Truck Festival 2024: Saturday – Festival Review

Truck Festival – Saturday
Hill Farm, Steventon, Oxfordshire
27th July 2024

Truck review Part 1 can be found here
Truck review Part 3 can be found here

Day three of Truck Festival featured Wet Leg among many others. Keith Goldhanger changes his socks, slaps on the sun screen and wanders back out into the big arena with the intention of seeing as many shows that time will allow.

We’re over half way through the event and day three (Saturday) is expected to be the busiest of the four. 

Mr Motivator can do one as far as the hungover and elderly are concerned. Or so we think until we return to the main stage to witness thousands of festival attendees bending their knees, stretching their arms and putting those of us already a can down to shame.

We’re up at the crack of dawn (aka around noon) to see Ebbb again because we know this will be different. We expect this to be difficult to comprehend inside the Market Stage due to the size of the tent and experience we’ve had so far over the weekend, but previous gigs by this band, as well as the recent release of the trio’s debut EP All At Once, have been enough to get us here again to soak in some more of their multi-layered electronics, harmonic echoing vocals and frantic drum patterns. It’s a great start to the day and we expect the sound they make to not be matched over the weekend, considering the amount of guitar acts on the line-up.

Lime Garden on the Main Stage manage three songs before a decision seems to have been made to pull the plug, with another show being announced later in the evening on another stage, with an explanation that’due to popular demand’ The Pigeon Detectives are to get a slot on the Main Stage this afternoon. It can only be assumed that data from the app has warned the organisers that a huge percentage of this festival have them bookmarked as a band everyone wants to see. Any alternative reason makes us wonder where exactly the queue began for people complaining that (what became our favourite stage) The Nest would not be big enough for the Leeds band, who some of us had completely forgotten about until recently. 

While, Leicester pop princess Sofy bounces around on the main stage arranging people’s arms so they sway too and fro, over at The Market Stage another band who are certainties to be seen again on bigger stages, 86 TV’s, are providing a few magical moments that more people will soon be aware of. Consisting of the three White brothers (two of whom were in The Maccabees) and Jamie Morrison (Stereophonics), the multi vocal outfit have a current selection of tunes already loved by some and destined to be loved by many others. We come away declaring Higher Love as our favourite hands-in-the-air sing-a-long anthem of the weekend.

Follow that we hear someone say…er ok then…
Fat Dog are nowhere close to disappointing us yet and today at Truck we witness the best show some of us have seen by this band this year (and there have been many). The Nest has so far proved to be our favourite stage to attend in terms of size and sound. We witness one of the most raucous crowds of the weekend and a selection of tunes that throb away fast and loud that would work just as well if performed at one of the more dance-orientated events we sometimes find ourselves attending. This is nosebleed techno coupled with hardcore ska music (if such a thing exists) we find ourselves throwing our bodies around to; a barrage of noise that sits perfectly for those of us looking for something hard and fast to lose our minds to. Fat Dog provide one of the best live experiences available in the UK at the moment. If you’ve not been near them yet then try to get there as soon as possible.

The altered stage times on the main Truck Stage mean this is weirdly followed by Sophie Ellis-Bextor providing the most Abba of all disco parties in front of those still capable of dancing in the blistering sun, followed by Soft Play doing pretty much the opposite as they shout about punk being dead and walk into the huge crowd for another impressive show.

Somewhere during all of this mayhem The Pigeon Detectives appear on the main stage but in the short time we’re there they fail to jog our memories as to why we still need to know about them in 2024.

A band we are fully aware of in 2024 are Yard Act, and boy oh boy have they upped their game since we first began seeing them. When they first arrived on the scene, we thought they could be as big as Bogshed – then as the months rolled out we were thinking they could be as huge as Half Man Half Biscuit. Nowadays, the band, including a brass section, a couple of backing singers and some beats that we haven’t danced so frantically to since Friendly Fires hit our speakers, seem to have become as important and as popular as Pulp. Only three years on from their debut single, life continues to speed along at such a fast pace for Yard Act that we’ll probably never hear Fixer Upper, Peanuts or Dark Days played live again. Yard Act are still an impressively great band that could have still been sitting comfortably on their indie arses, but have nurtured their music at such a fast pace that it may be worth one or two other bands taking notes and realising that, if you’re good enough, you can ditch the debuts that got you recognised and replace them with even more great tunes that can elevate you to a level not seen over recent years.

Wet Leg will need to achieve this next it’s presumed. As we all know, this lot have still only released the one fabulous album and are already headlining festivals and attracting huge crowds that are all happy to dance around and sing along to everything that will predictably be played before Chaise Lounge. Hester Chambers doesn’t seem to be as involved with the vocals as much as we remember previously, but the vocals of Rhian Teasdale are sounding as strong as ever. We get a 12 bar blues riff that Rhian simply refuses to take seriously, and a cover of Charlie XCX’s 360 that at least half the people here do seem to recognise and sing along to. Unreleased track Obvious remains a reminder of how powerful Rhian’s voice can be, and they’ve stretched the show out for long enough for no one to get bored, thus justifying the headline slot that not many bands with only one album have achieved previously. Album number two is what we wait for now though.

John Kennedy is now playing his second three hour DJ set in The This Feeling tent (Ramones, Pulp, Blur, Arctic Monkeys etc…) but we’re heading for bed because it’s been another long day with still one more to follow once we manage to climb out of our slumber.

Truck review Part 1 can be found here
Truck review 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).