Friday 01/08/08 Late of the Pier, Glasvegas @ Standon Calling, Hertfordshire

Standon Calling started at the turn of the millennium as a birthday barbecue for some close friends in the grounds of a sixteenth century manor house.  Eight years on and some 2,500 guests later, and that same sense of the close-to-home still remains.

Gigwise sets up camp on Friday afternoon in the tiny, lush campsite, and heads to the Shogun Tent for Ipso Facto to kick of the weekend.  This female quartet takes to the stage to concoct haunting, down-tempo gothic rock, but their gothic get up seems a touch contrived in their current environment – a pink tent filled mostly with posh kids and families.

The Brute Chorus is much more in tune with the occasion when they hit the main stage.  They’re late, but the few songs they manage to squeeze into their brief set showcase them as one of the most sincerely talented rock’n’roll revivalists of the moment.  Numbers like ‘Hercules’ and ‘Chateau’ spin such magical lyrical yarns that heads are subconsciously bobbing to their skiffle-stories before the set is out.

A little later on Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip supplement their usual dose of streetwise commentary and home-grown electro with as many visuals and props as can be accommodated.  Their set is dizzyingly polished and eclectic, encompassing favourites like ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’ and ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’.  They intersperse the usual with a cover of Sugababe’s ‘Push The Button’, which is surprisingly not half as bad as it sounds.  Sadly, ‘Letter From God To Man’, their closing track and one of Scroobius Pip’s finest lyrical achievements, is lost on the festival crowd – its dense moral poetry dissipating in the open air.

Meanwhile Glasvegas might have benefited from being relocated to the main stage.  Darlings of the popular music press, this Glaswegian four piece suffocate the crowd under the canvas in the Shogun tent with distortion-laden, melodically-elusive indie-pop.  Power chords and tirelessly crashing cymbals create grandiose blue-collar appeal, but there seems to be a lot of froth and little foundation in the yodelling Scotsman and his transparent lyrics.

Late Of The Pier don’t so much froth as fizz on the main stage at ten, clad in an assortment of shiny materials and armed with plenty of high-energy analogue-infused electro-pop.  They close the night with a set belied by huge technical problems, most notably the absence of lighting.  The young quartet soldier on but their usual neon-hued lyrically-unhinged electro-nonsense is dampened slightly by the issues, and frontman Samuel Dust is clearly annoyed.  Eventually though, their shiny suits and android affectations illuminated by a sudden surge of light, they manage to ignite a rave before the stage with ‘The Bears Are Coming’.  It’s not Late Of The Pier at their best, but technical faults aside the boys were impressively professional about their unfortunate fate.

They leave festival-goers in the hands of William Rees of Mystery Jets, who DJs in the Lordship Tent for an hour to make up for his band’s no-show.  His set, which starts with the Switch remix of Mystery Jet’s ‘Hideaway’, sparks a spontaneous and raucous dance off between a pride of lycra-clad lions and a herd of toilet paper-waving zebra.  Before long everyone in the tent is raving to an eclectic mix of pop-melodica and electro-filth, dancing on every bit of furniture imaginable, from sawn-off pool tables to worn and wobbly sofas.  There’s even a man bravely hanging from the chandelier.  It feels, in fact, just like a house party gone undeniably right, and everyone involved can only be grateful that the festival team at Standon decided to make that original birthday barbeque an annual, public event. 

Click here to see Standon Calling 2008 in pictures