Latitude 2010: Day One, Part 2

Distractions are many at Latitude – the natural beauty, the eccentric charm, the rabid singer-songwriters roaming the woods looking for Fly writers to kiss (as mentioned in my first blog: cheers, Lupen Crook) – and it’s easy to become entangled in its crackpot village fete-like appeal. But unlike other events in an increasingly bloated festival calendar, the incidentals are just as crucial a part of the experience as the performers within it. Hence, our late arrival for The Kissaway Trail, whose epic bombast, fronted by singer Thomas Fagerlund’s Michael Stipe-like histrionics, takes a mere two songs to have us juiced up and raring to spray – the ideal state of mind to attend the subsequent act, who are essentially the world’s greatest wedding band. It sounds like a slagging off, but Villagers’ effortless way with nostalgic guitar melody makes each song sound like covers of 50s/60s classics, which lends their set a distinctly wedding feel, and one that gets the best of receptions. Next to us, a couple are celebrating their 33rd anniversary – you’re not gonna get that at Reading – in which the Villagers’ (wedding) singer apparently makes the good wife’s neck hairs “go wild”. We decide not to check – the proud hubby is a virtual Captain Jack from the ‘Pirates…’ franchise. On paper, Villagers’ fusion of retro-rock and progressive pop sounds like a divorce for the ears, but this is one marriage that’s worth the paper it’s written on.
From there, its old school metal action tinged with a brush of psychedelic gothica in the form of Black Mountain, whose monolithic space rock operatics are lacking nothing but the mothership to drop them onto the stage. A more apt name for band? There is none. Black Mountain’s range reaches for the moon and makes tidal waves in the sea of tranquillity, all fronted by a singer who looks bewilderingly like Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart. Wonderful, wilfully incongruous brilliance.
And from the incongruous to camouflaged harmony. Amid the lakes and fields of undulating splendour, Laura Marling graces Latitude’s tranquil late-afternoon surroundings like a breeze – her somnolent, airy seduction a sonic synchronicity that could shame the birds in the trees with its ergonomic excellence. Other wildlife seeking to rampage the landscape are, aptly enough, Wild Beasts, whose paradoxical static performance is a canny disguise for the slavering wolverine of a performance that leaves everyone hooting and howling with banshee-like abandon. A far cry from Everything Everything, whose sparse falsetto-laden tinkerings fall surprisingly short in these surroundings, even the kinetic aceness of ‘MY KZ, UR BF’ render Everything Everything nothing nothing to shout about about. Double trouble.
But vociferous ebullience is soon restored with The National, whose grandiose melancholy perfectly brings the Friday to a close. As the twilight hits with palpable synchronicity, singer Matt Berninger’s forlorn baritone soundtracks the setting sun with soporific beauty, track like ‘Mistaken For Strangers’ and ‘Afraid of Everyone’ paradoxically alienating while slowly extrapolating the stranger in all of us. And by the time ‘Fake Empire’ delivers its majestic climax, there’s an ineffable harmony coursing through the crowd that, much like the festival itself, seems equally integral and incidental – like an unexpected love informing you that, right in front of you, you’d always known what was possible. A National treasure. Much like this fledgling five-year-old festival is turning out to be.