Doune the Rabbit Hole 2014

To have a festival on your doorstep – the Linlithgow Palace show a couple of weeks ago – is a luxury. To have a second one a half-hour drive away? The musical gods are spoiling us, though the two events couldn’t be much different. From major mainstream pop acts on a single stage we go to similarly impressive surroundings in the Cardross Estate, but the audience are, well, more of your traditional stereotypical festival crowd – hippies, punks, and very few people with picnics and those wee folding chairs.

I did suggest that this second fest in two weeks was too good to be true, and thus, I was stymied by work meaning I could only catch a handful of acts on Friday and Sunday, missing the likes of Errors, Adam Stafford, Paws, The Yawns, Trembling Bells and another 70 or so acts. Harumph.

Arriving late on Friday night I caught maybe 30 seconds of Howie Reeve – one man, one bass guitar – who I mistook for local(ish) lad Billy Bates, but in fact is more like a younger (and better-looking) Charlie Brooker.

Hector Bizerk‘s is the first full set I catch – Louie and Audrey having been garnering a fearsome reputation in the past couple of years and they attract a sizeable, enthusiastic crowd. Hip-hop and street art go hand-in-hand of course and the band have brought graffiti artist Pearl to ‘illustrate’ behind them, while the crowd are encouraged to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her daughter. The band mix old and new material – ‘The Fish That Never Swam’ seems to rhyme “RM Hubbert” with “cupboard” as Louis gets the crowd to move forward easily and sing along, and they do – fun-loving ‘malleable’ audiences are a feature of Doune, it seems.

To the Fruit Tent where Laura J Martin is singing of The Hangman’s Tree’ – “It’s not sinister” she insists before building another tune via the now common loop pedal / sample method. She blends thumb piano, voice and does a decent Ian Anderson impression on flute, standing on one leg to complete the effect. This closing song is long and prog-infused, apt in the run-up to Kate Bush’s comeback (although no sign of Lene Lovich on the way, I note).

The Cosmic Dead are, in essence, a battle for the middle ground between Hawkwind and Can. Singing about a “magic carpet” and assaulting the audience’s eardrums, the sonic highs and lows are hard to cope with as rhythms flit in and out of the din. In fact, there’s a lot of punk rock about the ethic as well as the delivery.

So, a wee bit of a delay as Acid Mothers Temple rather nonchalantly set up on stage (to be fair, they do have rather a lot of effects pedals). 10 minutes turns to 20, to half-an-hour, and eventually, with the band close to 60 minutes late, Peatbog Faeries strike up on the main stage, coinciding with the announcement that “Acid Mothers Temple have been delayed”. With dark descending and the cold working through our bones, itm? decides that, well, they’ll tour again, right?

To Sunday evening, and just in time for Jeffrey Lewis and the Jrams – Lewis continues his Anglophile love affair – comic-book legend Alan Moore the subject of his picture story this time, while there’s what seems like a macabre Alan Bennet tale, ‘Sad Screaming Old Man’. Lewis is best known by some for his ‘Ten Crass Songs’, but he’s moved onto The Fall with a cover of ‘Cruiser’s Creek’, handy as his backing band contain two Brixes. Politically-charged as ever, his closer is a raucous ‘What Would Pussy Riot’ Do?’

In the Bar Tent, and in the dark, East Coast Defector are, in the glaur, female-fronted pop laden with heavy distortion, this adds to their sound and therefore may be intentional…

Strange Blue Dreams are fronted by a familiar face – Dave formerly of Aberdonian nearly-weres The Needles. They’re no less energetic or catchy now, but their punk rock has been replaced with klezmer gypsy jazz, which goes down a storm with the (as discussed) ever-enthusiastic Doune crowd.

RM Hubbert is fresh from the Greenbelt festival where, he tells us, he broke the first rule of gigging by “engaging with the mentalists” – specifically, telling 5000 Christians their god didn’t exist. Some unearthly retribution follows as he’s interrupted mid-song by a smoke machine spontaneously going off (we assume it’s accidental, Hubby’s blend of post-flamenco and murder ballad doesn’t exactly lending itself to such rock trappings). He chides (good-naturedly) the audience for applauding during one of his false endings, and is then “upstaged by a toddler” as a stray kid invades his space. There’s sound bleed from the Bar Tent, causing him to forget his words; inane chatterers (who are hushed down by the rest of the crowd), a barking dog which interrupts yet another tune, and when the guitarist dedicates a song to a recently-departed friend, receives the most tactless of ‘heckles’: “How did he die?” In all, then, another successful set.

The Wave Pictures – with, I’m pretty sure, Stanley Brinks on guitar – are pure pop. Though maybe a bit left-field – take a song they claim is from a Bogart movie, ‘Take Care Of The Chickens’, and they run the gamut from Herman Dune-y acoustic melodrama via hoedown, psych pop – including a Credence cover – even treating us to African-tinged jit. And drum and bass solos which to be fair isn’t what you expect from a ‘pop’ act, but somehow, it works. Again, it’s getting cold so all this jigging is handy as those of us not chemically emboldened to the elements can shake a leg or two to keep the cold away.

Finally, back to the warmth of the Baino stage, where space-rockers The Telescopes have resolved to leave us with some heated. Ably assisted by members of St Deluxe, it’s impossible to tell where the feedback starts and the screams of frontman Stephen Lawrie stop. But for a festival exuding joyous fun on the main stage and embroiled in dark psych in the recesses of the tent, the quintet couldn’t be a more appropriate way to round off the weekend.