Picture the scene: There’s 100,000 people around you. The beer is a fiver for a can poured in a (hopefully) sterile plastic cup, and you can’t see the Main Stage from your vantage point but know it’s over there somewhere as your favourite band take to it. Probably. Somehow you’re covered in beer and the only way to change is to head back to your tent which is about seven miles away in a different field.
Apart from the being covered in beer bit, none of that happens at Truck Festival. A festival run by Oxfordshire people for the people of Oxfordshire originally, but since has grown modestly to become a true showcase of local, up and coming, and established international acts, while feeling more like a large garden party than a three-day music festival. There’s nothing quite like it. Of course we can get on to the current lineup, including a series of solo names from huge bands, but first we need to head to the humble beginnings to understand what Truck truly is about.
Truck One took place almost fourteen years ago on a Saturday in September. A handful of small-time bands, headlined by local jazz-punk noiseniks Nought, took to the stage in a modest affair which plugged the gap of a serious music festival in Oxfordshire. Reading was just down the road, and only took place four weeks before, but it’s so vast and expansive this just felt a little more homely.
Of course, with that evening came a host of success and it took just one year for it to move to a more accessible July date, strap another night onto things and more than double the number of bands. Truck festival, a local festival for local people was born.
Of course, the current organisers, Joe and Robin Bennett (although far more people have helped run it during the years) live on site as it takes place on their own farm. What most would consider the second stage, “The Barn That Cannot Be Named” is actually a working cowshed for 51 weeks of the year. The cows get moved out for the stage and lights to be set up, people dance about like idiots inside it for two nights, including an old-school rave who, over the years, has featured DJ Zinc, Altern-8 and many more, and the constant smell of manure. It’s unlike anything at any other festival. The Main Stage is, and always has been, made out of a couple of flatbed trucks pushed together with, more recently, a huge impressive canopy straddling it. The handful of bands who took part fourteen years ago will explode into the hundreds this year, where a third night has now been in place since 2010 and a capacity of up to eight thousand people will enjoy festivities as the end of July moves closer and closer.
Not to miss out on all the fun, the Bennett brothers are in, or have been involved with a conglomerate of bands over the years. Goldrush started the scene as headliners or thereabouts for most of the early years, as their other projects, including Danny and The Champions of the World, Dusty & the Dreaming Spires, and the Truck All Stars, as well as appearing alongside Mark Gardener (from Ride), and Common Prayer, amongst others, they truly maintain a presence around the festival all weekend instead of being shut away in the background, or being too busy schmoozing with the other bands. Even when facing adversity, the organisers, helpers and staff involved with Truck try their best to put on a great show. In 2007 a series of storms lashed most of the country, resulting in huge floods on the Truck Festival site causing it to be called off. In a stroke of extreme emergency planning, a mini version of the festival was put on across a few venues in Oxford over the same two nights featuring a number of those on the lineup including Frank Turner, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Goldrush and more. The festival itself, featuring a good portion of the original lineup, went ahead at the re-arranged dates at the end of September that year.
Since then, things seem to have gone without a hitch and the festival brings people from all around the world to sample the completely indiscriminate lineup of bands. There’s always metal, folk, punk, dance, rave and the damn right obscure on offer. Bands from Fucked Up to Stornoway can be found on the bill over the years, and some acts have passed through the Truck Festival either on their way to true stardom, or legends in their own right, including Biffy Clyro, Foals, Regina Spektor, Seth Lakeman, Dodgy, Noah and the Whale, Young Knives, Supergrass, Ash, Mew, Teenage Fanclub, Idlewild and The Futureheads.
This years lineup features Bellowhead, Graham Coxon, Phil Selway, Gruff Rhys, Tunng, Edwin Collins, The Go! Team, Saint Etienne and Roddy Woomble amongst a cacophony more. There will be a hotbed of local talent on display too with rising stars Jonquil, Trophy Wife, and more gracing the stages, keeping the festival important to the acts who would rarely get a proper chance to play a proper festival. The stalls aren’t those soulless trucks that sell you a dog meat burger for a million pounds either, they’re fried up in front of you by Didcot rotary club. The vicar makes ice cream, and you can get Fairtrade produce and local delicacies on site as well for a surprisingly reasonable price. Oh, and the beer’s by far the cheapest I’ve ever seen at a festival too, without the need for a queue four miles long to get it, and almost every penny raised at the event, with a small slice taken out to keep the festival running year on year, goes straight back to charities. What’s not to love?
Truck Festival is, and always will be, about the people that attend. It’s an important pillar for the community, and it grows year on year without ever overstretching its boundaries. Some festivals over expand into oblivion, but the Bennetts have kept a cool head, even though in 2010 they juggled three festivals (including the family-friendly eco-festival Wood, which itself has now run for four years, and the inaugural Truck America), as well as running Truck Records, keeping the farm running and organising other events in and around Oxford. There is nothing more important to them than the music, and while they may not pull in the U2’s, Beyonces’, Arctic Monkeys or Kings of Leons of this world, people never ever go to Truck on the strength of their headliners. They go to Truck for a fantastic weekend experience where, without question, the vast majority will discover their new favourite band, have a great time, and most importantly, feel like they’ve savoured every single minute without fear of being crushed, ripped off or lost.
The big festivals of this world: Reading/Leeds, T in the Park, Glastonbury and the like are all excellent in their own right, and long may they continue, but for a sense of fun and adventure without even the slightest whiff of pretentiousness, Truck Festival is an excellent and largely untapped way to enjoy the late July sun.
22nd, 23rd, 24th July 2011 - Truck Festival, Hill Farm, Steventon, Oxfordshire
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Apart from the being covered in beer bit, none of that happens at Truck Festival. A festival run by Oxfordshire people for the people of Oxfordshire originally, but since has grown modestly to become a true showcase of local, up and coming, and established international acts, while feeling more like a large garden party than a three-day music festival. There’s nothing quite like it. Of course we can get on to the current lineup, including a series of solo names from huge bands, but first we need to head to the humble beginnings to understand what Truck truly is about.
