ATP vs The Fans - Minehead 8-10/5/09

All Tomorrow’s Parties again. An odd line-up all in all but that’s what you get when half the bands are chosen by the fans. Still, having Jesus Lizard, Sleep, Harvey Milk, Electric Wizard and DEVO all on the same bill makes me happy enough that they could flesh the rest of it out with utter crap and I’d still be more than up for it. It turns out they did pretty much fill the rest of it up with utter crap.

Well whatever, Beirut and Spiritualised just aren’t my bag. And Liam Finn is a bag of shite. Frankly, I’d seen a lot of acts before and didn’t want to see them ever again. There were some exceptions though, well, one exception that I can recall, and that was Nico Muhly. He was one of those acts I really had to drag my ass out of the chalet to go and see during the day. Turns out that a tired ass on a comedown is a great thing to sit on whilst listening to this guy. Sounding like some strange avant-garde ambient folk music, all the parts adrift on a calm sea, slowly washing in and out of sync, it’s genuinely soothing music and a real contrast to everything else I was into this weekend. He was my new discovery, of which there is always one (and only one) at each and every ATP.

The rest went as planned, pretty much, I saw all the bands I wanted to see and all of them were amazing, especially Sleep, who closed my weekend with one of the greatest sets I’ve seen from any band, ever. Heavy fucking riffs. David Yow was everything you’d hope for with Jesus Lizard, stage diving before he’d even spit his first acerbic line and repeat offending to the extent that he probably spent more time on the crowd than in front of it. I should give a mention to Killing Joke, not because they were any good, but because their hilarious rants about supermarkets intentionally poisoning our food really tickled me, the crazy old shitters. Other than that, my band played and got shut down, then played again, didn’t get shut down and were awarded the accolade of "best moment of ATP" by whoever wrote the review for Dazed and Confused. Oh and, perhaps - in retrospect - inspired by DEVO’s urge to devolve, I stripped down to my pants and ran into the sea.