting on and doing it themselves. They are making and selling their own records and promoting their own gigs without a big record company in sight nor want one in many cases. Being able to chat to so many of the bands you had just seen was also a plus.

Top value - the organisers made a small loss apparently (hardly surprising), but are planning to do it again next year, and everyone seemed to have so much fun I expect word of mouth will help a lot.

Here are some pics Ian the How Does It Feel fellow took

[RickyC6]

Nice one Uncle Ants - Bearsuit are cool!

Cheers

Rich

[Uncle Ants]

Originally Posted by RickyC6

Nice one Uncle Ants - Bearsuit are cool!

They were damn good, so much so that Auntie went and spent her pocket money on their records.