A Latitude encore

Yes, they dye the sheep pink...

Sigh. It's a scarcely believable fifteen years since I first went to the Latitude Festival, a more plausible two since my last visit. A lot has changed in that period - it is still a multi-disciplinary festival, but music dominates more than ever - that's a shame, much as I love the music, because the variety of content is what has always made Latitude so special. It seems to get bigger every year too - when I first went, capacity was a little over 20,000; it's more than 40,000 now. And sponsorship? Barclays were all over this year's event. A necessary evil, I guess. Still, I got to go, just for the day, and since neither I nor Mrs Amusements had seen Pulp live back in the day, it was Friday we plumped for. Amusements Minor also came along for the ride. So in the manner of my festival diaries of yore, here's what we saw...

Friday:

• 
  Ed Byrne : Comedy Arena. Delays leaving home and then a queue at the gate meant we missed local band Ikarus and a recording of Radio 4's Loose Ends. So, after a quick sandwich lunch, the first act we saw proper was comedian Ed Byrne. He didn't disappoint. Sure, some of the material felt a bit safe, a bit easy - parenthood, marriage, vasectomy - but then he's 51 now, so what should we have really expected? What was evident though was just how much of a seasoned pro Ed is - his timing is impeccable, his ad libs precise, his reading of the audience spot on. This felt like a comedy masterclass at times and I would later reflect that his set was part of my Latitude Top Three.
• 
  Lime Garden : Sunrise Arena. After Ed, we schlepped across the site to what remains my various music stage, the Sunrise Arena, at the far end of the woods. Lime Garden are an all-female four-piece from Brighton who sound like they've consumed a lot of Elastica, Sleeper and Echobelly growing up. This is a good thing. Not so good were the technical issues the band had at the start of their set, to wit: "Can I get a lot more SPD in the front monitor?" I gave the bright-haired singer's slightly inaccurate vocals the benefit of the doubt on that basis, anyway. She has a stage presence though: introducing the song Popstar, she explained that it was about not wanting to work, before noting that if there were any sugar daddies in the audience, she was listening...
• 
  The New York Brass Band : Trailer Park. After a quick but much-needed cup of tea, it was a short walk through the woods to the Trailer Park to see The New York Brass Band. That's "a new brass band from up north" rather than from across the pond, by the way. What can I tell you, their big, lively sound in a very compact setting proved popular from the off. Unlike the rest of the Amusements clan who, I think, would have preferred a less densely packed audience, I would happily have listened to this for a bit longer. But then TNYBB launched into a Toploader cover (you can guess which one) and that was me done too.
• 
  The Beths : BBC Sounds Stage. After a mosey around the family area and the Faraway Forest, we made our way up to Latitude's second stage, an enormous tent named, this year, after BBC Sounds. I was particularly excited to see The Beths and, having conducted a bit of a sales pitch in the days leading up to the festival, so were the rest of the Amusements clan. Lucky for me, then, that the Kiwi indie darlings didn't disappoint. As they walked on a giant fish inflated at the back of the stage (a nod to the sleeve art from their most recent album), and then the band launched into Future Me Hates Me. For some bands this might have set too high a bar but The Beths were more than capable of maintaining that standard for the entirety of their hour-long set. For me, the band are at their best when lead singer and principal songwriter Elizabeth makes full use of her vocal range, effortlessly switching from high to low - it elevates them above other bands that, on paper, might seem quite similar. And although it's not often noticeable, I do like it when a vocal is sung with an honest accent (the chorus of Best Left becomes "bist lift to rot" in Elizabeth's hands). Other observations? Recent album opener Expert In A Dying Field was the penultimate track here, and sounded excellent. Mrs Amusements was dancing by this point, to Amusements Minor's, well, amusement. Oh, and The Beth's drummer looks very like my boss, but I digress. Either way, The Beths were a real highlight for us all, and were part two of my Latitude Top Three.
• 
  Bleach Lab : The Alcove. Mrs Amusements took a time-out at this point, preferring to sit on a fallen tree and read a book whilst The Boy and I squeezed into the back of The Alcove (a big marquee in the woods) for this. Mutterings in the crowd beforehand were all about dream-pop and shoegaze, which was exciting. And sure, listening to their Bandcamp I can see how those comparisons get made. But live? Well, the vocals lacked the ethereal qualities I associate with those genres. Musically, well, I'd say the guitarist has listened to a lot of Johnny Marr, but then haven't we all? Where we were stood, there were an awful lot of teenage boys too, attracted, I would venture, by vocalist Jenna Kyle rather than by any sudden predilection for dream pop. But again, I guess we've all been there. Whatever, this didn't do much for me, disappointingly (I'd enjoyed what I'd heard from them in my pre-festival research), so after two songs we left and scooped up Mrs NA.
• Luke Wright : The Listening Post. To be honest, we were all starting to flag a little bit by this point, so got to the next venue early for a bit of a sit down, which is how we came to catch the tail-end of poet Luke Wright. This was a nice bonus - Luke has performed at every Latitude since the year dot, so this felt like returning to a simpler, smaller festival time. Like the rest of us, Luke is getting a little older, a little heavier set. He still seems a little bit too pleased with himself as well, but that's okay, it turns what would otherwise be just a poetry reading into a performance. I guess that's the point. He ended his time on stage with the eponymous Peak from his most recent book which, like our glimpse of his set, was short and bittersweet.
• 
  Nobody Panic podcast : The Listening Post. This was essentially a recording for Tessa Coates' successful Don't Panic podcast, the gist of which seems to be Tessa discussing how to do something with various comedic guests. For this episode, there were two guests, Jess Fosketew and Shaparak Khorsandi, and they were there to discuss how to ... be good at sports. Which I wanted to listen to and like but ... it just seemed to turn into an episode of Loose Women, something I am clearly not the target audience for, and with a focus on how much they had not enjoyed PE at school. I checked my subconscious bias by asking what Mrs Amusements thought, but she didn't much like this either. To be honest though, it was warm and comfortable in the Listening Post (the only tented venue with matting on the floor) so I tried to catch a power-nap during this, mindful of the fact that I would be driving us all home in the wee small hours. I only managed about five minutes though, before Amusements Minor noticed and elbowed me awake. Hey ho. Bottom line: you might enjoy this podcast. I hope you do. But it's not for me.
• 
  Yard Act : BBC Sounds Stage. After a lovely festival dinner that involved a lot of pulled pork and no small amount of chips, NA Minor and I left Mrs Amusements at the Listening Post, and headed back to the Sounds Stage to see a band that I had high hopes for. We arrived a little early, which left me time to be intrigued by their "100% irrelevant" sign ... and then the band came on, to the sound of Enjoy Yourself by The Specials. Another good sign. But then it all went a bit wrong. Opening your set by teaching the audience their part for some call-and-response, before you've even played a note? Er, no. And then curling up into a foetal ball on stage whilst singing the (eventual) first song, so that most of the audience can't see you? Again, no. Forget the stream of consciousness semi-spoken lyrics, they may or may not be for you, that's subjective at least. But learn some stagecraft, man! Others were heard to enthuse later but for us? "He's a character," said Amusements Minor with a raised eyebrow and deadpan face, two songs in. And we left, both a little disappointed.
• 
  Pulp : The Obelisk Arena. The main stage was as packed as I can ever remember seeing it in all my years at Latitude, and there was a palpable air of excitment building from quite early on. At 9.25, the big screens either side of the stage flickered into life and announced, in hot pink on black, that we would remember this night for the rest of our lives, and that we were about to see the 534th live performance by the group Pulp. This, the screens displayed, is what we do for an encore. And as the minor chords that had accompanied these pronouncements morphed into the intro for I Spy, on came the band. It's a cliché to describe a welcome as rapturous but really, there's no other word for it. And they were straight into it, with such a full sound too, augmented for the night by the Elysian Collective string section. I'll put the setlist at the bottom of this post, but suffice to say the band played all the hits from His'n'Hers and Common People, plus some from This Is Hardcore and We Love life. The BBC's excellent review of this gig later described Jarvis as "Britpop's very own angle-poise lamp" and that is perfect, for he struck silhouetted pose after silhouetted pose, filling those big screens with his trim besuited outline, arms and hands adopting curious positions in a way that reminded me of Bowie. Jarv dedicated Something Changed to late Pulp bassist Steve Mackey and, later, bizarrely reached into his jacket pockets, produced chocolates, and threw them out into the crowd. Make no mistake, musically Pulp are a band. Theatrically, Pulp are Jarvis. For however much the screens panned to Candida on keys, or the criminally under-rated Nick on drums, it was almost impossible to take your eyes off the frontman. Ah! What else? At various points in the show there were confetti cannons, giant streamers shot out into the crowd and, during the ultimate closing anti-singalong of Common People, even a few fireworks. For me, Pink Glove, Do You Remember The First Time?, Babies, Sunrise and Underwear were highlights ... but then really, the whole set was one giant, continuous highlight, and how often can you say that about any gig? Only the inclusion of relative rarity Like A Friend, from the soundtrack to 1998's Great Expectations, threatened to briefly derail the Sheffield Express ... but really there was never any danger of that. The 20,000 (and more) people standing in a field were all squeezed into the palm of Jarvis's hand. He knew it, and so did we. The very obvious highlight of my Latitude Top Three.

And that was that. All that remained, as we surfed out of the Obelisk Arena on a euphoric cloud, was the long walk back to the car, and the long, late, tired drive home. Amusements Minor is still wearing his wristband, eight days later, Mrs Amusements got to dance and I got to fill a very important hole in my gigography. Hopefully I really will remember that night for the rest of my life...

As for Latitude, it gets bigger, more commercial, less "different" every year. But it's still pretty bloody good, as festivals go. There's already talk of getting some other families together for next year, so the kids can have some company their own age, and going en-masse for the whole event. That sounds ... interesting, I think. A very different experience, certainly. And hideously expensive too, ironically for what some consider a poor man's Glastonbury. As for me (and my wallet), I might just wait and see who the headliners are...)