Nine years ago, Caught by the River began life as a website that allowed stressed urban dwellers to appreciate more bucolic pleasures and re-engage with nature. It has since expanded to encompass a magazine, book publishing, a record label, live events and, now, boutique festivals.
Its first London festival, in the picturesque, compact garden of Fulham Palace, bills itself as part rock gig, part literary gathering and part nature symposium. This audacious claim feels justified as you wander from the intricate polyrhythms of Tuareg band Imarhan to the reliably erudite Iain Sinclair likening Gravesend to “a Conradian heart of darkness”.
Yet the setting lends the event the feel of a highly quirky and eclectic village fete, with Saturday afternoon’s festival-goers sipping Pimms in front of Be for One’s ambient electronics-and-strings drone symphony, featuring the recorded buzzing of 40,000 bees. As Ryley Walker growls through his inward-gazing songs in the sunshine like an opiated Springsteen, Amy Liptrot discusses her award-winning debut novel, The Outrun, in the palace’s great hall.
Beth Orton’s recent album, Kidsticks, saw her switch from bare acoustic musings back towards electronica, and it’s a welcome return. Jittery new electro-pop outings Moon and 1973 sound as if she is once more scratching a nebulous but urgent existential itch, and are more engaging than Saturday night headliners Low’s magisterial but ultimately one-paced glacial washes of sound.
The festival’s wilful eccentricity continues on Sunday as the Latin-tinged Llareggub Brass Band parp winningly through the whole of Super Furry Animals’ 2000 album Mwng. Even more diverting is BBC Springwatch nature presenter Chris Packham, who talks movingly of his teenage punk rock epiphany and living with Asperger’s: “I don’t like myself, particularly.”
Packham’s guileless honesty is striking, as is that of veteran pop journalist Sylvia Patterson, promoting her tremendous memoir, I’m Not With the Band. Reflecting on the cultural shifts that have reduced the role of critics and decimated music magazines, she wryly concludes that pop writers are today as redundant as “gaslight lighters in the era of electricity”.
Back on the main stage, Gwenno’s thrumming, left-handed electropop, delivered in Welsh and Cornish, enchants, but Temples’ frazzled psychedelia fails to convince. New songs such as Roman God-Like Man have gained a scuzzy edge, and image-wise they appear to be morphing into the Ramones, but their 1960s retro rock remains so meticulously precise that it can only come across as a homage.
This charge could never be levelled at Super Furry Animals. Re-formed after a five-year hiatus, it’s a joy again to hear their music, where imagination is always the driving force. Clad in white boiler suits, they fire through their acid-rock back catalogue with their usual expansive relish, while comeback single Bing Bong – written in honour of the Welsh football team – exudes their trademark spring-heeled surrealism. As SFA encore, in yeti costumes, with the righteous stoners’ rage of The Man Don’t Give a Fuck, they are fitting headliners for a maverick new event that looks set to be a fine addition to the festival calendar.
