Music, Style & Culture

4 Bands To See At Ben & Jerry’s Sundae On The Common ‘10

This festival is entirely about ice cream.

Each summer, around late July, a thing of peculiar delight befalls Clapham Common. More delightful than all other delightful events and spectacles staged there throughout the year. Revellers of all ages, tastes and sizes relinquish their differences and otherwise socially inhibitive opinions of each other in exchange for an amiable measure of pure, childlike glee. An almost romantic sense of frivolity asserts itself, that of- alright, FINE. I’ll stop.

Here is a surprising truth package. Ben & Jerry's Sundae On The Common is entirely about ice cream. Free ice cream. In each corner and precipice, as far as the eye can see. It is about nothing else. If you are under the impression that this festival is concerned to any negligible degree with anything other than ice cream, you have been deceived, and probably keep questionable company. If this festival was staged without bands, rides, toilets or any other attractions, it would continue to draw the exact same crowd as it does currently. If you were to ask an individual leaving the festival on either day as to their opinion on the bands that performed, they will tell you that Ice Cream were really good and had developed a very tight live set, but that that other band, Ice Cream, were too quiet, played obscure songs and obviously didn’t take the gig seriously. This would imply that the incorporation of any kind of music, in general, is simply for appearances, intended as a front to allow the event to assume the false moniker of a “festival”, amongst other summer frolics that are dedicated to music rather than the most enjoyable method of committing suicide ever. Similar to how drug dealers sometimes operate out of supermarkets which are stocked only with tubes of Smarties that went out of date seventeen years ago.

This leads neatly on to the fact that, like those festering tubes of Smarties, the quality, and nutritional benefit, of bands playing at the Ben and Jerry’s Summer Sundae festival over the years has been notoriously questionable. From The Ordinary Boys, to The Feeling, reaching all the way to a particularly obtuse crime against sound called King Creosote, the festival has always insisted on reserving a certain measure of stage time for, bluntly, some shit. This period can confidently be named as “Jeremy Kyle time”, an hour or so in which would be wisely spent sampling the festival’s many other regular attractions. This can be credited to the fact that there is no such thing as a precise demographic called “people who eat ice cream” to market to. Thankfully, however, the ratio of good, often classic bands to bands who often perform in shopping centres is at least 3 to 1 here – take Camera Obscura, Super Furry Animals and, incredibly, The Human League, for example. This year, while not as stellar as all that, is, evidently, no different in this respect. So, without further ado, let’s separate the shit from the not shit and identify four bands worth looking up from your wheelbarrows of ice cream for. For this purpose, I am going to pretend that Scouting for Girls are not headlining one of the days this year. I’m not even going to tell you which day it is. Not that you wanted to know.

Idlewild

“On hiatus” as of April this year, then out of hiatus as of a month later is unsurprising for a band with six albums out over fifteen years, spanning everything from Britpop to Shoegaze to Indie. Through it all, however, Idlewild never lost a knack for making a fanfare of some magnitude out of almost every song they write and play. A fanfare quite suited to this festival.

Listen to Idlewild on Spotify

Slow Club

Slower (What!? Really?), tempered, mulling faux-folk music with a boy/girl vocal dynamic, rebounding off each other, which has all but died out in most modern songwriting. Something to sit down on your picnic mat to.

Listen to Slow Club on Spotify

Doves

A band that has been performing, and writing, long enough to understand that a lasting appeal cannot be retained if your style, sound and beat signatures remain the same in all of your songs (you hear that, Scouting for Girls? No-one cares anymore about the thousands of different ways you’ve tried to pursue the same girl. In every track. Every single one). As a result, we’ll be expecting a diverse, well-considered live set. And maybe a few absolutely killer riffs.

Listen to Doves on Spotify

Frightened Rabbit

Rustic, fuzzy, euphoric fare, with an excellent command of both lyrics and rhythm. Would invite comparisons most frequently with Death Cab for Cutie, though do not sound like they’re about to cry.

Listen to Frightened Rabbit on Spotify