ATP: The Nightmare Before Christmas
posted Dec 13, 01:17 PM by Rick WebbFile under: Festivals , Overseas
Travel: London, Minehead, Bristol and Taunton, UK
Bands: Sparklehorse, Glenn Branca, The Gas Giants, Portishead, Chrome Hoof, The Horrors, Fuck Buttons, GZA/Genius, The Heads, OM, Aphex Twin, A Hawk and A Handsaw, Julian Cope, Jah Shaka Soundsystem, John Cooper Clarke, Damo Suzuki, Black Mountain, Sunn O)))
Recap from All Tomorrow’s Parties: Portishead: The Nightmare Before Christmas
Photos here
Thursday: Working all day and then flying after work and then landing at 6 in the morning and not having a place to sleep until 2 PM is a little rough. We got to the hotel at around 9:30 – and it was quite the lovely hotel. Nothing to complain about there. The hotel was near Tottenham Court Road, so I knew the area a little bit. emmascully handn’t ever been to London before so I figured we should see the sites a bit. We walked up to the Natoianl Gallery in the rain, arriving and getting to be the first two people who walked in. Yay! We kllled about two hours looking at the DaVincis and Vermeers and Rembrandts and trying to remember why it was I hated Sir Joshua Reynolds so much but man Ioved Constable. I forgot about Constable. He’s awesome. Oh and they had some really awesome Turners. I’m always going back and fourth about that guy, but I think Im into him again. They didn’t have the Fantin Latour from the cover of Power, Corruption and Lies out, though. They never do. That’s sad.
We were totally running out of ideas for what to do with our time, because, a) it was raining, and b) we were exhausted having been up a whole day already. Then Emma got the brilliant idea to go on one of those hop on hop off busses, and it was perfect! We took a three hour tour around London from a double decker bus, so we got to sit and stay dry AND emma got to see the city – buckingham palace, fleet street, marble arch, the tate modern (which I thought about going into but I was just too tired to deal with those big dark rooms with those moody video screens that you just KNOW they had). Big Ben. Parliament. Etc.
Our bus trip did a full circuit and dropped us off back in Trafalgur Square in time to pop up to our Hotel and get in a nap before meeting augstone for dinner. We took the bus up to Camden Town and went to this new Cuban place in Camden Locks that was solid and lots of people were learning salsa dancing. Then we went to some bar and that was fun and quiet but then some band started playing so we moved on to the Factory Records Night. How fortuitous there was a Factory Records Night when I was in London! AWESOME! So while there we drank lots, of course, and aug told us funny Finnish jokes and then John – our future chalet mate at ATP – came in with a woman named Joy or Jill or something and we all drank more and there was dancing to New Order and Joy Division and Crawling Chaos and A Certain Ratio and on and on though no Red Turns To… We busted out of there in time to get some sleep before our big ATP day.
Friday: Get up super early and get to the Hertz rental place at Heathrow. Rent the car and can’t figure out how to get in because the door’s locked and.. oh yeah, right. The Driver’s side is on the other side. Get used to the car, figure it all out, just in time for ksta and John to arrive. We have a relatively painless escape from Hertz this time – not near as terrifying driving on the left hand side of the road this year as it was last year. Pretty quick traffic up the M-4 till we get to Bristol, where Kasia takes us on a tour of Bristol (she went to college for a year there) and we needed to buy some Groceries. I also figured it was appropriate since we were going to see Portishead and they are from Bristol. Good times grocery shopping in other countries – I love it so. I was accused of overbuying on the food, but I was hellbent on not eating too much at the Burger Kind or the terrible Chip Shop this year. PLUS champagne is so cheap in England! Then on to Minehead, and the scary 29 mile drive from Taunton to Minehead that nearly killed us last year and was so scary wasn’t nearly as bad this year. Got to Minehead relatively on time, and checked in amazingly quickly and it turns out our chalet was SUPER close to the venue this year – building A, actually. That was cool because it meant that I didn’t have to wear a coat all the time. We loaded our stuff into the Chalet and parked the car and headed out all quickstyle because Emma and I wanted to see Sparkelhorse.
And here’s where things get interesting. it turns out that since I was at an ATP a year ago they have reworked the configuration completely. They used to have three small venues, and they were all sort of clublike rooms, the largest being maybe the size of avalon. Now, they have carved out a giant venue underneath the main tent of Butlin’s, that would easily hold 5,000 people. On the flipside they have invited fewer people to the event. I suppose this is necessary: when we were there, there were tons of bands that people wanted to see that they couldn’t see because of capacity issues: and they compensated by having all the bands play second shows, but that’s not always viable. Still, it sort of threw me off, and provided a strange opening to the festival because Sparklehorse were playing on this main stage and it was BOOMY and ECHOY and loud. Also, Sparklehorse was just Mark by himself this time, and I don’t like him when he doesn’t have the whole band. Well, I just don’t like it when he plays to backing tracks. His songs are so good, but it’s distracting.
So, after that we explored and showed Emma and Kasia and John around, then we moved on to the main room to catch Glenn Branca perform New Works for Guitars. He had ten guitarists on stage – basically all the guitarists at the festival: Thurston Moore, Ben Power from Fuck Bettons, John Parish, Adrien Utley from Portishead, etc etc. I was skeptical at first but the piece evolved hypnotically and compellingly and by the end I was sold. Good times.
Then we popped out into the main room to see The Horrors who sounded pretty awesome and terrifying from the back, but then you see pictures of the and you want to spank them.
Portishead were playing two shows on the smaller, center stage. You got a bracelet that was either Silver or Black, allowing you access to one of the shows. We got black bracelets, so we had to see Portishead friday, which was strangely exciting and disorienting, but also kind of awesome. So we got in line right away, and got a really amazing spot for them. Before they went on, though, there was a fifteen minute set by a group called The Gas Giants that seems to be the band of someone from some other band (man I should really get my program out now) and they played sountracks and jazz for 15 mins or so but weren’t as bad as that sounds.
Then came Portishead.
Save for one brief charity half gig, Portishead haven’t played in ten years. You wouldn’t know it. I remember fairly vividly Portishead on the other two tours. The first album was a great tour but still a little rough, but by the time the second one came along, they had nailed it. This tour was pretty much a repeat of that one, sans strings, and with four new songs. They opened with two new ones, both seemed a bit darker and a bit more tense but generally the same. Then they played some hits, they had one very electronica-inspired new one in the middle and a very Portishead-esque new one at the end. But man, they played pretty much everything: “only you,” “cowboys,” “sour times (nobody loves me),” “glory box,” a truly creepy, sexy, weird, totally different version of “Wandering Star” that was pretty much acoustic, “Over,’ “only you” and more. They didn’t play “mourning air” which was said, but.. wow. Solid. They had the DJ doing the live scratching and he nailed it all the way though, which is always awesome.
We were all quite happy afterwards, and basically could have stopped seeing bands at that point. We did however check out some Chrome Hoof, after an extended bout of in-chalet drinking, and they were good – had great outfits, and a basson on the plus side but a bad diva chick singer on the minus side. A lot of energy though. Then Fuck Buttons who won the award for wall of noise onslaught this year – and given the lineup that was no slouch.
Mainly, though we kept looking for good dancing. The first night was pretty rough – it’s not a fully attended event yet on friday and SIlver Apples, who I skipped because I’ve seen them enough – ran late so we went to the pub, which was fun playing bad 80’s hip hop and it was awesome how emma didn’t know most of it and I could feel smart about hip hop. And the Crazy Horse – a bar – was now the main dance room and it was playing soul. Ew. Oh well. We wandered from venue to venue listening to the different dance music (an electronica club opened up a little later), but eventually got bored, sat in Crazy Horse for a bit drinking beer, and made it to the end of the night.
Saturday – After two days of no sleep, I woke up INSANELY late. Everyone else was up hours before me, but I woke up at – get this – 3:47 PM. Yep. Still, though, I stuck to my festival guns and I made some potatoes and eggs like I do at festivals, and got a nice breakfast in me before rocking. First up was A Hawk and a Hacksaw – mainly because I got the stages mixed up, and was trying to see The GZA. I coudln’t figure out if this was some super high concept thing, or if I was in the wrong place until, thankfully, emma figured it out for me. A Hawk and a Hacksaw were cool in their own right, though, with a dude (who looked strangely like Daniel Handler) playing a hammered dulcimer (I think) and an elusive marching band that seemed to emanate from nowhere and wandered through the crowd. I was into him, though it was no GZA, and I would check him again.
Next was The GZA and Genius doing the album Liquid Swords in its entirety, as part of the ATP “Don’t Look Back” series, which I have waxed excited about before. It was pretty solid and fun and hilarious and it’s funny to see 5,000 white british dudes wave the Wu Tang sign in the air while the GZA goes “What’s up MINEHEAD ENGLAND!! HOOOOOOOOOO-OHHHH!” Good times. Scary album. Badass.
Then we went and sat at the Bar in the main area and met up with sadotter and Marcie for a while and caught up, then they drifted off and Kasia and John came by and a friend of Kasia’s named Kay, and we all went to see the awesome Julian Cope.
Julian Cope. hoo boy. Man, that guy is nuts, but in the most awesome way. I’ve been a longtime fan, of course, thanks to Mr. Aug Stone, who leant me Head On and the second autobiography a good ten years ago now. Wow, that is a long time. He’s sort of a personal hero of ours, despite a lot of bad music and a rather strained physical appearance. So it was super exciting to see him live. I had no idea what to expect. Would it be folk? Kraut Rock? Ancient Druidic chants? Japanese noise?
No, it would be metal. Metal like “I wear a leather policeman hat” metal. Metal like his band looked straight outta a Judas Priest cover band. Metal like they had a drummer, a second “bass drummer’ and a third “mega bass drummer” along with, later, a dude dressed as a ninja who did nothing but hold up a second bass drum for the drummer to bang on. Not that he didn’t already HAVE a bass drum.
He played everything sounding like metal, but in there, he did play like 3 songs off of Peggy Suicide, and, even crazier, he played two songs from his old band, The Teardrop Explodes – he played, in fact, a screaming metal version of “Read it in Books,” and an almost normal, like-the-original version of “Sleeping Gas” that then descended into a sort of “ooben eeben glotten globen” type of goblins doing druidi stuff that was pretty wonderfully hilarious. They obviously had more material than time, but in the end he opted to use his last five minutes for a speech rather than a song, which was pretty glorious, and I don’t remember it all, but ended something like
so we have to go, as we are wont to do, but we are not leaving you. We will be over there. Come join us, and partake in our pile of blow on the girl, and if not, well, go back to your chalets, tonight, gentlemen, and make love to your ladies, and when you do, think of me, mister julian cope.
He was really pretty wonderful.
Then came The Heads. We lost Kasia and John around this point but picked up Ben and Marcie and watched them, and Ben commented about how there’s always one band like this – awesome droning, repettive, thumping rock. Be it Awesome Color or Endless Boogie, or, this year, the Heads.
Then Om who I actually liked a whole lot but think I may have been the only one of us who did. It was a bassist and a drummer and they’d play comically quiet, slow, doomy death metal that would occasionally erupt into the damndest wall of noise you’d ever heard. Out of the blue. It was quite confrontational and quite… surprising.
Then, finally the Aphex Twin who a) played the first normal set I’ve ever seen and b) has shaved, and c) played normal downbeat housemusic. It was… we danced a lot. It was fun. it was an awesome rave as raves go, but.. it wasn’t like life changing like everything the Aphex Twin should do. Man, he doesn’t even look like himself anymore! I mean, he does, but he’s not sitting there with long scary hair and a shit eating grin.
So, eventually we mozeyed off and went to the pubs and danced and had fun and ate some chips and ran into Donnie and Katie (mine and Ben’s original ATP chalet mates, and his chalet mates this year, and also making appearances in this LJ in Touch and Go 25). We ran into a completely crazy chick from Canada and who worked in a strip bar (but only as a waitress) who Donnie couldn’t stop fucking with. Upon finally escaping I remarked to emma “I wonder where her boyfriend was” (she had mentioned she was @ the festival with her boyfriend,) to which emma replied “avoiding her.”
And then we danced some more. Arcade fire, I don’t remember what else. We had hit the pub earlier – me and emma and ben and marcie – and Declan was DJing and it was awesome and we danced to Arcade Fire and Shellac and some other stuff, but it wasn’t critical mass of dancing awesomeness yet. It was still good, though. And the end of the night DJing on Saturday was decent, though most people were still in Aphex Twin. Still, for the second day, we were out till the bitter end. That was good. I was proud.
Sunday Man, sunday was SHORT. Lots of “activities,” not so many bands. The bands I came to the festival to see were Portishead, Cope and Aphex Twin, so my work was done. Normally, at an ATP I would run around and see a little of each and every band, but i was really enjoying the company of my chalet mates and we had a) a lazy breakfast, and b) a long lunch/dinner/drinks and c) an hour of pool playing throughout the day, so bands were few and far between. We saw a good chunk of Damo Suzuki who had like 11 members in his band, including Adrian Utley from Portishead, and that was decent, though nothing mindblowing. We tried to go see the Jah Shaka Soundsystem, but it was super Reggae (why is it I still haven’t learned that everything with the word soundsystem in the name, save the one obvious exception, is reggae?)
The one good hit of the day was the legendary John Cooper Clarke, who was fantastic. He’s a legendary mancunian comic, who I learned about from my Factory obsession – he’s in a Joy Division Video. He can also be seen in Control, if you’ve seen it, depicting himself opening up for a Joy Division gig, even though he’s 30 years older. Still, though, he was solid and hilarious and both his poetry and his jokes delivered. We all liked him.
Saw a little bit of Black Mountain, and I liked it in its metaly wall of noise kind of way.
But the wierdest thing of the day was SunO))) who were sort of like the usual Sunn O))) show, except a) they had a 20 minute instrumental pre-recorded intro, b) the fire alarms were going off the whole time, and c) they had a man dressed as an ent doing druidic chants the whole time with a green light shining dramatically on him and enshrouded in fog. If you’ve never seen SunO))) before this was probably totally weird but if you had seen them before, it’s even more confusing. WTF. John actually in the end developed a theory that the Ent was Julian Cope, based both on the words we could hear (Loki, and that sort of thing) and because one of the members of SunO))) was in Julian Cope’s band. I would buy it. There were some other people up there, Donnie and I assumed from Boris, who played right before them and with whom they have a collaboration album and a show the next night in London.
Other than that, Declan really delivered on the DJing sunday – man, it was awesome. Wedding Present, Shellac, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Big Black, Arcade Fire and more. He’s the greatest DJ in the world. Except when he plays Raggae and Dancehall. Still, though, wow.
I fucked up again on 24 hour time, so our flight wasnt at 4 something like I thought but at 2 something so we had to get up early sunday, so as much as we wanted to stay to the bitter end, we all retired early. It hurt, too, because the dancing wasn’t up to snuff this year, and I could tell, around 1 when I turned in, that it was really starting to kick in with Declan and Justin Spear on the decks. BOOOO.
next year maybe I’ll do that early checkin late checkout thing.
And next year I have to remember to go to the gas station before I return the rental. OW.
Monday Up early, make breakfast, clean, out of Minehead by 8:15 yes! Get to Heathrow, despite a Loooong detour through Taunton, by 11:45 and we say our farewells to our Chalet mates and check in for our flight and do the departure lounge thing and look for good books from borders in airport editions and then we take off! And the flight was good EXCEPT I HAD NO LAPTOP POWER. That sucked. A lot. It’s basically what i paid for premium economy for. It was my own damn fault that I had run one of my batteries down and checked another, so I was down to one battery. I plowed through 400 emails in the 2 hours of battery I had, but I didn’t get to write this, or do the photos, so I am half assing it now. Sad.
Still, though, another ATP and I am still a fan. It’s a great time. Of the two upcoming ones, the Explosions in the Sky one is looking pretty good, but I think it’s probably too soon after SXSW and Coachella, and it really is quite an expensive operation to get to Minehead. I love it, though, and I’m thankful for my three chalet mates, all of whom were ATP virgins and all turned out to be excellent company (so much so that we kept missing bands!) and seemed to enjoy themselves! yay!
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