FESTIBELLY 2010 | livemusic.fm

Canute’s Law confirms wild horses have dwelt in The New Forest for a thousand years. The journey towards the festival turned up the same feral wanders on our approach, the perfect weather on their backs. Festibelly is one of the smaller festivals in both capacity and average human height (the average is not brought down by the very old incidentally!). As many of these smaller festivals do, it proves to be a genius venue to watch music. What’s needed to make for a good time is simply the absence of tragedy – a faith in the human condition, considered and good music. And here the music chosen demonstrated an intelligent mixture of acts.

The acts fused together brilliantly throughout the day and night. Johnny Flynn (probably the highlight) continues to be a man of immense talent and his band member exchanges draw on evermore intriguing characters. At 3.50 in the perfectly temperate heat of the Hampshire afternoon King Charles came to stage. King Charles is a wigga from West London who sings rather self-righteously about love and if you don’t care about stuff you’ll be free from the manacles of the ego -errrrrr. It sounds rubbish but his vibrant and impulsive folk psychedelia is hugely entertaining.

King Charles’ Folk pop met seamlessly with dub-step in the form of Tek-one later that afternoon. The live show brings fantastic live instrumentation combined with electronics in a way nothing short of genius. The band has a November 2010 tour coming up it can be booked for through Livemusic.fm and should be looked out for.

Livemusic.fm favourites Man Like Me didn’t deviate from their deeply entertaining work. The band made a welcome change to their line-up by loosing some of their live instrumentation. Not present were two of the brass section and of particular note the percussion. Adding to the already huge drum sound drew the group away from their electronic foundation that was a major part of the attraction.

A fairly disappointing Rob Da Bank preceded The Big Pink’s first festival headline slot. Noise electronics coupled with brilliant pop tunes sets The Big Pink out as the perfect and dark frontier of chart music. The wild arbitrary Dionysian drones Milo creates on his set-up lead the subversive into the popular domain in an incredibly interesting fashion.

There was a feeling at the festival that you were at your public school chum’s A-level leaving party but with brilliant music. The healthy cuisine and the brilliant bands rescued the event from any criticism and it was just rodding pleasant in it’s entirety.