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Rockaway Beach 2020, Butlin's, Bognor Regis - Part Two

  • Published in Live

Image:- Steven Velentzas (@captainstavros)

Saturday dawned grey and blowy so clearly it was the best day to check out the excellent new swimming pool and flumes, improved no doubt by the lack of children (waiting up to 50 minutes to climb upstairs to the highest slides in peak season sounds awful).

Having got that fun out of the way we repaired to see Dutch trio The Sweet Release Of Death. A mix of Sonic Youth & Argentina's Capsula best describes their sound. A loud, propulsive and enjoyable way to start off today's live offerings.

Captain Stavros is a great advocate of the work of Our Girl & for me they were one of the very few acts whose Flying Vinyl disc was worth keeping hold of. This evening though the Brighton trio's sound strikes me as no more than pleasant. More bite is what I seem to be after in many cases this weekend and the indie on offer in their set isn't really grabbing my attention so I step out for some air after a couple of tracks.

Our main stage sojourn tonight kicks off with Peter Perrett, not far off the same vintage as John Cale from the night before. An articulate & amusing lyricist whose set on Marc Riley's 6 Music show last year was one of the best of 2019, he has a great number of punchy songs in his repertoire. Unfortunately he doesn't play these in the first part of his set & I'm left yet again trying to explain an act's relevance to The Captain as we mooch back down the stairs.

Next up though comes what, with hindsight, was the best act of the weekend and I'm not even a fan. Nova Twins' play funk metal, in the main, & that's one sub-genre I've never liked. They do though play it loudly and extremely well (their technical ability is fantastic). Singer Amy Love is genuinely pleased to be playing on a stage in a venue she's been to a number of times on childhood holidays and that pleasure is evident in the exuberance of her and Georgia South on bass (no idea who the bloke on drums is). I manage to stick around for most of the set, just to experience the volume & distortion and it's safe to say they do the job required of warm-up act very well. Perhaps too well in fact.

For tonight's headliners are The Jesus & Mary Chain, reformed in the past couple of years and with an overlong comeback album under their belts. Jim Reid falls foul of the urge to be ironic about Butlin's (managing to equate the place with "Stalag 17") and it's also their bad luck to have poor guitar sound for much of the show, rendering William Reid's guitar solos practically silent. I last saw the band on the Destroyer showcase tour in the '90s in the aircraft hanger that is Glasgow's SECC, a venue far too large for them & so tonight is intimate in comparison. Back then though it was already clear they'd shot their bolt in terms of audience baiting antics etc. and tonight was a reminder of how many of their tunes speak to you as a gloomy teenager but in middle age turn out to be plodders. The final straw is Jim's attempt at a joke prior to the encore "we'll go off for a half cup of tea" - just man up and either say a beer or don't mess around with a break in the set at all. Much of the crowd aren't in a state to care anyway so why not plough on? 

When the band speed things up and the sound technician improves things guitar-wise a bit this is probably a vintage performance from the JAMC as they are now but they were close to being blown offstage by the previous trio. Not feeling the need to stick around for an hour until Steve Lamacq gets behind the decks to unleash some lame musical world cup or other we call it a night.

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Rockaway Beach 2020, Butlin's, Bognor Regis - Part One

  • Published in Live

Image:- Steven Velentzas (@captainstavros)

It's that time of year once more to head down to the southern end of GB for the first festival of the year. This time around the on-site, daytime entertainment had clearly been beefed up so an overall different experience from past years was highly anticipated.

Weather-wise we got probably the best possible for a January weekend & certainly the best of the three years the event's been on at that time. This made daytime wandering around Bognor Regis itself very pleasant, whilst the location of this year's accommodation couldn't have been handier for the performance spaces + we even had a sea view.

Once we'd arrived, checked in and then had dinner the first act we were able to catch on the Friday night were Young Knives, who I think I last saw around five years ago (a quick look on Wikipedia confirms it was in fact eight, seeing as it was album number three they were touring at the time), the first of the weekend's acts whom Captain Stavros was unacquainted with. Singing their praises as decent purveyors of indie & post-punk, I lead us off to the show.

Eight years is clearly a long time in music. Having previously dressed as if they'd just left the office(s) they still had to work in to make ends meet, there's now shoulder length hair, a full beard, some kind of sequined, glam rock t-shirt, a coat which could once have been a pair of curtains and a fourth member on percussion. Not that any of that is in itself cause for alarm. Having stood about through a long-winded setting up of levels (the more kit you have the more there is that ca go wrong) we in the crowd finally get some music, fifteen or so minutes later than billed. 

Noise rock is about as close a description as I can manage. Screaming & shouting was a part of the band's sound previously but now there's a cacophony of guitar and drums worlds away from the likes of 'Sister Frideswide' or 'She's Attracted To'. After four numbers & with no interest in seeing how known songs are fitted into the set, we beat a hasty retreat, with me attempting to explain how different they used to be.

Thankfully this is the only real shock of the weekend. There's at least one surprise, on the Saturday night, but everyone else plays it as expected, for better or worse.

On to the main venue then for Black Country, New Road. The youthful septet served up a blend of Eastern European folk music sifted through Roxy Music & James Chance's saxophone noise. I've either not paid enough attention to them on the radio or it was a case of a band being very different in the flesh, but they weren't exactly what I was expecting. Which isn't though to say there was anything wrong with the show - they were an enjoyable act to watch & went down well with the crowd, albeit with the odd bizarre heckle although those happily seemed to go over their heads.

BC,NR were followed up about twenty minutes or so later by Soak, the first of the bands we saw to actively take the mickey out of the collective experience of us all being at a holiday camp. That fell as flat as it deserved. Having done something similar when reviewing the event in the past I can now speak as a convert. This was the festival's fifth iteration and it was clearly well attended & the assumption could be made from that that many people had been to it more than once in the last few years - not something to be mocked.

Musically the band played some pretty competent shoegaze incorporating a bit of Sundays twee, with on occasion Big Countryesque guitar solos. On the whole they left the impression that they'll be filling the shoes of Texas and/or Deacon Blue in years to come if they last that long.

Tonight's headliner was John Cale, the definition of a living legend and in an utterly different league from most of the other acts appearing over the weekend. That said I know nothing of his output other than the Velvet Underground material, Paris 1919 (first heard only last year) and the awful Songs For Drella album which I ended up putting in a litter bin as no secondhand record shop would take it off my hands in the decades before Discogs (Q Magazine didn't half recommend some terrible music in the '90s).  

He starts straight into his set with no preamble, which sets the scene for the entire show seeing as he's not that chatty. Making full use of the venue's projection facilities he and his band have some some of the best films/abstract displays of the weekend. Plenty of the songs maintain a good pace but noodling does become an issue on more than one. 'I'm Waiting For The Man' proves to be the only song I recognise, albeit it's a bit drawn out & sounds odd with Cale singing it. Still though this is one of the tightest sets I've seen at the festival to date, despite which (as well as out of respect for the singer's six decades of performing) people still felt it was more important to have a conversation throughout the performance.

Princesteen is the night's closing act but the combination of the two performers being paid tribute to doesn't inspire me to stay out so it's off back to the Shoreline for some shut eye. 

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