No Direction Home Festival

There would surely be someone who, if their favourite restaurant were to expand by opening a branch in another neighbourhood, would take it as a personal offence, an unforeseeable betrayal by their best friend – as if everything were above mere market forces, above filthy lucre. Perhaps, though, driven by curiosity and an unquenchable prejudice, they would sneak off to visit that new location, discovering it to be irremediably "similar", but in a blurred way – a somewhat desperate attempt to reproduce a spirit, perhaps a memory.

One hopes this preamble will help in giving the benefit of the doubt to this assessment of the first edition of the No Direction Home Festival, staged in the middle of Sherwood Forest, on the far side of the lake that almost encircles Welbeck Abbey, by the same organisers behind End Of The Road. Perhaps the sense of deja vu comes simply from the need to recycle a bit of equipment: it's all over the main stage and inside the second stage's tent. Or maybe it's the fact that the stalls are still the same ones, just fewer of them.

In short, it's more of a feeling than an actual judgement on the quality of the music on offer – which, in truth, feels much closer to End Of The Road as it was a few years ago than to the current original edition (including the ever-present Low Anthem, by now practically festival regulars on the payroll; but it's easy to see why, harmless and mannered as they are). What also matters, of course, for those travelling from outside England, is that on top of the usual two days of travel there's one less day of festival, despite the organisers' efforts to "tack on" to the Friday Warren Ell… the Dirty Three, to please the older crowd (even more so than usual, perhaps) with a bit of virtuosity that's by now been drained of meaning, and the "slightly" Velvet-esque Veronica Falls (though also pleasant enough indie-pop, to be fair), for the younger, still fairly restrained crowd.

In truth, it must be said, the only real concession to old glories is above all the one made to Richard Hawley, a homegrown star whom quite a few there probably consider the true highlight of the festival (indeed, his is in a sense a "national-popular" show, a display of technique and stereotypes, which will likely have had several ladies swallowing their faith for an hour and a half, hopefully in a figurative sense) – even more so than the real one, Andrew Bird, who moves audiences in his own way: with a nervous tic of the head to the left (no, he hasn't lost it).

Aside from the excellent Andrew, finally not forced to record five or six loops for every song thanks to his flawless band, the pleasure of any festival is putting together your own personal setlist; watching your own "stars" while kids run riot on the grass and gentlemen dressed like Englishmen (like me) eat the organic, bland pizza they make here. Among these are surely Laish, whose membership of the Wilkommen Collective and an album like their self-titled one, a graceful little masterpiece, ought alone to guarantee them a mandatory slot at the festival, yet they end up playing No Direction Home in one of the less fortunate slots simply because they won the young bands' competition – rigged, we sincerely hope – and are camped right next to our tents; I get the feeling they've eaten more than their fair share of stale nonsense.

Or that gentle giant Seamus Fogarty, who, “since it's a festival,” leaves the laptop and his experiments with memory and “costume” at home and delivers a knowingly classicist set, a kind of country-blues somewhat in the vein of M. Ward but without the persona, and shows good taste in his choice of girlfriend too, who accompanies him (well) on violin; the technical and artistic ability to play different things while still being himself is implicit. Then there are the ever-reliable Wave Pictures, among the few bands around who actually “interpret” their songs on stage, instead of serially replicating what's on record.

Aside from a few disappointments, some expected (Trembling Bells – her vocal style is unbearable – and Cold Specks, whose charm, as on record, lasts only a few songs), others less so (a lifeless Tiny Ruins, a bored and depressed Woodpigeon with some new songs that are genuinely worrying in their contrivance, a Spectrals thin and sloppy beyond what the genre demands, a Father John Misty who's clearly fed up with that swot Pecknold and has written songs with the precise aim of going grouse hunting; amid the tales of a capercaillie he forgot to mention that his shirt had been torn off by one of them, conveniently in just the right way to show off the tattoo underneath), we had the misfortune of spotting from afar the “bloated” silhouettes of Unthanks, busy on a criminal mission to poison the festival with their “afternoon tea” traditionalist numbers, backed by a full orchestra, all dressed as waiters (there must be a reason).

Luckily the fat gets trimmed and drained off by the capable – though this was somewhat expected – Zulu Winter, a pleasant Balearic digression, and later by Mikal Cronin, messy and rowdy both on stage and in life, equipped with a bassist whose foot had been “splinted” the day before with tape and a wooden board. Among the surprises worth mentioning are the (slight) solo repertoire of Euros Childs, former frontman of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and Moon Duo, the side project of the Wooden Shjips guitarist, whose appeal, though, is mostly aesthetic, all projected shadows, hypnotic rhythms and barely discernible guitar themes.

This, more or less, was the first edition of No Direction Home. Some might see the fact that it's the “first” as an excuse for its rougher, more slapdash character; others might see it as an aggravating factor – for the very same reasons. It's certainly a festival that, for anyone facing a long and costly journey, probably doesn't yet deserve the unconditional trust needed to buy a ticket, even at a discounted price, before knowing the line-up, or part of it – unlike End Of The Road. You do the math.

Photo contributions by Francesca Baiocchi.

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