The best of Belfest

It’s October. It’s Belfest time again and, as ever, we’re moving from venue to venue in the rain, encountering all sorts of strange performers – from Christian folkies to sulphur-voiced metalers – and wondering where did these audiences come from? And where do they hide for the rest of the year?

Yes, our own bite-sized (okay, nibble-sized) In The City is back with two days of free showcase gigs hosted by various boozers clustered around the city centre. And, considering that some serious behind-the-scenes difficulties almost put this year’s event in doubt, organisers Gerard Sheppard and Sean Arnold, as always, deserve as much praise as we can muster for ensuring that this popular, and increasingly vital, collection of shows and workshops is once again taking place.

With almost 40 different performers spread over two consecutive nights you rarely have the luxury of catching anyone’s entire set, while clashes in scheduling mean inevitably missing out on acts that would be well worth seeing. But the physicality of moving from place to place – swapping opinions with people leaving gigs that you’re about to enter, joining proceedings on the last note of the last song – grants Belfest a shuffling vibrancy quite unlike anything else dedicated to promoting local music.

At the end of Wednesday night, with most pilgrims finally settling to watch the Desert Hearts’ headline slot at The Empire, it was great to hear a generalised lack of consensus concerning anything that had happened earlier. People had obviously been watching bands they had never seen before and, more hearteningly, there were many present who would never normally go to hear local music. So, Wicked, Wicked Cowgirls were great. Wicked, Wicked Cowgirls were shit. Clone Quartet are a shambles. Clone Quartet are the most imaginative group in the city. Tracer AMC played the most transcendent gig of the last five years. Tracer AMC spent half an hour making dolphin noises on their guitar. Whatever the opinion – it was good to hear people talking loudly about gigs rather than talking loudly during them.

If these kind of events are important to bands, they are every bit as crucial in the struggle to encourage people to come and see live music.

As it stands October is dedicated primarily to (and this is a clumsy but unavoidable term) guitar acts – be they indie, death metal or coyly new acoustic – while the springtime Digital T shifts the focus squarely onto the dance scene. There are a lot of good reasons for this dual approach – the most convincing one stresses that, as it stands, the music scene here gets two chances a year to show itself off. The most practical one involves the demands of certain sponsors keen to associate themselves explicitly with one form of music over another. Whither or not it continues that way, though, is a moot point. However, if by necessity Belfest is ever forced to slim down to once a year, that need not be the disaster it appears. There are any number of highly promising acts here doing interesting things with guitars (and if you’ve followed the development of Tracer, Desert Hearts and Kidd Dynamo from previous festivals you couldn’t but be struck by the improvement), and the quality of the upcoming prodigies messing around with beats (not to mention their invigorating surplus of positive attitude) is close to breathtaking.

Before Belfest’s initial partition, the most interesting gigs in town were always those that pitched the two camps together, where you could watch Tracer right before Calibre. And it was evident then, as it is now, that much of the most exhilarating music coming out of Belfast at the moment is being produced by acts that refuse any kind of dance/indie distinction. Acts – and I’m talking about the likes of Foam, Jupiter Ace, Roo Nation – who seem to believe that once you start skating along those kind of faultlines there are all manner of great sounds available. So if Belfest becomes a once a year treat, we’ll be disappointed, but it may well taste an awful lot richer.

The crowds willing to move from venue to venue this week show that Belfast has an appetite for a-la-carte gigging. I think they’d be brave enough for a more varied menu.

The belFEST 2001 CD is available now