One of the first things I learned after seeing Big Thief triumph at the Green Man is that some long-time fans are worried about them. There’s an extra drummer, the bassist has been replaced and the singer is now the focus. Have they just become a conventional rock band, people grumble. Have they lost the familiarity they once had?
I had never seen Big Thief before, which is a mistake on my part. Not least because I cannot answer these questions: I have no comparison with Saturday night’s performance. All I can say is that, without worrying about what they were in the past, they are exceptional in the present: both magnificent and inviting.
When they played in the big tent with a huge PA, the Nightingales suddenly had the power of the Who
Earlier this year I wrote on these pages about Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief’s singer and main 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 on guitar, and a bassist – they became beautiful clockworks, the guitar lines swirling around each other, the two drummers meshing together.
Big Thief play in a genre we could loosely call indie folk, which is full of sensitive people who are sad about things. Lenker is sad about things too, but she’s a fantastic lyricist, sometimes opaque, sometimes direct, with a gift for imagery that anchors her songs in time and place: “Tired in front of the TV, bleeding on the bed/ The milk just ran out, all the leaves are dead,” begins “Vampire Empire.”
What’s so appealing about Big Thief on record is the clatter – as if it were somehow degrading to record. They can be wobbly and precise at the same time, and the two drummers have helped keep the songs both loose and bouncy: James Krivchenia, the pair’s lead, proves the truism that a good band needs a great drummer. Meek is also a wonderful guitarist, playing lead lines that can be delicate and gentle or angry and distorted, violent interruptions of quiet melodies.
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Not everything is perfect: “Grandmother,” a song that felt like a self-mockery about turning pain into music, was pleasantly reminiscent of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. But then Lenker laid down a guitar solo that could have been lifted straight from Young – minimum effort, maximum bang. It seemed a little too on-the-nose for a band that is anything but obvious most of the time. It wasn’t boring. It just seemed 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 blew me away this year was the Oracle Sisters’ “Most of All,” which swirled in on the organ and then carried on like a lost Christine McVie song from the early days of Fleetwood Mac. Unfortunately, the studio version doesn’t seem to have the magic that I heard on Saturday night.
The band that clashed most with their surroundings, however, were the Nightingales, the old post-punk band from Birmingham who were enjoying a revival thanks to the patronage of comedian Stewart Lee. Playing in a big tent with a huge PA, this scratchy indie band suddenly had the power of the Who. So they didn’t sound like they were coming through terrible speakers in the back room of a pub.
The other truly spectacular performance on Saturday was by Tinariwen, the Tuareg band from the border region between Algeria and Mali who single-handedly brought the “desert blues” to the rest of the world. They have become a hit elsewhere in the world too, perhaps because their African music will be familiar to rock fans: the way the guitar solos sound piercing and soaring was reminiscent of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s work for Television. Their music really does sound like the desert – endless, its features subtly changing. It is the sound of vast horizons and endless time: an ecstatic prayer. In their robes (see below) they looked less like a band and more like characters George Lucas might have walked into frame during one of the set shoots. star Wars Films. Imagine them dressed like this going into a newsagents in the local Crickhowell to buy some chocolate before heading off to the festival site.
They were fantastic. But the day belonged to Big Thief, a band that was supposed to be small but turned out to be huge.
