All Tomorrow's Parties

The manifesto of Barry Hogan, founder and organiser of All Tomorrow’s Parties, is pretty candid about the festival’s polar opposition to the conventional summer hootenanny: “Losers like The Hives, Andrew WK and the Streets will not be performing. There will be none of the fools from Oasis parading around backstage and masturbating over their talentless friends... and no VIP area, so the bands can’t act like rock stars.”

In a sense, ATP is an anti-festival. Each year’s ‘curator’ – the band who decide what other acts to invite – is willfully chosen on the grounds of their rejection or open denunciation of the mainstream music system. The festival is not advertised through normal channels, there is no sponsorship, and the whole affair is – horror of horrors – civilised, comfortable and muck-free, thanks to the chalet accommodation (on the East Sussex coast) included in the ticket price.

So Shellac, given their reputation for relentless musical independence, their stentorian energy and frontman Steve Albini’s vociferous dislike/hatred of Big Music, were an ideal choice as curators of ATP2002.

The most recent, and arguably most brilliant, project from knob-twiddling savant Albini (who engineered PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me, Nirvana’s In Utero, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and thousands more), Shellac deliver the kind of utterly uncompromising, abrasive live shows that leave you undecided as to whether you’ve been exfoliated or flayed. Yet they maintain an unapologetic sense of humour, inviting the audience in rather than keeping them at a distance. Their three daytime performances were, to this writer’s mind, the categorical highlights of the weekend.

Not that there weren’t others. Godspeed You Black Emperor! were predictably fabulous, and the modest indoor venue they chose to demolish made their set at once soaring and intimate. Weird-punk heroes The Fall were also on form, with the frenetic Mark E. Smith proving definitively what we had all suspected: he shoots up elixir of youth. And those who predicted that the impossibly beautiful, elegiac strains of Low would flounder in a live context were proved triumphantly wrong.

In such a varied casserole, there are bound to be a few rotten onions, and there were.

No matter, though. The kitchen sink approach is crucial to the festival’s liberal philosophy, and in the final analysis the scales tilted firmly towards excellence.