Ben and Jerry's Sundae Festival @ London Clapham Common

Main Stage @ Ben And Jerrys Sundae

The Ben and Jerry’s Sundae Festival on Clapham Common, London may at first glance sound like my idea of festival hell. It is as heavily branded as you can possibly get. From the moment you walk through the gates and a man on stilts shouts “Lovely gorgeous free Ben and Jerry’s ice cream here,” you know that the motive for this festival is not just about the music. This is an exercise in advertising and marketing, that hopes to turn you into a satisfied Ben and Jerry’s customer, ready to make safe decisions on auto pilot about how you consume your ice cream in the future. Yes, these days even ice cream consumption is a lifestyle choice.

Luckily, and some may say arrogantly, I am happy to accept Ben and Jerry’s attempts to persuade me that the personal experiences they offer today for just £8.75 a ticket will affect my ice cream purchasing in the future. But I can assure you they won’t. Yes, my perceptions of the company may be altered by the raft of fair trade and charity stalls that occupy the site; but boo hiss, just by changing my perception of a companies ideology will not change my consumer habits. Yes, the quality of the product may be good, with a wide range of flavours that are available to eat in copious amounts today for free. But just because of this, please don’t expect my purchasing thoughts to change. Yes, the scorching weather and emphasis on fun exemplified by an area dedicated to Mystic Moo, the future predicting, yoga demonstrating cow will make me feel happy and potentially associate Ben and Jerry’s with good times. But still I will not be adding their ice cream to my shopping list. The reason ? Because quite simply, I don’t need ice cream in my life. At best I probably buy 3 tubs of the stuff a year. And no matter how nice it is, how ethical it is and how much zany fun it may be, I am afraid I’m a fairly useless candidate for ice cream marketing men. Just say no kids. Remember, as Neil Boorman wrote “There is but one message underlying all brands; materialism.”

So for my £8.75 ticket I will say thank you very much to Ben and Jerry. Yes, Jerry himself is here today, and gets a huge cheer when he arrives on stage to introduce a band. Then I will act in an ugly, disgusting and unhealthily nauseous way by stuffing free ice cream into my face until I’m almost sick, even though I don’t need or particularly want it, shovelling down the free pancakes, stuffing the free Frusli bars in my bag to take home afterwards ( I fill a whole bag ) and enjoy some top notch live bands. Corporate branded festivals may not be my idea of heaven, but I’ll enjoy the ride whilst it lasts. And so after failing at the free Coconut Shy, whizzing down the free helter skelter, having had my photo taken with a giant fluffy chicken, stroking a sheep in the animal zoo, watching toe wrestling and laughing at banana jousting its time for the real reason I am here. Live music.

Unfortunately it seems that a fair proportion of the crowd are less bothered about the music. At times the event resembles a massive picnic orgy, with vast numbers of the crowd sitting on their £10 a piece, cow hide pattern picnic blankets supplied by those lovely folks at Ben and Jerry’s. Yes, remember that message that underlies all brands folks; regardless of emotions and ethics they present to you, they want your money.

So, the music. Fight Like Apes are a late addition to the bill. Having incessantly listened to Lend Me Your Face in the last couple of weeks, and having blogged them just a few days ago, they are an exciting proposition to behold. MayKay is a strong and forceful front woman, a goth in silver hot pants, her hair whipping violently as she pulverises her keyboard before wrestling to the ground with fellow keyboardist, the bearded Pockets. It is often Pockets that is the real star of the band, head butting MayKay and walking to the front of the stage, straight armed and just staring at the audience like an escapee from a mental hospital.

Fight Like Apes

Slow Club are a more gentle proposition. Admitting to being very nervous, the gentle acoustic alt. country folk sound that this brother and sister duo produce sounds just right for a sunny Sunday afternoon, lounging on a picnic blanket in a park.

Next up on Clapham Common, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. 22 year old Sam Duckworth has ditched the laptop and brought in a full band, which one may think would lead to a loss of originality and charm that his early solo sets brought. However his activist folk rock works well and the additional musicians bring an extra dimension to his sound, his set featuring a large number of songs from his first album. Duckworth jokes with the crowd about how good it is to get out and play again, after spending several days grouting. Phew, the rock and roll lifestyle, hey ? Here is Sam and the boys as shot by Breaking More Waves.

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly as shot by Breaking More Waves

Just a few days ago The Lemonheads played Truck Festival and by all accounts were arrogant and appalling. Luckily today a different, happier blissed out Evan Dando takes to the stage and reminds everyone why he became a sex symbol for the slacker generation back in 1992. The band play every track from It’s A Shame About Ray in the order that they are on the album except for the cover version of Mrs Robinson, and the die heard Lemonheads fans in the audience physically swoon. Those too young to remember the band first time around look on in puzzlement.

Which leaves headliners Ash to wrap up events. With just one new song on show, this is hit heavy. Girl From Mars, A Life Less Ordinary, Burn Baby Burn and Oh Yeah are thunderous rock pop played straight and all the better for the lack of rabble rousing.

So thank you Ben and Jerry. Thank you for being close to your cows through your caring dairy sustainable diary programme that makes happy cows and happy farmers. Thank you for being the first ice cream company to buy fair trade certified ingredients. Thank you for using free range eggs in your ice cream mix. Thank you for being a company that cares about global warming. And as Abba once said, thank you for the music.

I’ll probably be back next year if the tickets are cheap and the music is good.

But I’m still not buying into your techniques of persuasion.

The Mummers - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

Raissa Khan Panni of The Mummers

To call The Mummers a band is almost insulting. For The Mummers are no ordinary band. The Mummers are a huge, glorious, quirky, cinematic childlike fantasy adventure composed of cellos, flutes, french horns, violins and the enchanting saccharine voice of one Raissa Khan Panni. The observant amongst you may recognise Raissa’s voice and name from the late 90’s, when she released 3 albums as a solo artist and toured with Suede’s Brett Anderson. Now she has grouped together with Mark Horwood and Paul Sandrone, together with a vast array of classical musicians, to form the delectable Mummers.

The sound of The Mummers is a somewhere over the rainbow soundtrack to life, formed out of sessions in a ram shackle studio by sea, surrounded by pine trees, on the south coast of England. From these beginnings songs such as Wonderland have formed, the kind of lush orchestral pop that Saint Etienne always aspired too. Then there is The Secret which is perfectly left of centre, and will be met with welcoming smiles from fans of Play Dead and It’s Oh So Quiet era Bjork. The Mummers deal with swooping, bewitching orchestral pop in a way that is so beautifully executed that it is almost impossible not to fall in love.

These songs and many other lushly orchestrated compositions are likely to be found on their forthcoming mini album entitled Tales To Tell (Part One) which is released at the end of August. Gigs so far have been sparse; it can’t be easy fitting an orchestra in the back of a small van. However, if and when the band tour, make sure you grab yourself a ticket. Your ears will never forgive you otherwise.

http://www.myspace.com/themummers

Fight Like Apes - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

Fight Like Apes

Every now and then a song smashes itself so hard into your ears with an energetic spit, crackle and fire that it just demands to be noticed. Lend Me Your Face, the new single by Dublin four piece Fight Like Apes is exactly that. Its fractured blend of aggressive Karen O style screaming vocal, hammering bass and synth almost achieves what the band set out to do when they formed in 2006; to scare audiences with poppy songs played so obnoxiously that everyone leaves. Except in this case the exit doors will remain shut. This song is like a violent shag on broken glass, where the cuts are all part of the pleasure.

This is a band that are not afraid to be confrontational. They have covered McCluskys Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues, a raw and dirty song about nicotine stained crotches, aching from f*cking too much and which asks “Are you coming?” in its chorus. And I guess they don’t mean coming down the shops. This is a guilty pleasure far removed from the concept of Van Halen's Jump or Chesney Hawke's One And Only. This is like a pumped up fist f*ck against the wall of a pub, under CCTV cameras with your mum and dad watching from the other side of the street.

Fight Like Apes first release was in Ireland with an EP in 2007 on independent label Fifa Records. Entitled How Am I Supposed To Kill You If You Have All The Guns it featured the song Jake Summers which has the fantastic lyric “You’re like Kentucky Fried Chicken but without the taste,” and was picked up by Fierce Panda offshoot Cool For Cats for a UK 7 inch single release. This was followed by the David Carradine Is A Bounty Hunter Whose Robotic Arm Hates Your Crotch EP at the end of 2007.

The band, who consist of raven haired MayKay on vocals, Pockets on keyboards, Tom on bass and Adrian on drums have subsequently played SXSW this year and are recording an album with producer John Goodmason (Sleater Kinney and Los Campesinos). They are busy touring the UK right now and are playing a number of Festivals. Lend Me Your Face is released on 7 inch in the UK next week and is available on I Tunes now.

Quirky, exciting, powerful and aggressive Fight Like Apes demand your attention. If you don’t give it, I reckon they’ll come and cut your face for you.

http://www.myspace.com/fightlikeapesmusic

Camp Bestival @ Lulworth Castle

10,000 people descended on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset this weekend for the first ever Camp Bestival, the smaller 10,000 capacity sister festival to the now established Bestival. Set adjacent to an old castle with sea views, this new festival from Rob Da Bank and crew was pitching itself at a different demographic of audience than many larger festivals. It promised "A big old family campsite with what we reckon will be the best facilities of any festival.” Inspired by the halcyon days of summers past, Bestival looked to the 1950s British Holiday Camp as a starting point, and therefore campers were awoken with a bing bong chime and a cheery “Hi de hi campers” over a tannoy system each morning from the Bestival Bluecoats, who spent the weekend organising silly sports games and other such fun for adults and children alike.

All of this jollity was marred for many however by an organisational mess at the start of the event when the number of cars arriving on site far exceeded what was expected, and the car park quickly became full. Despite the fact that the festival was aimed largely at families, the number of persons per vehicle was counted at only 1.8, and with 3,500 children in attendance it seems that quite a few families brought two cars to site, one with people and one with camping kit. Luckily for my gang we were one of the first on site and experienced no such problems, but once the car park was full traffic queues built up whilst organisers tried to source more land to use as emergency car parking. The campsite also became very packed, with many people bringing massive tents and a new field had to be found as an emergency campsite. Unfortunately for those situated in this campsite it meant a very long walk to the toilet facilities, as organisers were unable to source any more at short notice, with it being a very busy weekend for festivals generally.

It was apparent on Friday that the main entertainment areas were spaciously empty as many people battle the traffic to get in. This meant that great performances by the likes of Florence And The Machine and Imperial Leisure were missed by many. Florence in particular was incredibly entertaining, bounding round the stage like a small drunk child, wrestling with her keyboard player and generally giving it her all with a massive vocal booming from such a frail body.

However, music played only a small part of Camp Bestival, with many of the family based attractions providing hours of entertainment. Fancy dress was a must on Saturday, with many dressing in the theme of Alice In Wonderland. We counted over 30 Alice’s on site, including several male versions of the apron fronted little girl.

The beautiful Kids Garden was set on perfectly manicured lawn by the castle, a colourful explosion of energy and tranquillity that delighted adults and children equally. Highlights included the magical insect circus and museum, dazzling us with juggling beetles, acrobatic flies and magical caterpillars and comedic performers such as Barnaby’s Razor Sharp Bananas who re-enacted a war using jelly babies as soldiers, Smarties as bombs and fizzed up Coke cans as nuclear warheads. Pant wettingly funny. This area also had the feel of a village fete, with maypole dancing, the women’s institute tea tent and farmers market serving up reasonably priced fare. But mixed with this there was also live music, including the fantastic Lucky Elephant whose sumptuous organ lead grooves and distinctive ’European’ vocal provided for the perfect sunny summer chill out that was one of my highlights of the festival.

But if dance lessons, cream tea and cakes, knitting (!), cockney knees ups, poetry, animal zoo, mad hatters tea parties, science lessons or medieval jousting with full on knights in chain mail weren’t your thing there was still a plethora of good music on the main stage. Chuck Berry is the 81 year old living legend who was there at the birth of rock n roll. His set at Camp Bestival may not have had the power or sex appeal that it had all those years ago, but he still managed to pull a gaggle of girls up on stage with him to writhe and cavort in worship. On Saturday the day belonged to The Flaming Lips who provided ticket tape explosions, green lasers and Wayne Coyne emerging from Lulworth Castle in a plastic balloon, rolling through the crowd in it to the main stage before launching into a turbo charged mountain peak version of Race For The Prize. Sunday saw Billy Bragg popping up on stage twice after his main set on the Saturday, first with folk super collective The Imagined Village and then for a match made in LDN heaven as a duet of New England with Kate Nash. Kate raged about how her song Skeleton Song had been used by pro anorexic groups without her consent, and that she believed that success and happiness should not be attained through body shape or size. Amongst all of this Beardyman converted many with his dumbfounding beat boxing and charm and Suzanne Vega provided a warm mellow set as the yolkish sun began to lay to rest for another day.

So after a shaky start, some glorious weather, a happy colourful and vibrant crowd and a barrage of entertainment, the first Camp Bestival was a success, that should it happen again next year and resolve its teething problems, could really be the festival that matches up to the term “Fun for all the family.”

And finally, here is a short video of Peggy Sue and the Pirates from the Festival, shot by Breaking More Waves. Notice how they got into the fancy dress spirit !