Forget Oasis, the best supersonic musical experience was to be found at the, er, Supersonic Festival in Digbeth.
Supersonic Festival, Birmingham, 30th August to 1st September, various venues around Digbeth
On the self-same weekend that thousands upon thousands of people followed the herd and shelled out exorbitant fees that they couldn’t afford and will surely regret to hear an overrated, over-the-hill Oasis shout about drinking gin and tonic and feeling supersonic to pay for a rich rock star’s second divorce, a few hundred more adventurous souls attended Birmingham's very own Supersonic Festival instead. Spread over three days at four venues, Supersonic was jam-packed full of a lot of weird and, occasionally, wonderful acts hardly anyone’s ever heard of.
Tristwch y Fenywo were described on the Festival website as a, "Welsh-language gothic rock power-coven… flickering landscapes and queer enchantment for dual-zither, bass and electronic drums”. One Leg One Eye was portrayed thus: “Ian Lynch (founding member of Lankum) explores submerged leylines of music and song, drawing on the raw aesthetics of black metal, noise and drone.” Melt-Banana are, “speed-of-light grind core”. Senyawa are, "Indonesian tribal, primitive sounds combined with industrial music,” and Womb and Water are actually two bands who were formed by Louise Bolla who’s now been dead nearly three years. The bands have reunited to perform Tank, a book of poetry she wrote, the one-off performance recorded for posterity, the audience being invited up on stage to “make noise” with the bands.”
You get the picture. None of these acts - a small but representative portion of Supersonic as a whole - was designed with any expectation or, indeed, desire to play multiple dates at Wembley Stadium.
What they are, though, is challenging, entertaining, exciting, unpredictable, spontaneous, brave, sometimes boring, sometimes brilliant, mostly baffling, often bonkers and almost certainly pretentious - all the things that count in my book.
We came to see Daisy Rickman and her raggle-taggle band who were playing twice – once as part of the Weird Walks evening happening in the rooftop bar and once in the afternoon at the O2 Institute. We took in the afternoon gig.
Rickman is a painter, video-maker, dress designer, photographer and self-taught musician with pagan leanings from Mousehole in Cornwall. In other words, an artist in the old school sense. She has a deep voice hewn from granite not unlike 60’s folk siren Bridget St. John and writes songs we now categorise as acid folk which means they can begin wistful like Nick Drake and wind up cacophonic like Can circa 1974.
The chap to (our) stage right who looks like a psychedelic Wurzel, plays banjo, often with a violin bow. The fellow stage left in dungarees looks like a refugee from Space Opera era Hawkwind and plays guitar and bass through a shambolic array of effects gadgets with palpable anxiety over whether they are going to work too well or not at all. It’s too well, as it happens, for the version of She Moves Through The Fair which emerges into recognisable shape once in a while through a haunting miasma of noise perfectly fitting for this ghostly fragment of fatal medieval premonition.
It’s a long time since I saw a band set up their own gear, spend time between songs tuning up their own instruments and then breaking it all back down at the end with no army of technicians just off stage to do all the grunt work. It somehow made the gig all that more (its)real(itals) if that makes sense.
Anyway Rickman, dressed in scarlet like she’d just strolled off the set of John Schlesinger’s Far From The Madding Crowd, did a lovely solo spot with her Signpost To The Stars, replaced the drummer behind the kit for one number, and pleased us greatly with Falling Through The Rising Sun and Bleujen An Howl, a couple of celestial chants which, when they got their deep cosmic groove on, saw the piper crack open his gates of dawn.
They’re both on her latest LP, Howl, which is this year’s best album so far IMO. Go dig it out.
