0.31.0 - We Are The Youth Gone Wild (Week 31 Wrapup)
This Week: Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud, No, It's The Children Who Are Wrong, Tramlines Festival Roundup and a few odds and ends
Behind us, a young woman is complaining in quite heated terms about her boss, who is apparently upset at the amount of time she spends going to the toilet while she should be working. "They said I was in there for twenty minutes every hour, and it's not more than 10 or 15. My boss said I should make better use of my breaks and not go to the loo 5 minutes after I come back from lunch, but sometimes you just need it, you know?".
I know. I have some sympathy, but if you need to visit the toilet for 20% of every hour you either need to visit a doctor, or you are skiving.
"My boss even told me I need to go to the doctor if it's affecting me like this, what's it got to do with her?"
I'm not her boss, for the record, I don't know who she is and couldn't pick her out of a lineup, but everyone within 50 meters in every direction is now keenly aware of her ongoing work issues. Sounds like her boss is trying to do the right thing at least.
"Fuck her.", the football shirt clad, number 1 buzzcut, bucket-hat-which-literally-says-twat-on-it wearing gent she is queuing with opines. "You don't owe her anything. You should just look after yourself; that's all anyone in the world is doing, and if anyone else tries to tell you different, they are lying."
I shouldn't be subjected to dark thoughts about the world while I am standing in a park in the sunshine queuing up* to buy overpriced pizza on a Saturday afternoon, but I felt my heart sink and my teeth grind as I listened to this twenty-two year old philosopher outline the bleakest, most antisocial worldview I could imagine. So sure was he that the only path through mediocre performance as a grinding cog in a machine is to be enough of an asshole to everyone that they'll find a way to cheat the system and join the megarich over the broken bodies of everyone else they stepped on to get there. I've spent a week thinking about that young man, and what his opinion says about how we, collectively, are failing as a society. Catherine hopes that his opinions are a minority, that a single loud asshole can't be classed as the voice of a generation, but I'm online enough to know that his opinion is not unique amongst disaffected young men who are facing into the bleak possibility of a lifetime of uncertain career prospects, rising prices, and climate catastrophe.
Fourty-eight hours later, we're standing in front of the main stage at the Tramlines festival, watching The Last Dinner Party perform. Like several acts we've seen this weekend, they speak openly in support of freedom for Palestine and the end to the ongoing genocide. On the big screens, they flash up QR codes, direct links for donations to Doctors Without Borders. In front of us, a group of lads, in their shell suits and football shirts and buzz cuts start grabbing at each others phones. "Oh, yeah, you want to do this donation shit don't you" they cry as they point each others camera's mockingly at the screen. "I'm sure everyone just has their phones out and they're sending loads of cash there." At least they are looking at the stage, as the crowd of high schoolers directly to their left continue to stand with their back to the stage, waving at their other friends in the crowd while taking duck-faced selfies to put on Instagram. "There's a song from this band on that FIFA soundtrack" one of them says, "once they've played that we can go get some food".
My vision starts to narrow in at the edges with black. I have an overwhelming need to be somewhere else; Catherine can sense I'm spiralling and so we move back, out to one side, somewhere with six feet of clear space around us as I collect myself and we watch the end of the performance.
I've spent a week trying to process my thoughts about that weekend enough to coherently write about them, and while doing that, I made a point to listen to an album by nearly** all the bands we saw that weekend so I had an excuse to talk about my experience as a whole.
Long time readers will know I have an enduring love of music festivals from my younger days, and this more recent trend of in-city festivals certainly takes away the muddy camping and sleepless nights I associated with my trips to Glastonbury and Leeds/Reading and the V Festivals***. Also, since Catherine is a Teacher, most of the festival season takes place a couple of weeks before the school holidays, which pretty much prevents us from visiting specific, long-standing festivals. Last year, for the first time in the 17 years we have been together, Catherine and I went to a music festival together, the All Points East Festival in Victoria Park in London, to see Sleater-Kinney, The Decemberists and Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service. After that experience, which had gone so well and where we had enjoyed ourselves so thoroughly, we decided that we should make a point of going to the in-city festival hosted in our own town of Sheffield.
This wasn't actually our first time at Tramlines, though it was the first time we had paid for the privilege. Back in 2011, before Catherine was a Teacher, she worked for the local government in Sheffield promoting public transport, and one of the ways they did that was with a small booth at the fledgling Tramlines festival, at the time a free-to-enter event taking place on a small patch of parkland you could comfortably walk the entire length of in 5 minutes. It had a single stage, a few booths at the back, and the rest of the festival, much like the Edinburgh Fridge, was distributed out across various music venues in the city. When it was Tramlines weekend, you could be sure there would be interesting bands on at pubs and clubs everywhere, and often the best way to experience it was not to visit the main festival site, but to travel across the city to whichever venue was hosting the bands you were most interested in. For reasons passing understanding, one Saturday afternoon Catherine was tasked with manning this local government information kiosk, telling people how great the city transit services was, and I arrived in the early evening to collect her as her shift finished, and just in time to see headline act Olly Murs take the stage. It was a different time, 2011.
Of course, nothing gold can stay, and as Tramlines grew more successful, it became more commercial; morphing into the rough approximation of a 'normal' (meaning: paid through the nose for) festival experience which it is now. Gone are the free tickets; instead, we paid £160 each for the pleasure of driving to the other end of town and standing in a park which, for the other 51 weekends per year, there is no charge for entry. Taking over the fairly spacious Hillborough Park, the modern Tramlines has multiple stages (well, one main stage and a few tents) with acts playing from midday to 11pm across Friday to Sunday. As you an see from the flyer for this years event, they don't struggle to get known acts to perform, though with the exception of Pulp (who are local to Sheffield and enjoy playing in their home town), there's a certain B+ quality to the acts who will make the trip; up and comers being told by their label this is good for exposure, acts from the past still keeping it real 20 years after their own big break, and local bands knocking on the door of some kind of mainstream success but not quite established enough that they can turn down a payday for a main stage festival appearance.
When we purchased our tickets, we did so on the strength of three advertised acts; Pulp, CMAT, and The Last Dinner Party, all of whom we had seen in the last 18 months, but all of whom put on a great show. We'd enjoyed wandering around All Points East the prior year listening to bands we'd not heard of before, and I convinced myself (and Catherine) that this would be a similar experience; I've rarely been to a festival and not emerged enthusiastically singing the praises of some band I'd not heard of before that weekend, and I was hopeful that would be the case this time too.
Oh, we can finally talk about some music now.
Friday
Catherine and I were both working on the Friday so we didn't make our way to the festival site until the late afternoon, then spent our time wandering around trying to figure out where everything was. We saw about half a song of John Grant's set before sitting on some haybales near the smallest stage, the one the size of a small caravan, where the young, hyperlocal bands get to play. So, our first band we saw was local indie-rock-ska-core band Magnolia, who were extremely fun to watch and despite calling themselves "Experimental Post-Rock" on their website, they struck me as the kind of noise you might get if the tour buses for The Polyphonic Spree and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones were caught in a head on collision****.
In my late teens and early twenties, it was my friend Mark (part of our very large social circle of nerds) who switched me on to Spiritualised (and Guided by Voices) and I have an incredible nostalgic soft spot for really just Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space and nothing else from their canon. I always considered them as a kind of Stone-Roses-A-Like, and I was a fan of their self-titled album, so Spiritualized were an easy sell for me. However, their downtempo and introspective style was a weird choice for a main stage act on a Friday where the audience, already half-cut and ready to blow off steam after work, could not have cared less about clever guitar arrangements and introspective, low-key lyrics. The audience was restless and the band did not seem to be having a nice time; while I love live music, some things just work better in the studio than in front of half drunk Sheffielders who are just there to see the act which follows you.
Fortunately the spectacular Pulp were next to arrive to close the first day of the show, and there's not really a band who are more fundamentally different in tone and audience attitude than Spiritualized were. As beloved sons and daughters of the Steel City, a band who just quietly succeeded, weaving their own path across the no-mans land of the great Britpop Wars of the 90's, the audience would have listened to Jarvis and crew sing Baby Shark for two hours and given them a standing ovation*****. In a way that was fortunate, as unlike their This Is What We Do For An Encore tour we saw at Sheffield Arena last year which was a career retrospective of greatest hits, this show was far more about giving live airings to songs from their 2025 album More, which I've put off listening to in full since it came out (while sneakily listening to sections of it since its release in May) just so I could write about it here as part of this. If you've not had the pleasure of seeing Pulp perform live, the best descriptor I can think of for them is compelling. Jarvis Cocker commands attention, still part James Dean, part Richard E Grant from Withnail & I, still cavorting around the stage despite being over sixty years old. There are bands for whom the tour is the obligation, the way to make money, sell merch, get out there, raise your profile. For Pulp, its the thing they do - the studio album is the programme, the order of service, what you listen to when you can be there, seeing it in person. Lots of the audience, I suspect, would have preferred older stuff, more familiar stuff, but there were no complaints to be heard - the new album carries with it the biting wit and sardonic observations you'd expect from the band which made a song about rich kids being excited to slum it with the common people into an international indie anthem.
And that was Friday.
By the time Saturday had rolled around, we'd already decided that just hanging around on the festival site was not suiting us particularly; one of the realities of this being an in-city festival in a relatively safe environment is that it had also become the Fischer Price My First Festival Playset for a significant number of the teenage cohort of Sheffield and its surrounding towns and villages. This meant, as well as generally being annoyed at the fact that young people exist, gangs of the pupils from Catherine's school were roaming the fields, sharing a single vape and two illicit cans of Cider and feeling pleased with themselves for doing so, which wasn't making either of us very comfortable. Instead, we looked at the performance schedule and picked out a tight 2 hour window where we could see a couple of bands and get out before the crowd got too overwhelming.
Jake Bugg was a name I'd let float out of my memory until Catherine suggested we go see him at the festival since he was on before Franz Ferdinand and otherwise we would only be seeing on act on the Saturday. It seems like every so often someone realises that no-one is really making traditional blues rock at that moment, and so someone steps in to fill the void and in the 2010s, Jake Bugg was at the front of the queue. That might sound denigrating, but it's not intended to be - I think blues rock is a fantastic genre which needs representation, and if my theory about the first band in a genre you love defining that genre for you personally, there are doubtless any number of young people who associate that style of music with Jake Bugg (the tediously self-titled debut album as well as the person). He put on a solid show, and the crowd were excited to sing along to Lightning Bolt and Two Fingers but not much else. I've never troubled myself to listen to this album before this week, but it's completely competent and I spent much of my time listening to it thinking "me and the other very amateur musicians I know, we could play stuff like this".
We did pop to one of the tents to see a couple of songs by The Rosadocs, but let me tell you, when they started their set by encouraging the crowd to chant "we're the Rosadocs army" to the tune of Seven Nation Army like we were tanked up hooligans on the terraces at any of the local football clubs you cared to name, my interest dropped like a stone. There's obviously a strong crossover between football fans and music fans in certain genres, and I appreciate that, because it gives me a strong indication of what bands I can choose to not engage with, secure in the knowledge I am not missing anything. I am sure they are fine, but if your bands culture is a celebration of laddish 'lets get pissed and have a fight' behaviour, it's just not for me.
Franz Ferdinand (the tediously self titled record, not the band) was a cornerstone piece of my post-grunge move to other modern music once the 90's passed into the rear view. I saw them at the very beginning of their rise to success, playing a smaller stage at Reading/Leeds 2004, the last summer music festival I went to and the only one I ever went to on my own (by then my friends had moved on from spending significant portions of their disposable income getting drunk in a field while bands were on). Back in 2004, I remember coming away from their performance thinking "This is a band who embody what a live performance should be, how to bring an audience completely along with them." Twenty years later, nothing has changed. Alex Kapranos is still an electric presence at the front of the stage while the band around him feed into the controlled chaos. Like Jake Bugg, I think the crowd were mostly there for the hits and nothing else, but I've spent the last few days listening to the tracks off their new album which they sprinkled into the set alongside Dark of the Matinee and Take Me Out and Do Your Want To and This Fire and I can't dislodge them from my head. Hooked and Night or Day are both excellent, and I'll almost certainly end up listening to The Human Fear in its entirety for this some time soon.
With Franz Ferdinand done, we made a sharp exit, as the headliners were local band The Reytons who also fit firmly into the "bands that want their songs sung on the football terraces", so instead we left the park, got some nice food at normal prices not inside the festival site, and went home for a glass of wine.
Sunday
Sunday was always going to be our longest day, so we had a tight schedule to keep to - first up another local band The Sherlocks on the main stage. I didn't know anything about them before seeing them live, but for midday on a Sunday they put on a lively show and had an extremely loyal crowd of fans at the front of the stage lending their own voices to the performance. The Sherlocks struck me as a straight ahead modern rock band, their music reminding me a little of Inhaler, another band I enjoy, and I had a good time seeing The Sherlocks for the first time, and was excited to go back and listen to their studio output. I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that Everything Must Make Sense! is somehow their fifth studio album, which only improved my estimation of them - I respect anyone who is willing to continue to push on making music, prolifically making music, while still waiting for something to happen which means you're not the first act on the main stage on Sunday afternoon at a B tier city music festival. The album was pretty good as well, and I've put a pin in them for now to return to one of their other albums later this year.
Next up was Cliffords, an Irish band Catherine had slotted into our schedule because we had a gap before going to see CMAT, and they were the discovery of the festival to me. Part Wolf Alice, part The Cranberries (look, its hard to get away from the irish accent forcing these kind of comparisons), they write intelligent, hooky rock songs and their lead singer has an incredibly powerful and clear voice that she can belt across the entire tent and make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. I loved everything about seeing Cliffords live, and I was ecstatic to be able to have an album recommendation for everyone coming out of this show. Of course, what I had not reckoned with is modern indie bands insistence of just not releasing albums, just 4-5 track EPs which I am sure makes a lot of sense from a marketing perspective and a recording budget perspective but I can't count them for this listening project and why won't people think about how this negatively impacts me?!
Anyway, I made a Spotify playlist of both of their EPs in sequence which you can find here and thoroughly enjoyed listening to the studio versions of the songs I had heard live, and if you get a chance to go see them perform, I strongly recommend it, they knocked my socks off.
We rushed away from Cliffords to take our spot in the tent to see the mighty CMAT (which I have covered earlier), then down to the main stage to see The Last Dinner Party where I had my mini panic attack (who I have also talked about earlier this year), which left only one band left on our schedule. Sigrid is a Norwegian euro-pop-rock performer who makes music I'd kind of describe as "Modern Eurovision" (not a perjorative, I like modern Eurovision music generally). She had the tough position of competing not only with Kasabian on the main stage (more football chant music, not to my taste really) but also having a scheduled start time just as the Women's football final was going to penalties. Sensibly, she delayed her arrival on stage until after the final had wrapped up.
My understanding is that she had performed at a previous years Tramlines festival and had been the surprise hit of the festival, and its not hard to see why. She's incredibly energetic, and that energy is infectious; she makes music that makes you want to dance, then directs you to do just that; something that was easy to do because unfortunately for her, the large tent she was performing in was only perhaps one-third full. While we may have been small in number, we made up for it in enthusiasm though, including inventing a new crowd dance for her new single Jellyfish and bopping and bouncing around with her until her final number. I'd actually listened to most of How To Let Go before the show, but I was happy to come back to it after and give it my full attention. I think she's very talented and it feels like she's just a single lucky break away from serious mainstream success. This is another strong recommend from me, both the album, and if you get chance, her live show.
That was Tramlines, an experience that I found both enjoyable and despicable in equal measure. Musically I had a lot of fun, but the crowd really pinged my anxiety and made me feel out of place and slightly threatened; nothing tangible (apart from a couple of blokes who did want to start a fight with me for asking them not to cut in front of me at the queue for the bar), but it felt slightly thuggish; full of increasingly intoxicated lads who use the word Banter unironically and crowds of 15 year olds thinking about no-one but themselves. Unless someone unmissable gets announced for a future festival, I'm not sure we will be back any time soon, but I'm glad we have ticked that experience off the list at least.
So, full disclosure this article has been open on my computer for over a week now as I've been plugging away at it; I've listened to another full 10 or so albums since I started writing this and I am still massively behind in my coverage of all 1000 albums (presuming I get there) while facing into the fact I am going on holiday for 2 weeks from next Wednesday, and there is slight chaos at work as in the middle of this week we found out my boss had resigned and now there is huge uncertainty as to what that means for everyone. As such, I've had less time or inclination to do writing - for the last two evenings I've finished work with my brain already a slight soupy consistency with no additional energy available for writing.
For all these reasons, the remaining four albums I listened to for this article might get little more than a cursory write up; the only saving grace I have here is we are trying to adjust our sleep schedule to Australia time so I have been getting up earlier and earlier this week (it was about 5.30am when I picked back up writing this) so I have a few hours in the morning to write before work gives me another headache. This really is just to say that you'll have to forgive me if some of the coverage is a bit rushed, and there's a little gap before I come back in September, but the listening, that never stops.
Let's wrap up the final four albums in a jiffy shall we?
I listened to Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast as my 666th album of the year. I like Iron Maiden (well, the stuff from the 90s which I remember from my youth at least) and this album has some of the hits on, but I mainly listened to it for the gimmick.
Blond is an album I listened to because I had so many people recommend it to me that it passed my threshold for "enough people have said this is good that I have to find out for myself" and surprise, its very good, a great modern hip-hop record. This One Goes To 11 covered it in detail here, and as always I recommend listening to their excellent and interesting discussions.
I kind of wish I hadn't listened to Spike this week because I have strong feelings about it and I am going to rush through it, but it's one of my all time favourite albums where songs exist essentially as short stories, has an all time great anti-Thatcher song in Tramp The Dirt Down, and is an album my Dad bought then had very mixed feelings about because of at least one pro-Irish song during The Troubles (which my Dad had thoughts on being a member of the British Military and having known people involved in the Army side of the conflict). I think this album is a triumph. Any King's Shilling, Last Boat Leaving, and Baby Plays Around are three of the saddest songs ever committed to media and I love to sing along with them. If you don't know this album, it's a diamond.
Also we made it into August, which means its time for my obligatory listen to folklore by Taylor Swift, which begins with a song also called august. I can talk more about this album when I do Evermore in November I guess, so just know that I listened to it, and its in my top 5 Taylor albums of all time.
There, done. I might have time to get one more catchup done before I head to an airport and spend two weeks listening to Australian bands. Look forward to that.
Before I wrap up on Tramlines, I wanted to share the single crowd interaction from the weekend which gave me any hope. As The Last Dinner Party talked about the genocide in Gaza, and the laddish gang ahead of us took the piss, off to one side of their group, a single young man; floppy hair, clean cut, no more than 18 years old, spoke up. He asked the lads beside him if they knew what had happened in 1948, if they knew what the origins of the genocide were, what they would do if it was happening to them. When one of them flippantly said they'd just ignore it and go to the pub, the young man shot back "Do you think there are a lot of pubs left standing in Gaza? Or shops? Or hospitals?".
And they went quiet; Then the band started playing and someone else in the crowd told them to shut up and stop talking, but that gentleman, unafraid and willing to try and change peoples minds who clearly had no interest in having their minds changed gave me a flicker of hope that perhaps an entire generation is not lost to self interest and nihilism. I salute you, unnamed hero in the crowd, you are a braver man than I was that day.
* The true Great British passtime, standing politely in a line waiting for things.
** My favourite band we saw over the weekend was Irish indie rock band Cliffords, but like all modern bands they are too cool to actually put out an album and just have a couple of EPs available, so while I did listen to them, I can't count them for my project. Also, we did see The Rosadocs for 10 minutes but honestly I forgot that was the case and so didn't listen to their album either.
*** For the record, I think the grody camping conditions and light-to-medium round the clock intoxication and stumbling through a field at 3am while someone three tents away struggles through Wonderwall on their acoustic guitar is crucial to the festival experience and without those elements, you lose a lot of what makes festivals special.
**** But in a good way!
***** How do you give a standing ovation at a festival where all the audience are already standing? Do we all collectively sit down, and then stand back up again?
