Well now it’s official: Summer has begun. Why? Because we’ve just had our first festival of the year.
When the first of the classic VW camper vans and regular tent camping patrons descended on Bellurgan Park in County Louth for this year’s Vantastival, the sense of something kicking off was evident from the fact that the crew were still putting the final touches to the site and the stages. This unhurried, relaxed professionalism is typical of the spirit of a festival which has its own, clearly evident, sense of community spirit. Everyone is here to have a good old shindig, and they all know that everything will come together in its own time.
If there was a sense that we’d arrived to the party too early, and were left twiddling our thumbs in the sitting room waiting for the host to get dressed and put on her makeup, it was dispelled the moment the first band took to the main stage.
Local boyos the Beached Whales blazed rhythmically through a collection of funk-infused reggae that seemed composed as a soundtrack to just this kind of evening, particularly thanks to their recent decision to add a trumpeter, keyboardist and two female backing singers to the group. Their spirited set danced along nicely through funky guitar work and oodles of soul, culminating on the infectiously bright and cheery Caramello Sunshine, a song that is the sound of the summer beginning if there ever was one.
Not only has Vantastival a reputation for its own distinctive attitude, the lineup is typically reflective of a more eclectic musical sensibility, eschewing the typical flavour of the month acts you’ve heard hearing on the radio lately in favour of a more diverse selection of folk, reggae, trad and the stuff that doesn’t have any kind of easy go-to genre label at all.
But for a while it looked like the Friday selection wasn’t going to deliver on this reputation. Both Fox Jaw (formerly Fox Jaw Bounty Hunters) and Animal Beats delivered proficient but unengaging sets of blues-y indie rock that was certainly pleasant to listen to while standing in a field on a sunny May evening, but never got as far as setting their respective stages alight either.
Gangs weren’t much better. The Tallaght lads have plenty of cheeky attitude and neatly delivered riffs, but never really managed to rise above their obvious influences and do something fresh. They could sing about a Life Without Meaning all they want, but there was still a certain emotional resonance lacking from the music.
It could be something to do with the fact that a festival isn’t really the right venue for this kind of band. Where you have old hippies strolling around unselfconsciously wearing homemade wool ponchos that look like your mam’s tea cosy, it can make it all the more obvious when someone is trying too hard to look like they aren’t trying at all. Still, it’s these kind of acts, and rising stars Gangs in particular, that will probably be a consistent feature of the rest of the summer festivals.
A breath of weird but wonderful fresh air came in the form of Aidan and the Italian Weather Ladies, an oddball folk collective with an distinctly psychedelic tinge to their sound. Contrary to the tongue in cheek name, the five piece group are actually all male, incorporating the flute and the clarinet alongside drums, bass and keys for a diverse, worldly sound that shot off in a some slightly skewered directions, but still retained a tight melodic core at the heart of the music.
Any doubts that still remained about Vantastival’s commitment to showcasing ‘something out of the ordinary’ were dispelled the moment the day’s main stage headliner appeared. There are plenty of negative things that could be levelled at the musical styling of Jinx Lennon, but generic is not one of them.
That the abrasive and eccentric singer-songwriter finds himself on the head of a bill at all is a bold move, even if he is a local boy. His distinctively thick Dundalk accent and songs about dodgy bars on Bridge Street may have an added resonance for residents of ‘da town’, but that’s far from his only appeal. It’s more down to the fact that there isn’t really anything like else around.
Appearing on stage alone with nothing but an old guitar and a drum machine, Lennon’s minimalist instrumentation only serves to highlight his werido rambling lyrics. Songs like My Guitar is a Magic Wand and Hard Man Soup saw him bashing angrily at a single chord relentlessly over a the shoddy drumbeat more commonly found on a bad dance remix, while Tommy Hides From the Drug Dealer ditched the music entirely and embraced the spoken word for the tale of a local junkie trying to escape he debts by hiding behind a tree.
It’d be easy to write off a songs like the topical David Drumm, or the pure nuts Gobshite in the House, as the rambling of a demented bowsie you meet outside the pub at 3am, but in a way that’s also exactly Lennon’s appeal. His subject matter is ordinary and obvious, but it takes this kind of meandering stream-of-consciousness outburst and twists into something that actually is as poetic and profound as the drunken rambler talking shite merely thinks he is.
Lennon closed out his set with a sing-along to the cathartic profanity of Forgive the Cunts, yet another song that starts out with such a basic structure that it sounds like pure, uninspired improvisation by somebody without a lot of range, but along the way it morphs into a true message, dripping with sarcasm and scorn, but somehow positive all the same.
Jinx Lennon is exactly the kind of act that should appear on more summer festival bills but, unfortunately, probably won’t.
Vantastival Photo Gallery
Photos:Keith Currams
