Truck Festival 2024: Thursday & Friday – Festival Review

Truck Festival – Thursday and Friday (see also Saturday & Sunday)
Hill Farm, Steventon, Oxfordshire
25th & 26th July 2024

We had such a great time at this year’s Truck Festival that we’ll be spreading this out over three parts. Held over a hot weekend in the Oxfordshire countryside Keith Goldhanger (words) and Trev Eales (pics) fell over themselves and each other attempting to catch as much as they could over four days.

The forecast looks good, the line up looks good, we know we’ll be asked to crouch down, jump up, split the crowd, find ourselves in a mosh pit or even have the lead singer of one of our favourite bands standing on our shoulders as they sing the refrain from a song released more than a decade or two ago. There are bands we love that will be playing left right and centre for four days solid. Many have songs we expect to enjoy listening to again, some will no doubt have material on display we haven’t yet heard but will begin to fall in love with. It’ll be great hearing Salvador and Sheila by Jamie T again, in fact the list of tracks we expect to hear over the weekend is as long as any festival has provided this summer. Every band on the bill is on the rise and it’ll also be nice to attend a festival without having to endure bands that will speak to us as though we are only eight years old. 

Four days in the Oxfordshire countryside taking stock of what’s going on in 2024. A few of our favourite people already making music that has become the soundtrack of our lives, and a few more contenders to join the never-ending list of names we’ll see again and be even more enthusiastic about once we’ve digested more than just the one or two tunes we already have available to us.

It’s Thursday and after a big deep breath we go in hard and fast. The main arena is about as large as Victoria Park in the Capital, where the All Points East and Field Day festivals are held, and a little smaller than the Reading Festival arena. Outside the arena are a couple of large fields for campers. Not all stages are operational today but the main (Truck) stage and This Feeling stages are hosting enough names to ease us gently into the next three days ahead.

Sheffield’s Minds Idle serve us the most indie of indie tunes we’ll hear all weekend in the form of Harry and a Pulp cover version. Balancing Act, another new name to us, seem to have a few decent (Kings of Leon sounding) songs we feel are worth trawling out again one day and rock band Dude Safari are busy murdering Wet Legs’ first release as we enter the busy tent they are performing in. It’s a decent start.

Brighton’s Ditz are on the main stage with a huge crowd in front of them. Vocalist Cal is facing the crowd and talking to us which is a vast improvement to previous shows we’ve seen when all we saw was the back of the singer’s head. It’s a ferocious start to the evening that distracts us from the dark clouds above our heads.

Good Health Good Wealth over on the This Feeling stage are also playing in front of a big crowd and sounding sexy as hell and causing the first huge hands in the air performance of the weekend. It’s a show we’ve been wanting to see for a while now (in a field as opposed to the London shows we’ve caught previously) and we come away this time now dreaming of a 2am slot one night with a backdrop of flashing disco lights that doesn’t end until the sun comes up.

The Mysterines get better the bigger they get. Lia Metcalfe’s voice is in great shape tonight as the rain arrives for a few moments. 

There’s enough time for the sun to reappear and Glastonbury heroes Idles to arrive and give us a near identical performance to a month ago in Somerset. It’s noticeable that there seem to be whole families and groups of mates losing their shit to Idles tonight. Together, the field is one huge celebratory mass of bodies as we party hard, scream along in the right places and start to feel that the weekend ahead already looks as promising as anticipated. 

A great crowd of music lovers are here for the same reasons as we are. We want to see how brilliant all the bands are that we’re hearing at home. We want to sit around all night swapping anecdotes about the bands we know, the bands we’ve seen and the bands we’re being told should be seen. We’re witnessing the bands we love appearing on bigger stages with larger audiences than we’ve seen before, and before day one is complete it seems as though everything on our schedule for the next few days already has a circle around it.

After a pleasant and relatively quiet night’s sleep, a wander around the site is always worth experiencing to catch a few bands that we don’t know too much about at the present time. Truck Festival 2024 for some of us is providing the answer to many of our dreams at the top of the posters, therefore an 11 hour shift will require a carefully hatched plan, plenty of liquid refreshments, good footwear and the occasional visit to one of the many food outlets scattered around the arena.

A few hours of browsing the surroundings we find ourselves in are always welcome at festivals where the distance between stages is only a few minutes walk. Car Sick are singing songs about dodgy gig promoters, New Dad are playing the Cure’s Just Like Heaven, Menstrual Cramps are screaming ‘Fuck the Tories’, Problem Patterns are swapping instruments and seem to be really enjoying themselves as they shout about the injustices of 21st Century Britain or leaving a shit job, and Peace arrive as we begin to dissect the world of white boy indie guitar music in an attempt to be able to explain the differences between various bands we’ll see this weekend. 

A new name to us, Elephant Kind, are playing an ace cover of Donna Summers’ I Feel Love (a song that has to be heard at every festival at least once) and is certainly the best introduction to a band we’ve had so far this weekend. We are told that this trio are Indonesian, living in London and are keeping busy enough to catch live again before the end of the summer.

Anthony Szmierek inside The Market Stage is difficult to decipher due to it sounding as though it’s being performed from the bottom of a barrel. Despite the sound, we see enough to want to witness again under better circumstances. Holly Humberstone is being very polite to everyone on the Main Stage, but we return to The Market stage for The K’s where the pyro’s are being held aloft by a boisterous crowd who will no doubt return another year when these Northern guitar anthems will be performed from even larger stages to even larger crowds.

Watching Declan Mckenna on the main stage of any festival can be considered ‘a bit of a rest’ for those of us with aching feet and the need for a sit down, that doesn’t last the whole show thanks to Brazil and British Bombs being thrown at us at the tail end of this hugely entertaining performance. We may be tapping our toes at the expense of recently Mercury prize nominated English Teacher across the field, whose set we find on arrival is conveniently delayed enough to catch a few moments of.

The day’s events have been more than satisfactory as a build up to South London’s Jamie T who it’s easy to forget is ageing at the same pace as we are. Debut album Panic Prevention may be just under a couple of decades old now, but hearing Salvador, Sheila and If You’ve Got The Money again is as exciting and enjoyable as they were when we were all younger. The whole show is performed as it was back when he was treading the boards down our local small venues. No big light show or crowd pleasing arena cliches tonight, this is another Jamie T performance at its best. The years have been very kind to us all, and it feels as though there’s no one in this field unmoved by hearing Sticks And Stones or Zombies to round off the evening.

It’s not entirely over for day two though, as we walk towards a full-to-bursting tent where your friend and mine John Kennedy is beginning his first of two three hour DJ sets, that already include Seven Nation Army, Chelsea Dagger, Don’t look Back in Anger and Song 2 before we’ve even started looking at our watches to consider a much needed lie down for the night. By the time we’re back at our tents, we can still hear the crowd singing along to these classic anthems that are drowning out the actual tunes being spun. The man from Radio X is making this look and sound very easy, and it’s what anyone could hope for after seeing acts during the day that may one day join playlists many people will be relying on to keep us on dance floors across the country when we go out to party in the evenings.

Part 2 can be found here
Part 3 can be found here

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Words by Keith Goldhanger. Photos by Trev Eales. More writing by Keith on Louder Than War can be found at his author’s archive. You can also find Keith on Facebook and Twitter (@HIDEOUSWHEELINV).