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Omnipresence is a talent that, as yet, has only been masterminded by the Almighty and Alan Carr. A shame, as with 19 venues and 140 bands all competing for your attention at Sŵn, it would come in quite useful.
Aptly, only Huw Stephens, Radio 1 DJ and passionate supporter of new music, and the genius chap whose mind gave birth to this long overdue festival, seems to have come close. At Sŵn he seems to have a Hiro Nakamura–style ability of being everywhere at once, meaning that you can leave one venue, passing Huw nodding intently to a band, before getting to the next gig and finding him already there, drink in hand.
Sŵn is in its second year and Huw and fellow curator, John Rostron, from local plugging company Plug Two, have upped the ante for 2008, squeezing as many innovative and exciting Welsh and international artists across three busy nights in the Welsh capital. This year they’ve also boosted the festival’s credentials by adding interactive seminars on the music industry, gigs at the local Cineworld, exhibitions (including one on the infamous Sleevefacing trend, which started in Cardiff) and instore sets at the world’s oldest record store, Spillers.
For a city with a long and proud history of producing exciting new music – Los Campesinos, the Automatic and Kids in Glass Houses are just three acts to have emerged of late – Sŵn has been a long time coming, but now that it’s here everyone is devouring it, with most venues packed to capacity and music-wide grins on the hundreds of fans moving swiftly between them.
Classically, for a festival with so much to choose from, it’s a major headache actually making a decision between venues. It’s like one of those tasks where you have to pick the less worthy to throw out of the hot air balloon - you know each decision could come back to haunt you. So after we enjoy the twisting, surf-pop of Cymbient at Buffalo Bar, we turn up at the Gate for Martin Carr to be immediately told how great John Mouse’s earlier set of cutting, anti-folk was. Typical.
We nurse our wounds with Pagan Wanderer Lu’s affective, wry, folktronica in the Gate’s second room before heading upstairs for one of the coups of the weekend, Martin Carr. The Gate’s converted church-charm should be a perfect setting for the former Boo Radley singer’s lush, breezy, Americana, but with only a few dozen souls braving the trip to this side of town the atmosphere seems far too hushed to fully embrace Carr’s tender tales.
A taxi ride back into the centre delivers us at the door of the Threatmantics, already piling through their discordant pop archery at Clwb Ifor Bach. This infectious trio share much of the inspired risk-taking of some of the greats of leftfield Welsh language acts that have preceded them – notably Datblygu, Ffa Coffi Pawb and early Gorky’s Zygotic Mynchi. Plugging their new album, ‘Upbeat Love’, Threatmantics spiral round in an intoxicating daze of viola, drums and keyboard, like some village folk witchcraft, before ending with the deliciously viola-led ‘Don’t Care’.
We have minutes to spare before Rolo Tomassi so we literally fall out of Clwb and dash round the corner to a packed Dirty Sue’s cafe, where Huw MM is doing a fine job of diverting attention from Children in Need on the television with some haunting folk. When he switches from acoustic to banjo, the chill Huw conjures up seems to strum the hair on the back of necks in time to his own banjo plucking. Very special.
Rolo Tomassi have already begun carving up the downstairs of Clwb by the time we return, a few hundred people bearing down on the Sheffield band while they retaliate with a delightful splatter of disjointed noise. Fact: Rolo Tomassi are the only band with a singer that looks like À bout de soufflé’s Jean Seberg while simultaneously screaming like Lee Dorian from Napalm Death.
Tomassi’s set signals a welcome left-turn to the evening. It’s dark, the wolves are out and they’re pining for something just as challenging. How about four guys in surgery gowns and masks who’d like to operate on your mind with scalpel-sharp psyche-rock? Dressed as they are, Clinic are always good in an emergency and give us an hour of thrusting, spiralling, sonic energy that scares and excites in equal measure. We emerge from surgery blistered and bruised, but with newly carved grins. And they didn’t even offer us an anaesthetic.
Whoop! It’s the Casiokids! Arriving three hours late – circumnavigating 70,000 rugby fans leaving the Millennium Stadium proves a problem for the entire Moshi Moshi bill at the Kaz Bar tonight – the Norwegians immediately set about creating an engaging headrush of juicy, electro-pop. Armed with old analogue keyboards, a compelling urge to get up and close to the crowd and a Super Furry Animals-ability to submerge themselves in fuzzy, trashy pop, Casiokids completely rock the Kaz Bar.
Sŵn’s first outing nearly tucked away, we end the night at Tafod, a delicious, dirty romp of a nightclub on the River Taff where a boy dressed in a neon-green tracksuit with a sewn-on scaly-tale, crushes the dancefloor with aggressive techno and sleazy electro. This is Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and only someone who individually lists every dinosaur as influences on his MySpace page can finish the first night of Sŵn in such style.
