Offset Festival
Hainault Forest Country Park, London
Day 2 - Saturday September 5 2009

Bands in order of appearance:

Miss Something
Goodnight And I Wish
Ulterior
S.C.U.M
Death Cigarettes
Bo Ningen
A Certain Ratio
Panico

Back in the field for Offset day 2 - and back to the Experimental Circle Club tent, where, if yesterday was any guide, it's likely that most of the most interesting bands will be found.

What I find on stage right now is Miss Something, who is a solo artist, not a band - although I'm just in time to miss some performance art extravagances by Skip Theatre, who join Miss S. on stage for some formation dance moves.

Left to herself, Miss Something strums a fuzzed-out, plangent guitar and sings odd, introspective songs with a skewed sixties feel. She's like a one-woman version of the Shangri-las, with a certain louche weariness about her, as if she's just got home in the early hours, bleary-eyed and reflective after a night of unspecified carousing.

I get the impression that Miss Something's performance today takes the form of a battle of wills betweeen her and her effects pedals: she spends much time frowning at her effects, crossly prodding pedals as if they just won't do as they're told. I'm not sure how much - if any - of that is intentional, but it lends an odd tension to a performance that otherwise has a certain fuzzy, morning-after ambience.

It's side project time, apparently. I'm told that Goodnight And I Wish is a new band formed by the drummer out of Neil's Children. If that's so, then the first surprise is that there are no drums in this band. Whimsical beat-box ballads seem to be the style of Goodnight And I Wish, and while some of their songs get dangerously close to the dreaded twee territory (I notice some hand-coloured hearts stuck to the keyboard, which fairly screams 'TWEE!' to me) there's enough inherent robustness in there to give the band at least a subtle edge. Dreampop for a sunny summer's day - just as well this is a sunny summer's day, then.

One of the innocent little pastimes with which I've been amusing myself this year at Offset is to see which bands have done that essential move-on-up thing: which bands are higher on the bill this year than last, which bands have grarduated to a main stage slot. Ulterior seem to be heading in the right direction - at any rate, they're on the main stage right now.

Of course, Ulterior have always behaved as if the main stages of the rock 'n' roll world are theirs by right. This is not a band which lacks confidence; this is not a band which feels the need to ask permission. Certainly, today they rock up Offset's main stage as if they own it. The throbbing electro-pulses and slashing, stabbing guitar which are the key elements of Ulterior's noise come over surprisingly well in the open air.

I'd wondered if the Ulterior sound would translate to a location very different from the subterranean clubs where the band cut its teeth, but the music expands to fill the space. The band's on-stage moves, which always tended towards shameless grandstanding, work well, too. Could be the main stages of the world are Ulterior's natural home.

Here come S.C.U.M, blinking in the daylight. Out of all the bands at this entire event, I think S.C.U.M are the least likely contenders for a sunny afternoon festival slot. If there was ever a band built for sepulchral darkness and subterranean rock 'n' roll holes, then S.C.U.M is that band. Surely, S.C.U.M just don't do sunshine.

What the hell, we've still got that fine old standby: rock 'n' roll smoke. Pumping a grey haze over the stage, S.C.U.M retain as much of their mystery as possible as they crank up the reverb and get their customary melodrama on. But there's been a shift in the band's musical emphasis: instead of simply piling reverb onto everything until the songs wilt under the weight, now there's rhythm guitar in there too, giving the billowing S.C.U.M-sound a bit of shape and definition. Dare I say it, the band's sound is veering towards actual rock music now - and, for S.C.U.M, that's a paradoxically radical move.

Back at the new bands tent, Death Cigarettes are shrieking and pummelling up a storm. The singer holds her head as if there's just too much angst inside it: the drummer flails like seventeen Keith Moons are battling for control of his immortal soul. This band deals in tension, and lots of it - their songs are taut, nervy things that clatter up to the point of release like new wave elastic being stretched to breaking point.

This, I believe, is the last gig for Death Cigarettes, but fortunately they're not splitting up. The band is rebranding itself, and from this point forward they'll be known as Cold In Berlin. Remember that name: we'll be hearing more from this lot.

The Death Cigarettes tension-fest provides quite a contrast with the band that follows them onto the new band stage, Bo Ningen - a Japanese weird-rock outfit based in London. And although it might look like I've just invented a genre there (it wouldn't be the first time) 'weird-rock' is a pretty good encapsulation of what they do.

Monster riffs and mass headbanging, prog-punk guitar strangling, and downright dangerous antics both on and off the stage combine to create quiite a show, and if it's impossible to figure out what the songs are about (everything is in Japanese, including the guitar riffs) somehow that doesn't matter as the sheer rush of the experience carries all before it. The guitarist bites his instrument and holds it aloft in his mouth; the drummer hurls himself at the tent pole and hangs face-down above the crowd. Nutters, obviously. But as a quick blast of unadulterated rockism between the punky stuff, Bo Ningen do the trick.

Back to the main stage now, for more of the punky stuff. Well, sort of. A Certain Ratio have a certain amount of history behind them, as one of the earliest bands to sign to Factory Records - and one of the first acts to take the punk attitude and apply it to dance music. The band's resulting sound - stripped-down funk, bristling with a no-shit, purposeful attitude - still sounds modern today. The beats are clean, every thwack on the drums and bass-string vibration clearly defined, and the songs stride forward like an army on the march.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the crowd's reaction seems a little lukewarm. The audience is politely interested, but somewhat reluctant to get on down. Certainly, when bassist Jeremy Kerr produces a whistle and begins blasting away like he's Ravey Davey Gravy largin' it in the place to be, there's a definite frisson of frostiness in the crowd. Maybe that's the problem right there: somehow, A Certain Ratio's party-party stuff seems a bit...naff.

The band's up-for-it dance stance might have cut it in the clubs of '90s Madchester (in fact, it was A Certain Ratio who laid the foundations for the dancefloor that the Happy Mondays and others of that ilk later made their own), but here, in front of a crowd of twenty-first century post-punks who are more into cerebral art rock than rehashed 90s hedonism, ACR pitch it slightly wrong.

It might have been a better bet to keep their heads down, their whistles silent, and stick with the sparse, austere, sound of their earliest work. In the context of the Offset festival, that would've hit the prevailing aesthetic on the nose. We may be in a field, but this ain't no rave.

So, it's back to the new bands tent to wrap things up with our last band of this year's festival - Panico. Of whom I know nothing. But, earlier, I happened to see them walking across the field with their gear, and I noticed from the labels on their flight cases that they'd come from Chile. It occurred to me that I'd never seen a band from Chile before, so on that rather whimsical basis I decided to check 'em out.

And I'm glad I did, for Panico turn out to be a brilliantly manic bunch of flipsters who deal in fast, frenzied rhythms, their songs roiling and building to crazy crescendos, the whole lot topped by a yelping caterwaul of a vocal. All this is delivered by a bunch of deceptively respectable - almost geeky - looking people, like Talking Heads if you slipped them some whoopee pills and then stepped back to watch the fun.

This is the great thing about Offset: finding unexpectedly splendid bands lurking in the tents on the fringes of the field. At this moment, over on the main stage, The Horrors are bringing things to a climax with a headline set. But here in the new bands tent, hammering and rattling under the lights as the night comes down outside, Panico deliver the true spirit of the festival.

Essential Links:

Miss Something: MySpace
Goodnight And I Wish: Website | MySpace
Ulterior: MySpace
S.C.U.M: MySpace
Death Cigarettes: Website | MySpace
Bo Ningen: Website | MySpace
A Certain Ratio: Website | MySpace
Panico: MySpace

Offset Festival: Website | MySpace

Return to Day 1 of the Offset Festival here.

For more photos from the Offset Festival, find the bands by name here.