The Complete and Utterly Inaccurate Latitude Report - Friday

It is Tuesday; I’m still tired, but now the festival comedown is hitting me hard. What better way to ease my way through it than to give you my angle on the whole Henham thing. Sorted.

First of all, a big shout going out to all the brave families who went with kids in tow - a terrible idea at first, but when you see how much fun the little darlings have just getting away from the ephemera of modern life… it’s worth the hassle. And when the kids have fun, the parents relax and you get an idyllic glimpse of what life was like before we got all heath and safetied up and became afraid to let our children out the front door unless accompanied by both adults and a security adviser.

Secondly, apologies for the sparse nature of this review - there really is so much to do and see that the best thing to do is just pick a stage and drink your way through the less favoured acts. Or stay in the comedy tent from opening ’til Guilty Pleasures rolls up so you can actually see the big name comedian you wanted to see. But thus is the nature of the eclectic festival beast - you start chasing stuff around and you’re gonna stop enjoying it. And now, back to the music.

Friday

After being woken up way too early by a way too excited young man, a stroll up to the uncut tent appears to be in order to catch Gravenhurst’s Nick Talbot perform a solo show. I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems that being signed up to techno champions Warp has actually pushed them from augmented post-folk into just plain folk. Nick’s lone-man-on-big-stage makes little effect, bereft of any real presence or memorable tunes. I suppose this must the post-folk equivalent of turning up to see some techno band only to discover it is a DJ set.

Fortunately, this anti-opener is merely a glitch and my spirits are lifted on hearing Grammatics’ debut single, ‘Shadow Committee’ rolling up over the only hill in East Anglia from the Obelisk Stage. Though Rory’s bass and Owen Brinley’s guitar have been all but exorcised from the mix in favour of Emilia Ergin’s cello and Dominic Ord’s drums, Owen’s string section vocals cuts through any kind of sound man malaise, giving ‘D.I.L.E.M.M.A.’ a portion of the umph usually provided by the guitars. It’s by no means perfect, but for such a relatively new band the performance is confident and playful. Set closer ‘A New Franchise’ shows aspirations of the epic and can only be a foretaste of good things on the horizon.

The warmth and proximity of cider make it foolish to leave, so i indulge in a little Murder By Death, uncertain of what I will get. Surprisingly it is a mix of good ole’ boy rock ‘n’ roll and country, telling tales of sex and booze. Led by the mutton-chopped Adam Turla, you could be forgiven for mistaking them for some kind of Amish Danzig, or the righteous evil Elvis. Featuring another cello (!) that at turns impersonates full brass sections, string sections and duelling banjos (maybe not those), it may not be challenging but, hey, we’re here to have fun aren’t we? Murder By Death provide.

Leaving the comfort of our patch (just behind and to the left of the sound desk), I make a psychedelic pilgrimage to the pit for ex-Beta Bandists, the Aliens. Gordon Anderson comes on sporting a rather natty Native American (read Toys-R-Us) headdress and high kicking all over the place, trying to fill a stage that fellow band personae Robin Jones and Jon Maclean are reluctant to fill. In fact, they sound positively… bored. ‘Only Waiting’ seems to meander rather than punch and it is only the double-whammy of ‘Robot Man’ and ‘Rox’ that creates any kind of spark, with Gordon channeling the spirit of early nineties baggy via late sixties psychedelia. Could have been so much better.

Beth Orton comes and goes for me - she swears a bit, sings some niceish songs and then goes. I’m getting a bit fidgety. Lucky for twitchy me, BSP take to the stage; they’re looking like unsold seventies action men and strolling about a stage decorated by tree boughs - I hear that they have a habit of doing this, and at one gig guitarist Noble was found selling conkers and twigs at a table pre-gig. Perhaps that’s why someone in the crowd is waving a bough too. In a burst of fissile energy, the set opens with ‘Atom’ - bit risky, pulling out the air raid siren in the first instance, but then this band have suddenly grown a couple of anthems, so what the hey. A couple of fans come up behind me and ask if they’ve missed ‘No Lucifer’ yet. They look visibly relieved when I answer in the negative. The set is crowd-pleasingly hit filled, but also takes time to air the Peter Green-ery ‘Great Skua,’ complete with seabird imagery. My only complaint would be that they could have done with a bit more volume - I can hear my ‘easy’s embarrassingly distinctly over the music. Butch, beefy and mellow too, BSP are the Bovril of this festival, but it is heavily spiked with dangerous narcotics. Let the good times roll!

Shame about Crystal Castles then. I find myself sitting outside a crowded tent listening to some sequenced backing track being screamed at by some antsy girl while with-it teens drink overpriced alcopops. The set is so brief that, for the first time in ages, a band actually get booed. We shuffle away, dejected…

… To Guilty Pleasures! Over three hours of agonising cheese for those who know better. The tent is packed though, and you cannot help but dance yourself silly. And you can never leave. Because you say to yourself, ‘I can’t leave on this one, it’s awful,’ only to find it gets worse and worse. The Glitterbandits camp it up on stage and my sister comes out with the greatest piece of wisdom about this festival: “The thing with Latitude is that you see all these musos really getting into the bands, biting their top lips and all that, during the day… but in the evening you see the same musos here, dancing to ‘I’m Your Man’ - and you’re one of them!”

Guilty as charged.