Bleech 9:3 and other Irish bands dominate the day, but The Lottery Winners provide plenty of entertainment as well.
Saturday morning started with a grand Truck tradition. An appearance by the Oxford Symphony Orchestra. They were in good form and played everything from David Bowie to the theme tune for The Traitors.
Pixie McCann was our first proper stop of the day on the Market Stage. She describes herself as “making weird music for weird girls in my garage.” On this showing she will have to get used to being out of the garage, as her line in sad-girl indie is compelling and authentic. She is the latest artist at Truck to be blown away by the size of her audience. “This is our first festival.”
Our first Irish act of the day is Florence Road. This is a band achieving lift off in a hurry. They already have more monthly listeners on Spotify than two of the headline acts and the Truck Stage is very, very busy for this time of day to see them. They are blown away by the support. “Thank you so much for coming out. This is incredible. We were on The Nest last year and we thought that was great.” Support slots with Olivia Rodrigo (and ringing endorsements with her fanbase from her), Sombr, The Last Dinner Party and Wolf Alice have helped them build in popularity, alongside Tiktok numbers that they were already building.
They are impressive, they do proper rock when they want to. The vocals are strong and clear. They can do quieter, more thoughtful tracks. It will be interesting how busy The Ballroom (the old Festival Republic Tent) is for them at Reading Festival. You suspect it might not be big enough.
After a last minute decision, we check out Bloodworm at The Nest. The Nottingham goth-punks put on a good show. Their singer reminds us of a young Brett Anderson. Fans of Editors and The Horrors are likely to enjoy them.
We have seen The Lottery Winners a number of times and we expected them to do well here. How they adapted the show for a festival crowd, rather than their own fans remained the question. In fairness, a lot of Lottery Winners fans were representing down the front with their KOKO t-shirts and an assortment of aliens. The band come out to ‘Praise You’ by Fatboy Slim. They get straight down to business with ‘Worry.’ Thom Rylance is in fine cheeky form. He asks the photographers, “Have you got some good photos? You little pervs.” He turns round and sticks his bum out towards them.
Thom introduces ‘You Again’ as their one radio semi-hit. “Those of you over forty will have heard it on Radio Two. The rest of you won’t give a shit.” He suggests that The Reverend is here today to sing on the song, before pulling the rug out from underneath us and saying he is joking.
Thom claims his ambition is to be on the Graham Norton Show. “I just need to write that one hit that unlocks Graham Norton’s back door.” He claims to have written a new hit song and proceeds to start playing a bit of “Ring of Fire.” Then he says he really does have a hit song, and they do a bit of ‘Hey Jude’ generating a mass sing-along in the crowd. Eventually they get to ‘Favourite flavour.’ We also get ‘Much Better’ which feels as cathartic as always. They move onto new track ‘Steady We Go’ which has a good sing-along chorus. They are filming the audience to possibly use in the video for it. Thom says, “I’ve got my only fans camera here. Bigbear69. Bringing sexy fat.” The song is clearly important to Thom and he says it is about being sober for four years. He is quite emotional with the crowd singing it back to him well, “I don’t think I’m going to emotionally recover from this.”
Before ‘Letter To Myself’ Thom says he got a letter from a fan asking to sing the song on stage at Truck Festival with them. He carries on, “So of course I told them to f**k off. No I didn’t, please welcome Layla out on stage.” They are joined by a teenager in a black t-shirt to whom the words of the song also mean a lot. She does a good job of it, she is almost overwhelmed by the occasion a couple of times, but Thom and Katie guide her through it.
Keeping the audience sing-a-longs going, they throw in a bit of Andy William’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.’ Before ending the set with ‘Turn Around’ Thom says, “This has been my favourite gig of the year,” before remembering the huge stadium gig at Leigh they recently did and correcting himself to “Second favourite.” Thom makes the bold prediction that they will be “headlining the festival within five years.” With their humour and their covers the audience have been well entertained today.
We have to duck out before Turn Around has finished as we don’t want to miss the set on the Market Stage from Bleech 9:3. Another Irish band, and another on a rapid ascent. They formed two years ago and only released their first song in October last year. There is a huge sense of anticipation in the air before they are even out, walking out to the sounds of ‘Danny Boy.’ This is the most teenage-centric audience we saw all weekend, rarely did we see so many mobile phones up in the air and recording. What really surprises me is how everyone seems to know all the words to their five released tracks, belting them out as loud as they can. This is one of those bands that people go all in on. They sit in with Wunderhorse and Keo in the type of grungy alt-rock music they produce, but they don’t feel identikit in any way. ‘Underrated’ is staggeringly good. Easily one of the best tracks released this year.
They go straight from ‘Underrated’ to ‘Cannonball’ which feels equally epic. There are two unreleased tracks, ‘(figure 8)’ and ‘Tourniquet’ which are just as impressive as anything on the first EP. The middle in front of the stage has been an energetic mosh-pit from start to finish. The band don’t say a lot. They just seem to be soaking it in. A wall of impressive attitude. The half hour is up all too soon. It ends with ‘Ceiling,’ another minor-masterpiece of rock music. Wow. Wow. Wow. You could feel the electricity from start to finish. Their set at Reading Festival (also on The Ballroom stage) is likely to be one for the ages.
When Friendly Fires first emerged, they felt achingly fresh, part of that bubble of angular but groove-based bands that emerged at the start of the 2010s. They haven’t been very prolific since then, new music in 2019 was the only real release since their second album in 2011. Luckily, their big hits are still absolute monsters, and a huge part of the audience is singing along to ‘Jump In The Pool’ and ‘Paris.’
We catch a little bit of Saint Clair and The Vaccines, both sounding decent. We want a good spot for Madra Salach so we end up sitting through Silver Gore on The Nest. All that is missing is for singer Ava Gore to ride in on a unicorn here to fulfil some sort of childhood fantasy. With her silver-coloured hair and red, yellow and blue boob tube she spends the set jumping or prancing around. There is also a head on a stick at the front of the stage of a strange creature with two horns, looking like it has come in from The Never Ending Story. It was okay, but we were not really connecting with it.
Madra Salach are, you guessed it, from Ireland. The name translates as ‘Dirty Dog.’ There are a lot of good Irish folk bands. It takes a lot to stand out from the pack, but this was the most exciting one we have come across since Lankum. They lean closer to traditional folk than Lankum, but there is just such a ball of attitude underpinning it. They are a six-piece band, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums, bass and harmonium feature on every track but a range of things pop in and out including a mandolin and a tin whistle.
They start with the incredible ‘Blue and Gold.’ As with many a folk band covers are an integral part of their offering. Their second track is a cover of a Ewan MacColl song, ‘Tunnel Tigers.’ It is about the Irish workers who risked life and limb to create the tunnels that form the London Underground. Lead singer Paul Banks says that London has many statues of criminals, but not enough of the hard-working people who built it. Later on he says, “I have been at Truck Festival for four hours and I haven’t seen a single truck. Show me the lorries.” He asks the audience why it is called Truck Festival. It descends into a disagreement between those saying it is because the original stage was a flat-bed truck and those also rightly suggesting it links to a compilation CD called Ten Trucking Greats.
There is another cover, ‘In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’ by Neutral Milk Hotel. The set comes to a spectacular close with ‘The Man Who Seeks Pleasure.’ They only have one EP out so far, but great things await this band. What a three-quarters of an hour they delivered. With the length of the songs we only get seven songs in that time, but each is epic, given all the room they need to grow and create effect.
We missed the start of the set, but Ricky Wilson and Kaiser Chiefs were proving that they still absolutely have it on the Truck Stage. Reading Indie Life first saw the band in 2004, supporting the Ordinary Boys, and they were already the fully formed bundle of energy even back then. They played a number of tracks that ended up on Employment that night, and those songs still sound great twenty odd years later.
There are huge sing-along moments with songs like ‘Ruby’ and ‘I Predict A Riot.’ Ricky leaps around the stage and commands a crowd with ease. They throw in a cute cover of The Ramone’s ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ prior to finishing the set on ‘Oh My God.’
Having seen The Royston Club a few times recently we take the opportunity to take in some of Black Honey’s more old-fashioned blend of rock and roll. They wedge a full fifteen songs into their hour-long headline set on The Nest.
On the Truck Stage there is time for one last Irish band today, Northern Ireland’s Two Door Cinema Club. The set is celebrating fifteen years of their brilliant debut album Tourist History. Every track from the album features on the set.
It is a solid showing from the experienced live act. The band first played Truck seventeen years ago, before the album had even come out. They also did a headline slot in 2023.
Those mega-hits continue to sound utterly brilliant. ‘Something Good Can Work’ and ‘What You Know’ have the whole crowd dancing and singing along. A fitting end to a day utterly dominated by Irish brilliance.
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