Sweet and Lovely

Having always preferred live music with beer-sodden carpet rather than rain-soaked earth beneath my feet, I have not been much of a festival-goer. A solitary trip to Glastonbury, when it was first sponsored by CND, and a more recent outing to a tiny festival with the whole family being my only previous experiences, a sudden desire to attend this year’s Green Man festival took me by surprise. Surprise is not quite the right word to describe my family’s reaction: with an undertone of horror, they made it clear I was on my own; but having managed to recruit two friends to go along with me – one a festival veteran, the other a festival virgin – last Thursday we set off on the journey from Sussex to South Wales.

The Green Man festival has been running since 2005 at the Glanusk Estate, a privately-owned country park, set amongst the verdant hills and spectacular mountains of the Brecon Beacons. The reason I had wanted to go was not just the splendid setting but the expressed passion for the event by regular attenders and the line-up which, in recent years, has seemed to consist entirely of all the musicians I had been listening to at the time. 2015 was no exception with a whole host of artistes pretty much reflecting my record-buying over the past 12 months.

The festival proper runs from Friday to Sunday but most people start camping on Thursday so there is a small line-up on that evening. By the time I had remembered how to put up my tent, we only managed to see the final act; but it was a great start as we were able to ‘have it large’ to Leftfield, who finished their set in the Far Out tent with Phat Planet, which seemed appropriate as it was already shaping up to be a Guinness-fuelled weekend. We spent a lot of time in Far Out in the next three days – its dark interior had a certain appeal and it was a good shelter from intermittent soakings from the Spanish Plume – and saw some terrific turns from the perky Teleman, the youthful and enthusiastic Hooton Tennis Club and the cosmic and eternal Sun Ra Arkestra, whose leader Marshall Allen is 91 years of age. Watching Sun Ra it seemed amazing, not just that their sound works, but that they all managed to arrive in rural Wales (Saturn is a long way, after all). Far Out was also the setting for an amazing performance from Canadian post-punks, Viet Cong, on Friday: I was familiar with their album but completely unprepared for the intensity of their extended version of its closing track, Death, driven on by Mike Wallace’s ferocious drumming.

Seeking respite, we fled to the Green Man Pub next to the Walled Garden stage. The Walled Garden was a more relaxed and intimate area and we had already heard the tender modern folk of Rozi Plain, earlier that day, and would see her there again the next day, this time playing bass for Kate Stables’ wonderful, This Is The Kit. Saturday in Walled Garden also saw a stellar set of psych folk from Jane Weaver but we had to miss out on one of my favourite bands on the same stage later that night. A small irritation at music festivals is that, occasionally, acts you want to see clash with each other. On the Saturday night at Green Man, I was presented with a three-way clash: The Wave Pictures in Walled Garden, The Fall at Far Out and Television on the main Mountain Stage. The fact that they were playing their debut album, Marquee Moon, in full made opting for Television an obvious but, nonetheless, hard choice.

The main stage is probably in the most idyllic setting of any music festival and Television held the audience there rapt with a no-frills, faithful rendition of the songs from the album. The only concession to live performance was a shuffling of the running order to enable the set to finish with a dazzling reading of the album’s title track. I bought my copy of Marquee Moon 38 years ago but, shamefully, only really started listening to it in the last 15 years. My year-zero punk sensibility had previously dismissed it as being too proggy; now, I think it is one of the greatest albums ever made.

The Mountain Stage was an enjoyable place to be and we spent a lot of time there on Sunday: firstly, when Matthew E. White played a superb version of the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat that brought out both the afternoon sun and my dancing feet, and secondly when the festival was closed with the impressive stagecraft of two big-name performers: the charisma and humour of Father John Misty and the surprisingly polished pizazz of St. Vincent. But what made Green Man 2015 so good were the performances of two lesser-known acts that I had been aware of but had not really listened to.

On Friday afternoon, Sweet Baboo – otherwise known as Welsh singer Stephen Black and his band - charmed us with his infectious and winsome melodies. If I Died…, Let’s Go Swimming Wild, Walking In The Rain and You Got Me Timekeeping, described by Black as their seven minute prog epic, were immediately memorable. Black appeared onstage again in the Walled Garden at tea-time on Sunday with The Pictish Trail, Isle of Eigg singer Johnny Lynch, for a relaxed and funny sharing and trading of songs (pictured).

The Festival Virgin insisted on only one thing during the four days: that we see The Lovely Eggs in the Cinedrome tent on Saturday afternoon. This meant missing the spectacle of Mark E. Smith being interviewed live onstage by Mojo magazine in the Talking Shop tent but I had heard a couple of Lovely Eggs songs and was prepared to make the sacrifice; and it turned out to be a sacrifice well worth making. The pop-punk couple from Lancaster – Holly Ross on guitar and vocals and partner David Blackwell on drums – were incredible. Full of energy and wit, they created instant crowd-anthems with People Are Twats, Fuck It and I Just Want Someone To Fall In Love With (“thousands of people feel like me!”). They electrified the audience and when they finished with the hilarious Don’t Look At Me, I thought they should have been carried from the stage shoulder-high and paraded around the festival site like victors.

There were non-musical delights on offer, too: we never quite made it into the comedy or discussion tents, and we had no need for the many children’s activities, but we did eat some great food. The Festival Veteran cooked us a tent-side breakfast each morning, which was shared with our neighbours, and the rest of our culinary needs were mostly met by one of the many independent caterers – there are no multiple retailers or corporate sponsors at Green Man – The Goan Seafood Company; their fish curry and mackerel masala dhal were particular highlights. Everyone we chatted to - and we had lots of casual conversations with people of all ages about music, beer, festivals and, of course, the weather - seemed to have eaten there. Green Man really was a joy: the food, the site, the music, the people – they were all perfect. Kids, you might be coming with me next year…

Back to the Future

On holiday in Cornwall last week, my aged vehicle broke down. Happening near the end of our holiday, it was not going to be repaired in time so I spent a couple of days trying to make arrangements to get the car, two adults, three kids, two dogs and a pile of luggage back to East Sussex. Mostly, I was at the top of our holiday home desperately clinging onto a sketchy phone signal whilst I tried to coordinate a major breakdown service, a recovery firm and a local mechanic. It was not easy. It was a stressful time. At one point in the middle of all this my mobile rang and, desperate for good news but fearing it would be more bad, I barked “Yes!?” into the phone.

“Oh, hello. I’m phoning from the Jeremy Corbyn campaign team. I was wondering if we could rely on your vote in the leadership ballot?” said a polite young man.

“Yes you can!” I bellowed. “YES, YOU BLOODY WELL CAN!”

Taken aback by the blend of aggression and affirmation, I suspect he thought I was joking. I wasn’t. He had caught me at a bad time, but I was deadly serious.

Having re-joined the Labour Party at the end of April, the election defeat in May meant that I was quickly forced to consider who I would want the next leader of the party to be. I struggled to think of anyone other than Andy Burnham as a potential leader: working class roots, experience of government, still grounded; and as the candidates began to declare – some unfamiliar having risen without trace, others hamstrung by overleaping ambition – my mind did not change. That is until Burnham launched his own candidacy at a business consultancy specialising in tax avoidance, wearing a navy blue business suit and looking and sounding like all the other fortysomething showroom dummies – Cameron, Clegg, Miliband, Osborne – who have lectured us in recent years about the austerity medicine we all need to swallow: my heart sank.

However, due to the largesse of MPs who supported a widening of the debate, things started to look up: Corbyn got on the ballot at the last minute. Those MPs now probably regret their benevolence with him so far ahead in the polls, but this episode perfectly highlights the massive disconnect between the parliamentary party and its members. Of course, spin doctors, Labour grandees and faux-radical superannuated newspaper columnists are queuing up to tell us that a Corbyn-led Labour Party would be unelectable; and based on the profile of the recent voting electorate, they are right.

Elections have increasingly been dominated by older voters: the older the age group, the higher the turnout. At the last election, generations that had benefited from decent and available social housing, free further education, cheap home ownership and proper pensions elected the Tories. Manipulated into believing that the country can no longer afford these fundamentals of an equitable society, they pulled up the ladder. The reason Corbyn can win in 2020 is because he will be backed by a different electorate, one that supports those fundamentals for all. What he has done within the Labour Party – energising and attracting young people into politics – will be replicated across the country as those starting out in adult life will oppose their exclusion from education, housing and fair wages

It is not just the young who will win it for Labour. The sages warn that we have to tempt back Tory voters to win an election; this cannot be done with a left-wing manifesto, they say. But most voters do not think in terms of left or right-wing; they think in terms of policies. What Labour needs to go back to is its traditional beliefs. For a long time it has been drifting away from these (for me the New Labour nadir was not the Iraq war but super casinos; remember that idea?) and the number of people voting Labour fell at each election of the Blair premiership despite him winning three times. It is the voters who have deserted the party - not just to the Tories but to the SNP, UKIP and abstention - who will respond to Corbyn’s core Labour ideas for a future of investment not austerity; ideas which will build social housing, create manufacturing jobs, abolish tuition fees and run public services for people not profit. And I am sure that under a Jeremy Corbyn government, my car would not still be in Cornwall.

Trug Life

As August arrives, and harvesting begins in earnest on the allotment and in the veg garden, the most important tool in my shed comes into its own. The Sussex Trug, a lightweight and elegant basket made from willow and sweet chestnut, has the shape and capacity to spread the weight of the most bountiful crops. Coming from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘trog’, meaning wooden vessel, this highly effective design has been synonymous with Sussex for two hundred years.

It was in 1829 that Thomas Smith, widely thought to be the original designer, started making trugs in Herstmonceux. When he took his product to the Great Exhibition of 1851 it caught the eye of Queen Victoria; this royal endorsement brought it to the attention of the wider public, demand soared and the Sussex Trug was born.

Herstmonceux continued to be its home throughout the 19th and 20th centuries: Hormes House, a Grade II listed cottage where Smith began, still bears the royal crest and there is a small development of modern social housing in the centre of the village, called Old Trug Shop House, built on the site of a later workshop. It was here that I can remember seeing an elderly trug maker working outside as late as the 1990s.

Today, there are two trug makers in Herstmonceux: young upstart The Truggery, at Coopers Croft, has only been producing the distinctive baskets since 1899 and the successor to the original, Thomas Smith’s Trug Shop , is now at Magham Down. Young apprentices can be seen working at the roadside here, in warmer weather, producing trugs in the original way. The handle and frame of the trug is made first by shaving, steaming and bending sweet chestnut poles. Willow boards, made pliable from being soaked in rainwater, are then nailed to the frame to form the body of the basket; the feet are also made of willow.

My trug has endured 10 years of heavy and continuous work and is still going strong: it probably has another 10 year’s life in it yet. There are cheap plywood imitations available, but they lack durability and are not made in Herstmonceux, or even Sussex. If you want a garden trug for your veg harvest, it has to be a Sussex Trug.

Blasted Heath

Ashdown Forest is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, covering roughly ten square miles, on the higher ground right at the top of East Sussex. Stretching from Hartfield in the north to Maresfield in the south, from Wych Cross in the west to Crowborough in the east, it was originally an enclosed forest that was the preserve of the hunting nobility in the centuries after the Norman Conquest. Commoners were allowed to use the forest to collect vegetation for firewood and animal bedding, and to graze their livestock. Access was not open but was strictly limited via a series of gates, or hatches, that are still seen in existing place names, such as Coleman’s Hatch and Chelwood Gate.

There were constant tensions over Ashdown Forest, as landowners’ attempts to deny access were strongly resisted. This came to a head in the 17th century when the forest was divided, with just under half granted to commoners and the rest falling into private hands. To further protect the land for the people, Parliament introduced legislation in the 19th century and, at the end of the last century, East Sussex County Council obtained the freehold of the remaining common land and established the Ashdown Forest Trust to protect, in perpetuity, one of the largest open public spaces in the south east of England.

The ‘forest’ part of the area’s name is something of a misnomer, however: the areas of woodland are limited and, in the main, Ashdown Forest is not just open in terms of access. Writing in Rural Rides in 1830, the brilliantly acerbic reformer William Cobbett observed, “the forests of Sussex: those miserable tracts of heath and fern and bushes and sand, called Ashdown Forest”. Clearly not a fan, Cobbett is probably not alone in his initial reaction. There can be something of the blasted heath about the place, particularly on a day like yesterday when I was there: a fierce wind and a drop in temperature had turned July into September; but the views across the countryside were spectacular, the sense of space inspiring and kids and dogs ran free and untamed.

Ashdown Forest is probably best known today as the thinly disguised setting of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. The forest’s Five Hundred Acre Wood became the Hundred Acre Wood in Milne’s series of books and many of the landmarks in the stories – the Enchanted Place, Roo’s Sandpit, the bridge where Pooh and Christopher Robin played Poohsticks – can be easily located. Something of a Pooh tourist industry has grown up in Hartfield, the nearest village to Cotchford Farm, Milne’s home when he wrote the tales in the 1920s. Forty years later, the same house would be the scene of the death, from booze and drugs, of ex-Rolling Stone Brian Jones just one month after being booted out of the band for hedonistic excess. There is no Jones memorabilia in the local Pooh-themed gift shops.

Three-Song Wonders

When I saw the charming and disarming Wave Pictures in Bexhill last summer, they had finished recording their most recent album, at Billy Childish’s studio in Kent, only a few days earlier. Just one of the songs that lead vocalist and guitarist David Tattersall co-wrote with Childish for the album was played that night but, a year on, and with the album released earlier this year to critical acclaim, a trio of those tracks formed the centrepiece of their set at the Underground Theatre in Eastbourne last night.

Working with Childish has given the band’s songs a garage rock edge and, having played the provocative and raucous Pea Green Coat – “Everybody in the station wore black/And then there was you in your pea green coat” – requests from the crowd for The Fire Alarm are rebuffed with typically self-deprecating humour. “We can’t play those two back-to-back,” Tattersall explains, “because then you’ll realise they are the same tune - essentially, we only have about three songs.” None of which is true, but they launch into the album’s title track, instead, before completing the run of songs from Great Big Flamingo Burning Moon with The Fire Alarm, safely distanced from its ‘doppelganger’.

As well as the flamingo, other avian life is present: from 2012’s delicious Long Black Cars album, both Stay Here And Take Care Of The Chickens and Seagulls are performed; and The Wave Pictures’ recurring motif of the sea features on Blue Harbour, from Beer In The Breakers, with the wonderful lyric, “let my eyes slip away/ toward the coast around the pier/ all the things that brought me here”. Bassist Franic Rozycki’s phrasing in the song’s run-out is also a delight.

Drummer Johnny Helm demonstrates the power of his voice when takes the vocals on Atlanta, from 2013’s City Forgiveness, and again later in the set when they play an old song, Sleepy Eye, from 2005’s Hawaiian Open Mic Night album. We are offered the democratic choice of Helm singing that or Now You Are Pregnant, another old song, but the crowd opt for the former. Then there is more audience participation as we are given the tricky task of singing the chorus to Come On Daniel (“come on Daniel!”), and Daniel-time is completed with the obligatory Daniel Johnston cover, this time, I Killed The Monster.

Jointly promoted by excellent local record stores, Bexhill’s Music’s Not Dead and Eastbourne’s Pebble Records, this superlative gig is brought to a close with two numbers from City Forgiveness: the final song of the set is Lisbon, with lyrics - “It was one of those days/ the dead were digging upwards through the earth” - that perfectly demonstrate Tattersall’s gift for marrying the prosaic and the absurd; and the encore is The Woods, a frantic Velvets-style workout that crackles with intimate electricity. There is only a month to go until the Green Man Festival where I will see The Wave Pictures again. But I can barely wait.

In the Cherry Orchard

Walking through the local fruit farm recently, I was diverted away from one of my usual routes through the cherry orchard because the groves of trees had been netted-off to keep the birds away from the ripened fruit. Inside the green mesh, I could make out just enough of the spectral forms of the fruit pickers to bid them, “dzien dobry!” It struck me that a place that I enjoy walking through in the spring as the delicate pale pink cherry blossom blooms, and eating the fruits of in the summer, represents something entirely different for these hard-working migrants.

Depending on your point of view, cherry trees are seen as symbols of either a regretful change or a positive awakening and rebirth. In Chekov’s play The Cherry Orchard, the titular trees perhaps represent both: to the orchard’s owner, Madame Ranevsky, they represent memories of her idyllic childhood before she had the responsibility of managing a large estate; the radical student, Trofimov, sees in the trees the harsh and brutal lives of the workers who pick the fruit; for the rich merchant Lopakhin, the massive orchard stands for the unwieldy wealth and stagnation of the aristocracy. And it is the low-born Lopakhin who buys the estate and has the orchard cut down at the end of the play, symbolising a break with the cruelty of his peasant upbringing and the ushering in of the Bolshevik era.

Back on the fruit farm, the cherry orchard offers much-needed work for those at the lower end of the economic scale; but the trees also represent a tiring and repetitive working environment, long hours, basic and crowded living conditions and low wages. Much as I love it, it’s time to fell the orchard.

By The Sea

When Suede played the opening bars to the gorgeous By The Sea at Bexill-on-Sea's De La Warr Pavilion last night, Brett Anderson allowed himself a wry grin and told us, "we had to play this tonight". And perhaps not just because of the coastal setting, but because it is one of the best of those sumptuous Suede ballads that manage to be both uplifting and melancholy at the same time. With a repertoire of such quality, it must be a difficult task for the band to decide what to leave out of their set.

Anderson asks us for our indulgence in the first part as they run through some less obvious song choices but all with that trademark loose and dirty guitar sound, as if Mick Ronson had been in a punk band. That sound was first heard on their clutch of early records, and it is from the B sides of those singles and their most recent album, 2013's Bloodsports, that the opening numbers are drawn.

If not all of the crowd are familiar with Suede's earliest and latest material, this has no effect on the thrilling atmosphere. Anderson prowls the stage between the glam racket of Richard Oakes and Neil Codling's guitars and the rumble of silhouetted pair Mat Osman and Simon Gilbert's rhythm, whipping the air with the microphone lead and clearly having fun. The gear-change for the audience comes with Filmstar, from 1996's Coming Up, which is greeted with wild hysteria. Suede's third album was made after Bernard Butler had left the band; producing five top ten singles, and with all the other tracks sounding like hits, it was the band's biggest album. They could have played it in its entirety and garnered a similar reaction to every song. As it is, we have to settle for three more.

We also get those early singles - So Young, Metal Mickey and Animal Nitrate - which reminds me of the salvation the band brought. The early 1990s was a fairly arid time for new alternative music: the interregnum between the end of Madchester and the birth of Britpop was filled with the imported self-loathing of grunge, or even poorer domestic facsimiles. That music lacked grace, style and humour, and seemed to be only a hairsbreadth away from the male posturing of heavy metal. Then, enter Suede. Fronted by an androgynous council house back bedroom dreamer, and with a swift-wristed rock 'n' roll guitarist at his side, they dispelled the drabness of the Seattle sound with an injection of energy and urban poetry - "through the slippery city we ride/skyline swine on the circuit" - that paved the way for a British resurgence.

Having played a lengthy set, Suede return to the stage for an encore composed of a triptych of songs from arguably their greatest album, Dog Man Star: the beautifully tender, The 2 of Us - "Watching my mistakes/I listened to the band" - is followed by the sexual hollowness of The Asphalt World; and then, finally, the symphonic crescendo of Still Life sends us away, "into the night".