‘This Is Truck’, proclaims the website. And this is the review. It is also my chance to plug Thomas Truax to the point of electrocution, but more of him later. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

 

The Cinderella to usurping sisters Lovebox and Latitude (whose Disco Shed is it anyway?), Truck was up against it this year. A tradition of TBC line-ups ‘about discovering your new favourite band, and rediscovering those resident eccentrics on the fringes’ could easily have slipped into an oblivion of leftover-bookings, the great unsigned for the great unwashed. Mercifully for those of us stranded in Steventon, it didn’t.

 

Truck is small, refreshingly so. There is enough space to turn up late and still camp with better-organised friends, but not so much you can’t find your tent again after dark and too much cider. You can walk to the main stage in five minutes, buy food from the local Rotary Club and throw away the plate in the right recycling bin. Even the portaloos actually have toilet paper – well, you’re not just outside Oxford for nothing.

 

And you’re not at an independent music festival for nothing, either. In a bill spanning locals to The Lemonheads, Truck is at once an unmistakably homegrown affair and worth travelling to for everyone you have heard of. Standard festival hippie and hoodie stalls adjoin local pottery, popular Oxford club nights provide after-hours DJing, and The Free Beer Show stand-up comics fill daytime between-set gaps nicely. (And frankly, who cares about the bands when the compere’s comparing your awkwardest friend to a masturbating ostrich?) But bands there were, and I must have seen a good dozen over the weekend, from the boredinary (The Family Machine) to the extraordinary (the aforementioned Mr Truax).

 

It didn’t begin well. After sitting through Little Fish’s technical difficulties, we were intrigued to see The Television Personalities; we’d heard they were good, and they were on the main stage, albeit at three in the afternoon. But in a tawdry twist of irony, their set lacked any character at all, driving us into the arms of Truck’s traditional transvestite bar staff for enough cider to get us all ASBOs, and I started to have my doubts about the whole thing. We needn’t have worried, though, Emmy The Great more than lived up to her name, and no doubt the hopes of those who first spotted her in Steventon two years ago, armed only with her acoustic guitar. Saturday also gave us the competent but generically head-boppy The Family Machine (best song ‘Flowers by the Roadside’, if you like that sort of thing) and a predictably packed Barn stage for Youthmovies.

 

Penultimate act Okkervil River were energetic yet stirring, Sheff working the crowd into as much of a frenzy as you can get listening to Okkervil River. People danced, people sang, people swayed with their eyes shut… my personal highlight was ‘A Girl in Port’, but it was a rousing, passionate set throughout. The crowd had thickened by the end of their set, mainly with a demographic who were old enough to buy ‘It’s a Shame About Ray’ when it actually came out. As night fell and The Lemonheads shuffled on to whooping and shoving, I couldn’t help wishing I’d been there the first time round; post-rehab Evan Dando is no showman, the halfway encore was unnecessary, and one crowd-surge spilt wine all over my feet. But for all that, I didn’t care, because it was ‘My Drug Buddy’ and ‘Bit Part’ and it was fucking transcendental. I couldn’t stop smiling for hours and woke up with them still in my head the next morning.

 

Sunday was, as you’d expect, more sedate. It began with Oxford’s best, the theatrical Borderville are worth checking out on their fairly regular visits to London. As is the indie-folk of Stornoway, a band with songs good enough to excuse a even multitude of hats, lumberjack shirts and the periodic donning of animal masks (the horse is an EP-gracing favourite).

 

Further into the afternoon, Johnny Foreigner delivered a perfunctory set on the main stage, while Pivot maxed out the Beat Hive with scuzzy but ordered electro. Back out in the open once more, Camera Obscura delivered a beautiful set of old and newer material to a re-emerging sun on the main stage, followed by Frank Turner. Even flanked by about three more musicians than when I saw him last, proffering hand-labelled CDs in various dives around Oxford, the swaggering yet intimate showmanship is the same – though if you’ve only got the album it’s worth tracing him back to Campfire Punkrock, too.

 

It could all have been downhill from there. No one likes a no-show (unless, inexplicably, it’s Pete Doherty) and sitting in the Beat Hive for an hour not watching Cats In Paris was very nearly a waste of time… until we spotted Thomas Truax tuning up in a corner and I remembered how amazing he is. I hope that if you’re reading this you’ve heard of him, firstly because you should, and secondly because it would make my job a lot easier. Otherwise, how do I begin to describe a man who plays the guitar with a portable fan and builds music machines called Sister Spinster and Mother Superior? Who has a horn with springs? Who bounds out into the audience with his guitar for an acoustic lap when someone shouts “wanker”? Who makes some of the most beautiful and sinister music I have ever heard, about ‘The Butterfly and the Entomologist’? Quite simply, I can’t. You will have to hear it for yourself.

 

Anyone after that would have been an afterthought (though I suppose it didn’t help that Laura Marling seemed to forget her lyrics) as we sat huddled on the grass, cold and awed and exhausted.

 

‘Let it in’, Truck’s slogan urged; I had. And I suggest you do the same next year. 

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