Offset Festival (Sunday), Hainault Country Park
September 6, 2009
Credit to Offset’s bookers for getting a brilliant bill this year. Yeah it’s just outside London, yeah it’s like Hoxton spliced with its own parody but what of it? The faux-nonchalance pasted on the faces of these east-London-in-Essex hanger-ons absolutely doesn’t transfer to the artists playing the festival; everyone we see is playing like it’s their magnum opus. And that’s either a credit to the sunshine, the excitable crowd, the size and space of the festival, or the fact it’s the end of their outdoor-gigging season.
Following an impressive Saturday, Sunday’s stunning bill is led by The Horrors on the festival’s main stage. After sound problems delaying their set, they rise supreme. Spider Webb is thrown to the core of the build-up on ‘Who Can Say’, and the album comes to life. This said, they seem less energised and threatening than at their Electric Ballroom show in June. The missing magic may well be down to just how immediate Primary Colours is. The desperation on ‘New Ice Age’ feels more cinematic than startling, which is a strange turn but a welcome move as against its alternative of rake-framed despair. They get it right even if it feels studied.
The Horrors' Faris Badwan - photo by Tracy Morter
Dananananaykroyd may be equally studious, but provide the funnest set all festival. Like frantic kids on a merriment-mission, ‘Watch This!’ is a spectacular. Calum Gunn shows how it’s done by getting the audience (rather, his audience) to embrace in a ‘wall of cuddles’ (think literally), proving the band’s heart. It’s like they’ve figured out how to make people smile, filtered it, concentrated it, and put it through a microscope – for a whole set. Impossible to not beam at.
Dananananaykroyd - photo by Tracy Morter
The festival is perfectly-sized, giving us the enviable option of catching half an XX set and a bit of A Certain Ratio’s super-proficient punk-funk. The XX are the more interesting prospect, understated on stage yet emitting an addictive chemistry on the corporeal ‘Crystalised’ and sparsely warm ‘Islands’. They’re a refreshing part of 2009’s new class of artists recognised for doing something different rather than doing something done, well. Live, it comes across as silences punctuated by music rather than the other way round.
The XX - photo by Tracy Morter
The sun’s outside while spazz-pop poppers Tubelord, led by Joe Prendergast, play with time signatures. Captivating and easy to take in, their set lacks debris but induces confusion as it runs backwards and forwards through shouty post-hardcore and jerky, mathy hooky bursts. It happens within the one song on ‘Somewhere Out There Is A Dog On Fire’, even. They’re charmingly twitchy, and foreign enough to this writer to hold attention.
Tubelord - photo by Tracy Morter
Sian Alice Group, with Sian Aherne’s kitten-soft vocals, are also impressive. ‘Close To The Ground’ has plentiful space to unravel itself, and ‘Motionless’ is the showpiece for the rhythmic ambience that the band are so comfortable in.
It’s these new discoveries that make Offset such a welcome addition to festival season and another, this year, is Bo Ningen. In startling contrast to pretty much all of the line-up, their psychedelic guitar heroics are spectacular. In effect, it’s Japanese progressive-punk via guitar-in-mouth, crawling-up-the-tent-poles drama. The epic rock-out to radical Minutemen-esque riffing and reckless Boredoms-style drumming is twisted, lengthy and theatrical.
A few hours on, and Wild Beasts run a masterclass in recreating the album’s soft-focus sound in the Clash tent. The transition from studio to stage is easy, the elaborate design of their music gaining a tangible sense of warmth. From the rumblings and essential, sharp lyricism on ‘We Still Got The Taste Dancin’ On Our Tongues’ to the manic-yelping-meets-jangly-pop combo on ‘The Devil’s Crayon’, it’s astonishing just how natural their music feels. A gentle groove overwhelms ‘Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’ as much as ode to booze Britain, ‘All The King’s Men’. It’s music I want to live in; the combination of Tom Fletcher’s desperate “WATCH ME! WATCH ME!” screeches and Benny Little’s twinkly guitars are archaically human. It’s the festival set of my summer, an endlessly enticing performance I want to crawl into.
All in all, a mindblowing day of music with pretty good sound, few technical issues and reasonably-priced cider. CU next… year? Think so.
