Charlbury’s Riverside Festival is busier than ever this year – after a weather-enforced shift in date to late July – and it’s a pretty impressive event for what might best be described as a local festival. A couple of stages, lots of food and drink vendors and a friendly and buzzing atmosphere with all kinds of people contribute to a feeling that it’d be churlish to say anything negative about Riverside. Combine that with the very reasonable entry price (precisely zero pence) and what’s not to love?
Riverside Saturday is for the most part sunny and warm, except for the onset of ominous dark clouds towards the early evening, and this makes it a struggle to get beyond simply enjoying the scene and to try to focus on some of the live music on offer. The Graceful Slicks, for example, have the nerve to time their set with my being caught in the queue for a burger, but from a slight distance they sound solid and reliably stern, their 60s psych/Spacemen 3 mix slightly jarring with the ‘family fun’ atmosphere but nonetheless carrying a wave of lysergia that’s most pleasing. If they’re jarring, then Agness Pike are positively off the scale – their boiler-suited frontman stomping and quipping his way around a set that combines the brutality of Slayer with the cheek of Oxes (ox cheek, anyone?) and the camp theatricality of prime NWOBHM. Weird and confrontational they certainly are; the youngsters of Riverside, however, seem to take it in their stride.
The Hawkhurst are a calm betwixt storms, and their fiddle-heavy, bouyant folk music is charming and super-melodic. They’re relaxed and chatty, and something of a sedative after Agness Pike’s mayhem. They don’t quite dampen down the sheer strangeness of The Cellar Family, who are gloriously wrong: they have brilliant songs and a confident performance, but their lyrics speak of all kinds of dark sides. Mix that up with tortured, trebly guitar lines that bring to mind The Birthday Party and The Cramps, and it doesn’t seem surprising that they seem to go down best with what seem to be the more substance-altered elements of the crowd.
Like The Cellar Family, Black Hats pop up all over the place these days – an Oxfordshire festival would seem lacking without their presence – and they too aren’t in danger of becoming routine. Whilst their Jam-meets-Young-Knives sound isn’t as confrontational as The Cellar Family, they pull off a powerful show, demonstrating that at the core of music, a good song will always win out. Hot Hooves approach things in a similar fashion, albeit one that seems to pull oddly in two directions – tipping their collective hat to original punk and the buzzsaw indie-pop of the mid-to-late-1980s. They too are fearlessly confident in their songs, and provide a neatly-wrapped musical gift of a show – just enough self-deprecating humour to seem real; just enough heads-down focus to seem real.
Finally – for this reviewer at least (although I did later hear of Smilex’s supreme set later in the evening), Listing Ships nod to their nautical obsessions with a pirate flag tied to a microphone stand, but beyond that are quirk-free, focussing their attentions on a combination of instrumental bluster and post-Krautrock solidity. To paraphrase (or steal from) a greater wit, they sound like Quickspace Supersport glumly dancing about modernist architecture. Whilst not the most engaging or confident performance, what’s lacking in stage presence is made up for several times over by an increasingly direct and powerful sense of what works.