WALES GOES POP! – DAY TWO | LIVE REVIEW
The Gate Arts Centre, Cardiff, Sat 19 Apr
Saturday afternoon, and with the effects of last night’s beer banging around at the base of my skull I drag myself to the second day of Wales Goes Pop!, Cardiff’s very own celebration of all things twee. I find myself slightly disappointed that the wristband I am given on entry isn’t made of corduroy. Luckily there are plenty of trestle tables laden with cassettes and badges to confirm the DIY nature of the festival. David Gedge sits behind one with the bored resignation of a commuter who’s forgotten to bring a book, and for some reason this amuses me.
Rad Stewart sound like Pavement. There, I said it. Every single review of their records makes mention of this fact, because it’s so obviously, undeniably true. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, and Rad Stewart do a fine job of making a Pavement-shaped sound. Time passes, and sometimes that’s enough.
Time passes and then it’s time for Simon Love And The Old Romantics. A veteran of more than one campaign, Simon Love knows how to keep the audience entertained. “This one’s about a man who chopped his penis off and jumped out of a window. It’s called My Dick,” he says. It could be difficult to get away with that level of literalism, but there’s something so likeable about this music, with its sunny melodies, that he pulls it off (the level of literalism, that is).
TeenCanteen are next, and make 80s-style pop with lovely vocal harmonies. They all look far too young to make music that sounds so confident and sophisticated, and leave me feeling like an underachiever. Let’s file them under ‘ones to watch’.
‘What would an album of Dead Kennedys covers performed by Bis sound like?’ is a question I’d never thought to ask myself until I watched Cowtown perform. They play spiky rock, that’s not easy to pigeonhole. A barely legible scrawl in my notebook reads: “Badly mixed. Drums too loud.” This doesn’t seem to have affected my enjoyment of them.
The Proper Ornaments make music that manages to be fuzzy and jangly at the same time. I’m not sure how that works, but they make a fine sound that sometimes brings to mind Ride, Buffalo Springfield, or any other band that
ever had the adjective ‘West Coast’ applied to them. They end their set with a five-minute guitar freak out and they instantly go up in my estimation.
David Gedge leads The Wedding Present on to the stage and into Hot Pants with all the enthusiasm of a man clocking in on Monday morning. After a couple more numbers he starts to look like he’s enjoying himself a bit more. Alright, ‘enjoying himself’ is probably too strong a phrase, but there’s certainly a hint of pleasure somewhere in those features. Corduroy sends a contingent of middle-aged men in the audience into raptures, as does the announcement of a song from The Hit Parade. Gedge’s dogged determination to continue after all these years is admirable, and the hard-core fans in the audience reward him with a loyalty that is heart-warming.
At the end of it all audience members, grown adults all, the children having gone home, start knocking balloons back and forth, and drunkenly swaying. The whole thing takes on the air of a particularly whimsical wedding reception. There’s far worse things to be doing on a Saturday afternoon/evening.
words DAVID GRIFFITHS
