Well, the sun is out and it’ll be a good two hours before the one rain shower of the entire weekend pisses all over poor Shouting Myke’s parade, so a small glass of beer is in order.

So here we are at the fifth Truck Festival, and can we just say from the off that it just keep on getting better every year? And no, it isn’t just some misplaced partisanship that makes us say that. It’s the atmosphere - friendly, relaxed and enthusiastic - it’s the space - a sold-out festival with room move around and chill out as well as moshing yourself into a bloody stump - it’s the two-quid-a-pint bar, but most of all it’s the music. Something for everyone (well, anyone with any taste at least), and today particularly, one of the best line-ups of strange, exciting or just downright fanbloodytastic music on any festival bill you’ll encounter.

Juggernaut Records are hosting the Barn stage today, and the theme for the day is ABRASIVE. Abrasive band number one are Missed Her Bliss, sheet-metal attack dogs from Blackburn who splendidly remind us of much-missed noisemakers Ligament and realise that keeping shouting to the minimum and the molten fuzz level to the max makes for a perfect wake-up call. Which means we’re ready to brave the daylight outside and the main stage where Coin-Op are making out like The Pixies, only The Pixies if they’d sprung up in Haight Ashbury in the 60s. We don’t normally go a bundle on singing keyboard players (Toploader! Ugh!) but hints of Bowie, The Stooges and even Edwin Starr swing it for us. More beer you say? Why, thanks.

Sadly half of Cat On Form are hospitalised, but the remaining half of the band has got together with a couple of rowdy mates and written a whole new set of punk songs in a week. And they sound a bit like The Angelic Upstarts, all politicised Oi!-style rocking in a bored, shouty way and they’ve called themselves Corporate Marketing Ploy. Good attitude all round. And it gets us in the mood for some more anthemic punky-type stuff in the form of Surrey’s Reuben, currently leading the charge to follow Hundred Reasons into the charts. Straddling the punk-pop/nu-metal divide with an admirable urgency and melodic sharpness that their near neighbours seem to have had toured out of them, they’re on a steady upward trajectory and today’s lively showing suggests they may well be back hear next year as headliners.

It’s a shame that it then pisses it down for an hour, just as young emo pups Shouting Myke take the stage. They jump up and down lots and seem to be having a whale of a time, probably because on stage they’re under cover. Most of the crowd though have scuttled off to the Trailerpark tent where proving that every cloud has a silver lining are Chamfer who get to play to a packed house, and their much-improved exotic blend of Indian bhangra, north African souk music and 70s psychedelic rock make it feel like summer again. After all, it can’t be raining if you’re listing to a tabla, can it?

And of course it does stop raining and the sun comes back out and even better the new-look eeebleee have found their form. After a disappointingly disjointed show at the Cellar the week before they oddly fill the open air arena better, everything gels and they create an almost spectral atmosphere, with bassist Jo intoning robotic statistics over chattering electronics and they veer almost into Prolapse territory when keyboard player Dave starts shrieking aggressively over the top. Almost straight away though they’re playing it soft as a feather and threatening to drift off to join the small family of fluffy clouds hovering over the next field. All in all, quite lovely. Lovely being something you’d never accuse The Young Knives of. Singer Henry is dressed in a cream suit (the first of many this weekend for some strangely English reason) and a red headband so he looks like a cross between Mark Knopfler and a Palestinian suicide bomber. Their jittery psycho-killer punk-funk makes them the most wired band in Oxford since The Nubiles, but with a sharper sense of both melody and humour and as they shriek, bark, shout and change direction or come to a dead halt at will we decide that if ‘Rollerskater’ isn’t your favourite song of the year, you probably died sometime back in the 17th Century.

TRUCK 2002 review continued... ---->