So Excited to Go Again Tomrrow

All Tomorrow's Parties is a innovative documentary culled from found-fan-footage featuring peachy performances, but Robert Barry asks if it faithfully capture the spirit of the festival we all love

From 2000 to 2004, I went to every unmarried All Tomorrow's Parties festival held in this country. After attending three festivals in 2004 — the two "director'due south cutting" weekends in the bound plus the Chapman Brothers-curated Nightmare Before Christmas — and finally airsickness outside the Queen Victoria pub on the final night, I didn't go again. Maybe that year had felt rather like ATP overload, maybe I but couldn't become quite so excited about the curators anymore (I mean, come on, Vincent Gallo? The Mars Volta? Whatever . . .), perhaps the nature of my own professional life was making information technology harder and harder to book weekends off to go to festivals, or maybe I was only besides lazy to go all the way out westward to Minehead. Either mode, the dream, it seemed, was over.

By the finish of the 90s I had pretty well sworn off United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland festivals. I'd been to V and I'd been to Reading and I'd been to the Essential Festival in Brighton and I'd pretty well hated them all. Only All Tomorrow'south Parties promised to be something different. No camping for a start — this earned a big thumbs upward from me — and a line-up that hadn't been block-booked by a shadowy cabal of bearding promoters and booking agents, but specially curated past a single band, and a band that I liked and respected at that. The rule of pollex of festival going had been overturned — at Reading or V I could safely presume that 90% of the bands I hadn't heard of would be rubbish; at ATP the contrary was true. It was a affair of trust. I trusted Mogwai, and Tortoise, and Autechre to pick an interesting line-up, and to chose performers who, if I wasn't already familiar with them, well, I jolly well should be. So, my ears were opened to Wolf Optics and Pita, OOIOO and the Threnody Ensemble, Bernard Parmegiani and Yasunao Tone — foreign and wonderful sounds I might otherwise accept never come across.

Unfortunately, this is not really the festival represented in All Tomorrow's Parties — The Film. Of grade, ten years ago, Barry Hogan and others at Foundation probably never had an inkling that the festival would yet exist going strong a decade later, information technology may not have occured to them that ATP would become as much a part of the United kingdom'south music festival civilisation as whatever other; nor that, in the days when the Reading Festival was still the Reading Festival and non yet the Carling Weekender and things similar the O2 Wireless Festival and the Ben and Jerry's Festival were but a twinkle in the PR human being's eye, one day a festival without a major corporate sponsor might seem rather odd, unique even.

Equally a issue, virtually of the footage comes from the last v years — the post-YouTube, post-camera phone years in which no-one really believes they've experienced annihilation until they've posted their home video of it on Facebook — and then it's scarcely recognisable to me as the festival I once loved so much. In fact, if there is a problem with this picture show, it'southward that information technology ends up making the festival seem, well, like any other festival: here are the big indie crossover acts (Yep Yeah Yeahs, Portishead), in that location are the 70's rock heritage bands (The Stooges, Patti Smith); throw in a token reggae act (Jah Shaka) and a token hip hop human activity (GZA) and it could be the line-up to whatever festival anywhere in the globe from any time in the last five years. I don't care if Slint miss me (I certainly never missed them),;I don't care if Nick Cavern isn't getting any "pussy"; and I don't intendance a hoot for any band that accept been curated by Explosions in the Sky. What happened to all the weird stuff?

One of the nearly grating scenes in the film occurs nigh half way through. For what seems like forever, Warren Ellis (of The Bad Seeds and The Muddied 3) and Dave Pajo (of Slint and Papa K), stand around exterior saying, "Oh, hey dude, you were awesome, and did you lot see that other band? Man, they were really awesome too." Over and over again. This piddling indie rock circle wiggle is only beaten for unintentional comedy value by Thurston Moore'southward impression of Butthead doing an impression of Noam Chomsky ("Like, dude, capitalism, like, totally sucks and stuff" etc.) But as with all documentaries nigh music festivals the about annoying people are e'er the punters — the pilled-upward idiot playing an acoustic guitar, the guys who think they're just so wacky and crazy that they just have to tell everyone almost it, the dreadful bongo-driven "fan ring" in a chalet. It could almost be Bestival. Only if the film's greatest weakness is the fans, then they are also its greatest force.

For a film almost entirely composed of amateur footage, sent in by festival-goers, this is undoubtedly i of the best looking, best sounding stone documentaries I've seen for a very long time. The shots are ofttimes gorgeous, and the editing is spot on, with great apply of separate screens and archive footage from the heyday of the vacation camps equally holiday camps. It is of course perfectly fitting that a film about a festival that has, from time to time, turned over curatorial duties to "the fans" should turn out to exist a triumph of crowd-sourcing, and this is, in many ways, a wonderful, if at times a little self-congratulatory, tribute to a great festival. It just isn't almost the festival I loved, nor does information technology really make me desire to go back.

All Tomorrow's Parties - The Film volition be screened at this weekend'southward Branchage International Film Festival and will tour the UK alongside Les Savy Fav and others playing alive in October:

Thu Oct xv – Hull, Adelphi (with Gravenhurst)
Fri Oct 23 – Manchester Deaf Institute (with Les Savy Fav)
Sat Oct 24 – Glasgow ABC 2 (with Les Savy Fav)
Sabbatum October 24 - Brighton Knuckles of York (midnight bear witness as part of 'White _Nights', with live bands tbc)
Mon Oct 26 – London Forum (with Les Savy Fav)
Tue October 27 – Leeds TJ'due south Woodhouse Club (with Les Savy Fav)
Wednesday Oct 28 – Bristol Watershed (with Team Brick)

The DVD will exist released on two November.

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Source: https://thequietus.com/articles/02822-all-tomorrow-s-parties-the-film-review

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