“I think we’d better get back up onstage, Laurie,” Isaac Holman, one half of Soft Play, admits to his bandmate, engulfed in a pit of Truck festival-goers. It speaks volumes that even this anarchic duo feel inclined to remove themselves from the fired-up frenzy at the Oxfordshire site.
Truck is by no means the largest weekend get-together on the festival circuit – with the 30,000-strong crowd able to see the Main Stage from virtually every one of its other six or so stages – but it certainly holds its ground.
“It’s basically an engine, of f***king love – and anger, by the looks of it, which is good in the right balance,” The Streets’ ringleader Mike Skinner would declare, as he closed the Sunday night. His assessment isn’t far off, even if he had joked that he’d initially thought the site would was a convention for JCBs and combine harvesters.
Yet what gives this particular festival its charm, is that for every group of rowdy thrill-seekers, there’s a family who’ve brought their kids (“mini-Truckers”, as they’re named here) to the occasion, often wheeled around in trolleys and dancing out of time to the music with oversized headphones on. It’s Reading & Leeds meets Bestival, trimmed-down to the size of All Points East.
The headliners this year, though, were anything but juvenile. With the brute force of punks IDLES opening on the Thursday, followed by Jamie T (who was on far better form than his reported set at Tramlines this weekend), Wet Leg with making their UK festival headline debut and Mike Skinner and co. to round it all off, this year’s line-up meant business.
If criticism for Glastonbury’s headliners this year was the product of its own success, the humble Truck Fest had precisely the opposite scenario and was able to outdo itself here. It was such a scene that allowed Jamie T in particular (who has well-documented struggles with anxiety) to relax and revel in his performance, his 18-track setlist reeling off old favourites ‘Sheila’ and ‘If You Got The Money’ as well as newer numbers ‘90s Cars’ and ‘The Old Style Raiders’. His huge Finsbury Park show almost a year ago exactly excelled with its grandeur, but here the finest aspect was a smaller-scale, unpretentious enjoyment.
Likewise, Isle of Wight’s greatest musical export, Wet Leg, know a thing or two about hype. Their eponymous 2022 debut album was preceded by huge viral hits (one about a particular style of sofa), whilst their subsequent chart-topping success meant so many fans flocked to see them at Glasto 2022, you could hardly move. Here, in slightly more spacious climes, singer Rhian Teasdale, in her pink-dyed hair, promoted a “brat summer”, as the band shared a cover of Charli XCX’s ‘360’.
It wasn’t the most barnstorming set, and unlike Jamie T and IDLES, it took from a catalogue only one LP deep. But it was at least worthy of the headline slot, ticking off that particular distinction for the female-led indie-rockers and paving the way for them to surely top more UK festival billings, as album number two hopefully lurks somewhere in the near future.
The Streets had precisely the opposite issue as they closed Sunday, with so many old-time classics that their one-hour-fifteen-minute setlist would never please everyone. They gave it a shot, of course, traversing from the half-jesting lockdown banger ‘Who’s Got The Bag’ to Original Pirate Material tracks ‘Turn The Page’ and ‘Has It Come To This?’, flanked by the ever-soulful vocals of Kevin Mark Trail.
But whether the crowd were weary on the final night or the local council had limited the decibels, the set sounded quiet, only really picking up when Skinner – just as he’d done at Glastonbury a month earlier – waded through the crowd on someone’s shoulders for ‘Blinded By The Lights’, and for the drum n’ bass drop of set closer ‘Take Me As I Am’.
Of course, a festival shouldn’t just be judged merely on the strength of its headliners, and there were plenty besides these crowd-pullers to justify the approximate £200 ticket price. The Kooks indulged us with the fruits of their 2006 debut album Inside In / Inside Out, with ‘Seaside’, ‘She Moves In Her Own Way’ and ‘Naive’ coinciding with the setting sun; Sophie Ellis-Bextor added ABBA covers to a setlist that shimmied its inevitable way towards ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’; and the ever-reliable Yard Act brought their Yorkshire witticisms and post-punk prowess to the festival’s Market Stage.
Elsewhere, folk and punk veteran Frank Turner (introduced as “Rave Octopus”) was revealed as the special guest, whilst the festival gave plenty of space for rising rockers, with boisterous south Londoners Fat Dog, haunting experimentalists Mary in the Junkyard and Welsh six-piece CVC (Church Village Collective) among the pick of the best.
All in all, when Soft Play’s guitar-wielding Laurie Vincent was beckoned by his bandmate to return to the stage, you could understand the practical need; but in much the same way, you could see his desire to be down amid the thick of it all, at this spirited weekend bash.
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