Penny is the Bayonet who draws all the attention, makes all the moves and pokes all the eyes out. The SIXTY WATT BAYONETS (25) themselves (Will, Mike and Billy) are a modestly skronky band who provide the noisy soundtrack for the confrontations and declarations perpetrated by the main woman. It's a conceptual thing - of a John Dwyer, Pink and Brown, Load Records kind of persuasion. Penny leaps and pouts and oggles, throwing flirty moves in every direction, in a non-stop flow of choreographed mayhem. She gets down from the stage and makes goo goo eyes at the men in the front row, howling lyrics as she non-stops the full width of the (very wide) stage. Audience smiles are extra broad too, and maybe a little anxious for some. This is not, in any sense, the conventional tease of a soppy-faced pretty-girl singer: it’s a challenge and a threat with (for a hetero male) an unsettling mixture of questions and messages. This woman does not offer compliance with the norm. The crowd, many sitting on the grass at a safe distance, with last night still pounding behind bulging eyeballs, are bemused and entertained and (probably) hoping that somebody (somebody else) gets a good doing over.
A great start to the day then. A day that immediately swerves away from University student conceptual rock to Leeds' popster perfectos: KINCH (26). With a full set of personalised T shirt Mums in the crowd (Matty's Mum, Pete's Mum, Chris's Mum and Rich's Mum) things couldn’t really be better. As it happens, pop pickers, it is better. The band's songs are tuneful, catchy, hook laden top of the pops fodder for much better times than we have known for years. There is nothing here at all for the chin stroking intellectual to muse on. It's freshened up bubblegum with better writing and kids of the right age playing their hearts out. And it's really very good. Song structures are confident, arrangements of three voices, keyboards, guitar bass and drums are sophisticatedly simple-sounding. And the crowd vibe is excellent.
The thing is, if you're going to do populist cheese and make the audience love it, you've got to have the skill, the talent and the sincere belief in its considerable value. KINCH do - in seaside bucket-and-spadefuls. Song after song proves the point. They are a very accomplished quartet and a credit to their Mums.
With such a good start to Sunday's programme, things could only go downhill. MILK WHITE WHITE TEETH (27), perversely, do a great big welcoming smile and haul the crowd in exactly the other direction. They are a fabulous prospect. Lined up on this occasion are eight musicians. At any one time any or all of them might be singing, and individually they seem to be playing pass the parcel with instruments - excepting, maybe, the relatively junior cornet players. The songs are great. They have optimistic generous tunes and a happily positive world view. There are ideas in abundance. Not all of them fit together in these early days but trimming, pruning, sharpening up - all these things seem well within the band's reach if and when they make the difficult decision to turn this happy beginning into something more determined and permanent. The final number has ambitious proportions - reaching beyond the capacity of the pa to present everything that is being played (I can’t hear the accordion at all - but it does look great). And, perhaps it challenges the present capacity of the band to create arrangements that make the most of the full octet. No matter, though. What we have is still head and shoulders above a lot of what I have heard so far this year. The very very good are always asked to be excellent. It's only fair.
I had already seen MIDDLEMAN's (28) bravura opening for the festival Republic Stage at midday - and here they are again, at 2.45, bouncing the same happy routine in the slot left vacant by the "traffic delayed" PLUGS. ("Plugs have been pulled, then" muttered everyone in earshot). MIDDLEMAN have all the choruses, the beats, the musicality and the cheerful rabble rousing joy that they have been pumping out since way before their first Leeds Festival appearance in 2007. There are new tunes now, in among the early favourites, but I wonder how much longer they will stay just below the level of mass public acclaim that they seemed destined for back then.
KASMS (29) are Rachel Mary Callaghan, singing and very impressive, athletic, dancing, with Gemma Fleet on bass, Scott R. Walker guitar and drumming and Rory Brattwell, guitar, drumming and more stuff (The Rory Brattwell of many talents and ex-Test Icicles). They are very dramatic and (metaphorically speaking) seem overdressed for Sunday afternoon in a field. The songs themselves are vehicles for the display of huge reverb, screamed vocals, superglamour and very arch posing. But the crowd are gawping at, rather than enjoying, the spectacle. I admit to being lost for want of anything musically special to latch on to. Professional and culturally decorative for sure, and with every cahnce of commercial succcess, but social or emotional engagement? That would be found by different audiences to the one sitting on the grass here in Leeds.
The relative modest MINNAARS (30) are a much better fit for the kind of audience that finds itself here at the lip of the splendid BBC Introducing Stage (now in its fifth year and its third name at Bramham Park). They have the local connection of having been involved with producer Tom Woodhead (the self-strangling vocalist of ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA!). Their music has a family resemblance to ¡FORWARD, RUSSIA!. It's not so strong that you would say "it sounds just like them …": in fact it doesn’t; sound like them at all, but it does share the adventurous pursuit of tangents and layers and a precise use of guitar abrasiveness to accentuate dance intentions. The overall sound is sharp and full of chirpy ambition. The Leicester lads who have come to see them seem more football than dance, but there's plenty going on to help them siphon off the testosterone excess. So all is well as a pint of foaming beer is hurled as Freudian excitement into St Onan's air. There's plenty to listen to for those of us who are more reflective in our lust for good new music. And their manifesto does include a party requirement.
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WHAT MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL (31) echo the bouncy hip hop feel of MIDDLEMAN. As they open MC Cripz stands tall wide handsome and a little subdued centre stage. Marty plays Jester with his helical piebald Mohican and extravagant stage moves. This Derby hip hop crossover band are very impressive. After a while I notice that MC Cripz is sitting down, in a wheelchair and I notice that I hadn’t noticed that beforehand and realise that it makes bugger all difference to me or to the music. As he takes more of the vocal work and Marty does the eyeball candy thing the whole package looks exactly what it is - a very punchy, entertaining stage show with quality material and a very enthusiastic following. It is raining out there beyond the canopy, but everyone's happy. A sampler repeats "Game Over" as the set ends on a high.
KUTOSIS (32) are a three piece grungy punk band with three vocalists (bass, guitar and drummer. They advertise themselves as having names like Ian, Ben and Jim - emphasising the relative anonymity and brevity of their music. Fuzzy bass, simple attack drumming and a call/response with vocals against a distorted but trebly telecaster is most of the sound. Each song starts with its repetive guitar figure and uses the same sort of structure without offering much that could be recalled later.
By the time BEAR DRIVER (33) start their set the world seems to have changed. The sun is much lower and it's almost evening, The stage lighting is outshining the sky so it feels as though the sky is darkening. The warm colours already on stage are coaxed into exotic brilliance with peacock feathers on all the microphones and extravagance in the clothing. BEAR DRIVER dress like intelligent hippies, but with style.
Their music is gulpingly elated. Cunningly simple, devastatingly subtle guitars chunter under rolling tunes. Bursts of harmony vocal are like glimpses of sunshine though the rain forest canopy. It’s the happiest kind of pleasure-inducing music: it accepts a little minor key colouring into its palette, hinting nostalgia as well as optimism. Irrationality and love and altered perceptions ("Mind Attack") are what it’s all about. And the joy for me is that BEAR DRIVER make the music itself make this possible. There is no hip artifice here, no self promotion, no audience hectoring, no pandering to the short attention span. They dress up for a party and just play their songs as if they were worth hearing, Which they jolly well are.
Sunday has certainly been antidote-plus after the mild downer of Saturday. We still had two bands to go and the world was about as good it could be. EVERYTHING EVERYTHING (34) then came on - a brilliant bonus on top of already more than we could have hoped for. The name is as much a manifesto as a band name. There's a dance tempo running through their wonderfully light songs. Guitar arpeggios, gentle keyboards, three part falsetto harmonies, jazz leanings and funky bass sections and louder harder stuff too. EVEYTHING EVERYTHING are, basically, a feast concocted of all the good bits.
LOVVERS (35) who play last exhaust my normally extensive patience after two songs. Their record company uses the phrase "a yawning deluded mess" about something or other and it applies quite well to my experience of the band. The singer has been nearly famous in a couple of other bands and does a poor show of pretending that he doesn’t care and hates the audience. He starts a little banter about accents and tries to humiliate someone who calls a response to his question, but he's too slow witted to make anything stick and makes himself look flat-footed in the process. The music is slack and tedious.
Happily we have had a great day and LOVVERS can go and annoy someone else, by busking on Yellow campsite perhaps.
And, at the end of another amazing feast of (mostly) new bands, regular presenter ALAN RAW (36) (joined this year by Iain Hodgson from Radio Sheffield, Shamir Masri of BBC North, and others) should be warmly noted and thanked. Along with his BBC Humberside producer Katy Noone he has been instrumental in starting and developing this stage to the point where it is now a significant part of the whole of the Festival Republic effort. National BBC are fully involved and (perhaps in a less happy way?) "the industry" see it as a significant marker in the development of a new artist profile. Seeing students from Leeds Metropolitan University contribuing to the production side all over the Festival (especially on this stage) and hearing outstanding new bands as diverse as PUNCH AND THE APOSTLES, BEAR DRIVER and KINCH, I can see that the future will have plenty of reasons to be cheerful. Brilliant.
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