One of the first things I learned after seeing Big Thief triumph at Green Man is that some long-time fans are worried about them. There’s an extra percussionist; the bassist has been replaced; and the singer is now front and centre. Have they just become a conventional rock band, people mutter. Have they lost the intimacy they once had?
I’d never seen Big Thief before, which is something of an error on my part. Not least because I can’t answer those questions: I have nothing to compare Saturday night’s performance with. I can only say that without caring about what they were in the past, they are extraordinary in the present: both grand and welcoming.
Playing in the big tent, with a massive PA, the Nightingales suddenly had the power of the Who
Earlier this year I wrote in these pages about Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief’s singer and principal songwriter, when she performed solo at the Barbican. Her songs, played on acoustic guitar, were spindly and fragile things. With a full band – there were two drummers, Lenker and Buck Meek playing guitar, and a bassist – they became wonderful clockwork mechanisms, the guitar lines spiralling around each other, the two drummers interlocking.
Big Thief play in the genre we might loosely call indie folk, which is awash with sensitive people being sad about stuff. Lenker, too, is sad about stuff, but she’s a fantastic lyricist, at times opaque, at times direct, with a gift for images that root her songs in time and place: ‘Watching TV tired, bleeding on the bed/ The milk has just expired, all the leaves are dead,’ opens ‘Vampire Empire’.
What’s appealing about Big Thief on record is the clatteriness of it – as if it is somehow degrading even as it is made. They can be simultaneously ramshackle and precise, and the two drummers added to that, keeping the songs both loose and bouncy: James Krivchenia, the principal of the pair, proves the truism that a good band needs a great drummer. Meek, too, is a wonderful guitarist, playing lead lines that could be tender and mellow or angry and distorted, violent disruptions to placid melodies.
Not everything is perfect: ‘Grandmother’, a song that seemed to be a piece of self-mockery about turning pain into music, was enjoyably reminiscent of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. But then Lenker went into a guitar solo that could have been cribbed directly from Young – minimal fuss, maximal crunch. It felt a little too on-the-nose for a band who are anything but obvious most of the time. It’s not that it was boring. It just felt a little beneath them. One of the wonders of a good festival, of course, is hearing songs you’ve never heard before, and wondering why not. Another is seeing bands outside their usual habitat, given the chance to play through state-of-the-art PAs. The song that knocked me sideways this year was ‘Most of All’ by Oracle Sisters, which swirled in on organ, then carried on like some lost Christine McVie song from the early days of Fleetwood Mac. Alas, the studio version doesn’t seem to have the magic I heard on Saturday night.
But the band most at odds with their surroundings were the Nightingales, the ancient Birmingham post-punk band who have had a revival thanks to the patronage of the comedian Stewart Lee. Playing in the big tent, with a massive PA, this scratchy indie band suddenly had the power of the Who. This was not how they sound through terrible speakers in the back room of a pub.
Saturday’s other truly spectacular set came from Tinariwen, the Tuareg band from the borderlands of Algeria and Mali, who single-handedly introduced the ‘desert blues’ to the rest of the world. They’ve become a hit elsewhere in the world, perhaps because theirs is an African music that will be familiar to rock fans: the way the guitar solos pierced and soared was reminiscent of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s work with Television. Their music really does sound like the desert – unending, its features changing subtly. It is the sound of vast horizons and endless time: an ecstatic prayer. Clad in their robes (see below), they looked less like a band and more like characters George Lucas might have had wandering into shot during one of the Star Wars films. Imagine them walking into a newsagent in local Crickhowell dressed like that to pick up some chocolate before heading to the festival site.
They were fantastic. The day, however, belonged to Big Thief, a band made to be little, but who have turned out to be very big indeed.
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