Haldern Pop festival 2024 live review – Chalk, Tramhaus, Deadletter

Haldern Pop Festival
Haldern, Germany
8-10th August 2024

Richard Foster catches elemental darkness and nerve jangling rock from a host of essential acts such as Chalk, YARD, Tramhaus, DEADLETTER and Angélica Garcia at the legendary Haldern Pop festival in Germany.

Life comes at you fast. The realisation that this is the reviewer’s twentieth Haldern Pop on the bounce (including 2020 and 2021) is still taking time to process.

Every year since 1983, this unpretentious German village hosts a small, fiercely independent alternative pop festival built on enthusiasm and mutual trust; the type of event that is rapidly dying out as the economics around touring, and music’s role in popular culture as a whole are slowly dismantled.

Haldern’s unique microclimate can play with your senses. Time seems to pass very quickly there, or not at all, and it is often difficult to unravel what went on; even for the sober amongst us. Three definite points can be picked out of this mnemonic muddle and held to the light; the music is normally excellent, often surprising, and sometimes transcendent. This edition was a special one, too; Haldern Pop 2024 really gave too much to write about.

Although the festival has long championed acts from the island of Ireland, there has been a recent focus on the recent explosion of new, exciting talent. Last year Gurriers brought their burning vibe to the beautiful old Spiegelzelt. This year, we caught Susan O’Neill’s lush and heartfelt show, given a real emotional hinterland by the stargaze orchestra. We enjoyed The Mary Wallopers’ barnstorming knees up that brought Friday night to a close. Both gigs managed – by dint of very different but equally engaging personalities – to fill the huge main stage with their music, and hold the attention of a festive crowd burnt by the sun and stuffed full of chips and beer.

Most exciting, though, were Dublin’s YARD and Belfast’s Chalk, who followed each other in making the Spiegelzelt a cathedral of metallic, gothic darkness on the Saturday afternoon; a direct challenge to the blazing sun ripening the corn outside. Both acts immersed themselves in what “darkness” can mean in music; how it can energise a room, how it can create structures in and of itself, how deep-lying emotional undercurrents associated with the term can be dug out and laid bare on a stage.

Driven by a gestural form of stagecraft and a real sense of grabbing the occasion, YARD and Chalk revelled in creating a sense of unease in order. These weren’t rock shows, more like a set of Anselm Kiefer canvases given two deafening soundtracks. Here, guitars worked like a palette knife; creating opaque, atonal slabs of texture and slashing through the mine seams of our senses. Thumping beats drew on the industrial clangs of the 1980s, mid-Nineties dark techno, and now and again, in the more elegiac moments, Stephen Morris’s machine pressed calls to arms created an overwhelming sense of euphoria. Despite other, obvious signposts to Ministry, Underworld, or Throbbing Gristle, there is a real feeling that both bands draw on the many concerns of right now, and if the two shows are anything to go by you should see them as soon as possible.

One thing about British bands – they can really make something out of nothing. Everything that sticks, sonically, stays. There is also a cussed insistence on spelling things out, explaining every emotion, using every last ounce of theatricality to carry the message. Yard Act proved the point by having a lot of fun on the main stage, and braving the sun’s glare with their eloquent and nerve jangling music. Fat Dog were a stew of everything and anything in the Spiegelzelt on Friday – press ups and choreography fed into a frenzied klezmer punk that also, somehow, morphed into a form of protest music. On the night, their recent single All The Same, sounded like a reboot on Wrote For Luck. See them as a sonic jumble sale where everyone comes away with a bargain to suit them.

DEADLETTER also put on a terrific show on the Saturday night in a sweltering Spiegelzelt, where the fug created by the press of bodies generated a mist that could have hidden Magwitch. Playing in a line, it seemed like they were wired up to a central nervous system that directed their movements as they spat out their acerbic, enervating sound. The music also had something in common with the artful, razor-sharp pop of The Specials; this lot are obviously not “just another British guitar band”. At one point during the opening track this reviewer thought the sax player was copping the riff from Faust’s Rainy Day Sunshine Girl. I’m glad to report they’d never thought of it.

A word, too, for Sam Akpro’s band, who somehow managed to cram themselves onto the small stage at the Haldern Pop Bar. Their sound combined a propulsive rhythm section with a wonderful bass-heavy darkness that AR Kane used to trade in. Guitar washes very reminiscent of Nick McCabe only added to a wonderful stew of muscular and soulful rock. Pregnant silences played off thumping noise and Akpro’s fabulously poppy sensibility, courtesy of some killer tunes, held the bar in thrall. They really are something.

What else? Turning our gaze away from the British and Irish isles, we can report that Faber’s show on the main stage on Thursday was a triumph of European chanson; the man mixes a world-weary pathos and vituperative snark like no other. For those who don’t speak Swiss-German or Italian, Faber can be outspoken and sometimes rude; he delights in going up to the line, peeking over it and reporting back his findings as a series of risqué communications. There is also a sense of thwarted theatricality (his latest record cover plays with a Caravaggesque sense of self, which may give you another clue). On Haldern’s main stage, the huge set up with a backing chorus and band that played expertly against Faber’s earthy growl sometimes reminded me of seeing Leonard Cohen, though darker, and unsettling in maybe a more brusque and confrontational manner.

Another exploration of the excesses and recesses of the heart was given by BC Camplight. Fresh from a triumphant outing at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Nick Drake Prom, Camplight and band put on a gloriously poppy, empathic show drawn mainly from his last – and best – album The Last Rotation of Earth. As on the album, the live set was driven by the rich textures woven from some chiming guitar parts and mellifluous keys. There was enough thump in the rhythm, too, to give a real presence and plenty of sand in the Vaseline to make the message matter; Camplight often lurching around or standing up from his seat to preach his bittersweet tales of love and loss. The glorious Kicking Up A Fuss was a beautiful moment – the woozy fug of the Spiegelzelt pierced by the song’s chiming chords and laid back, late night beat. We were hooked.

Tramhaus? In the Haldern Pop Bar? How would the walls withstand them? Tramhaus are on the cusp of greatness and equally at home playing your local toilet or soulless arena. We got a tough and tender set with many changes of tempo; they are increasingly adept at plotting out a set of moods and attitudes with their material. Also really noticeable is the sense of space that drives the music; the guitars match each other well, and the rhythm section finds the space to float above or drop into the mix to add some gristle when needed. It’s not a wall of sound, even though it sounds like it, you ken? Singer Lukas – ever charming, and switching between cod-camp and snarling menace when needed – prowled around the space in front of the stage like a Gabriel Ernest who won’t eat your children… Tracks like Beech and Make it Happen rang through the room like clarion calls and the audience dissolved into a baying hoard. Glory awaits.

The Michael Wollny Trio gave a wonderful exposition of what jazz can mean on the Saturday night; but there again – the eternal question – was it actually jazz and did it matter? Wollny’s excursions on piano sometimes sound sharp and inquisitive – itchy, long-lost cuts from Cale and Riley’s House of Anthrax; at others zen-like flights of fancy incorporating most parts of his piano – textures and counterpoint given by the rock solid drumming of Eric Schaefer and the almost mystical undercurrents created by double bassist, Tim Lefebvre. Avalanche Kaito reached similar mystic heights in Haldern Pop Bar with a beautiful set high on polyrhythms and astounding guitar effects; Kaito’s impish presence and fabulous messaging – whether through flute, vocals or invocations – felt like we were receiving vital information from another planet.

“This last song is called Paloma and it’s really cute.” Last word has to go to Angélica Garcia, who may have played the show of the festival in the Spiegelzelt on Friday. Seeing someone dressed from top to toe in black leather in thirty-odd degree heat, spending forty-five minutes belting out a mix of operatic goth pop and jazzy, Latin-American anthems that could get a ski hut going was quite something. Playing off her perma-animated drummer partner in crime, Garcia flirted, pirouetted, carried out barre movements in vertiginous high heels and belted out a stratospheric set, bursting through the ozone thanks to the sheer force of her, and her drummer’s personality. And Paloma – a song about wanting a horse – was really cute; a rhythmic pop song with a killer chorus that floated around the tent like soap bubbles.

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All words by Richard Foster, you can find his LTW author’s archive here.

All photos by Janina Tebrügge