If there’s one thing we know about Britain, it’s that there’s a time and a place for keeping oneself to oneself.
We are, after all, not known for being a nation of small talkers. Never has a man been met with such scorn as when he dared to strike up a conversation on a London bus, and God forbid you’d ever dare to attempt to make eye contact with a stranger on the tube. We like our personal space, polite nods, and an inaudible tut if we feel particularly wronged, and we’d implore you not to ask any further questions, thank you very much.
But of course, one can’t spend all their time wrapped in a bubble of British social nonchalance.
And if ever there was a place that was tailor-made to push a person out of their comfort zone – one that encourages you to roam free, and explore new feelings, and release your inhibitions (even if there’s rain upon your skin) – then it just might be Truck Festival.
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Accurately referred to as the nation’s most warped village fete, Truck Festival has slowly but surely gained a reputation as one of the British festival season’s hidden(ish) gems.
If you ask us, it’s the perfect festival. It’s big enough to attract some of the country’s best-loved bands, yet compact enough that getting from one stage to another doesn’t require a compass, a packed lunch and a tearful goodbye to your family.
And somehow, it’s still retained an intimate feel. There are strangers talking to each other, voluntarily. There are people sharing drinks. There are grown adults wearing outfits that would prompt an immediate welfare check in any other setting. People are smiling, and having fun, and it’s all rather lovely, really.
So it’s no surprise that, by Friday afternoon, the famous British reserve is already beginning to weaken.
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Bristol post-punkers My First Time are among the first to give it a proper shove.
There’s no polite easing into proceedings; gangly limbs jerk, guitars and drums snap into place, and the whole stage moves with the nervous energy of somebody who’s just downed three Red Bulls and suddenly remembered that they’ve left the iron plugged in.
They’ve got several songs that would be any other new band’s best. Much Better and Brand New are early highlights, while we’d be damned if Paris, Texas isn’t a lost The 1975 hit waiting to happen.
By the end, they’ve achieved the primary objective of any emerging festival band: ensuring that several hundred people leave feeling faintly smug about having seen them before everybody else did.
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Fellow Bristolians Getdown Services, meanwhile, have no interest in being faintly anything.
The duo look like two men who have accidentally wandered out of a pub and onto a festival stage, only to decide that they may as well get on with it. What follows is part post-punk show, part cabaret performance and part fever dream brought on by eating something inadvisable from a service station.
Their songs are funny without becoming novelty songs, catchy without behaving themselves, and built around observations that feel increasingly profound after several hours in a field. The crowd responds by losing its collective mind.
They’re brilliant, and you’d be daft not to see them at your earliest possible convenience.
And then, we disappear into the night.
There are hazy memories of The Maccabees, Primal Scream playing a frankly blinding rendition of Country Girl, and a slightly regrettable combination of deep-fried potatoes and a far-too-fast-for-our-liking Ferris wheel; but all we can be sure of is that fun was had.
Which is the entire point of Truck Festival, really.
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Saturday brings a slightly sore head, another slap of sun cream, and a stagger towards the nearest food van for a medicinal bacon baguette and an iced coffee that might actually have been sent from the gods.
It also brings The Vaccines, a band with more than enough indie ammunition to win over any festival crowd, and enough uptempo bangers to cure even the most stubborn of hangovers.
In case you hadn’t noticed, their songs seem to have been constructed in a lab with the sole intention of making several thousand people bounce in sweaty unison. Their best songs waste very little time getting to the point, which is a useful quality when playing to a crowd containing people who have been drinking cider since breakfast. In the name of journalistic integrity, of course.
Justin Young is the textbook frontman, all chiselled jawline and impeccable vocals and the kind of charm that seems unattainable when you’ve been sleeping in a tent for a couple of nights. He’s the perfect leading man for a summertime smash through some bonafide indie-rock bangers.
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And yet, somehow, Kaiser Chiefs are even better equipped for the job.
Few bands understand the requirements of a British festival quite so thoroughly. You need hooks, you need choruses, and you need enough energy to reach the people at the back who have spent half the set queueing for chips. These Leeds lads have all of those in abundance.
Oh, and you need a secret weapon as your singer.
Fortunately for band and crowd alike, Ricky Wilson remains one of the country’s most industrious frontmen, approaching the stage as though he’s been personally challenged to bellow at every member of the crowd before he heads off home.
The songs, of course, are enormous. Ruby and I Predict A Riot have long since passed beyond being mere hit singles and entered the realm of public property, shouted back by thousands of people with the confidence of those who consider themselves part of the arrangement.
The crowd are going mad. Ricky’s diving head-first into them. It is big, daft and completely effective.
As is Truck Festival, really.
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By the time we reach Sunday, inhibitions are in dangerously short supply.
Rizzle Kicks arrive to find a crowd primed for one of the weekend’s most undeniably brilliant sprints down memory lane.
Down With The Trumpets and Mama Do The Hump are received like cherished national heirlooms, while Lost Generation is greeted with the kind of roar more generally reserved for an Englishman burying a penalty or a friend returning to the pub table with crisps.
Around us, thousands of people rediscover dance moves they should probably have left buried in the early 2010s. Nobody is judging. Well, not openly. Because that’s just not how things work at Truck.
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Later in the day, The Libertines offer a rather different type of nostalgia.
Their set is loose, scruffy and perpetually in danger of wandering into a hedge. Guitars jangle against one another, songs threaten to unravel, and Pete Doherty occasionally appears to be operating on a slight delay from everybody else.
It’s not polished, but it’s not supposed to be. After all, it wouldn’t be The Libertines without the threat of everything falling apart at any moment. Doherty and Carl Barât remain indie’s favourite boyfriends, sharing microphones and glances with the intimacy of two people who have lived through far too much to bother explaining any of it to us.
We’re happy, tired, and potentially a little bit sunburnt. They’re brash, probably a little bit drunk, and definitely brilliant.
So far, so Truck.
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It’s left to The Wombats to shut up shop for the weekend, armed with an armful of indie classics and a crowd that spends most of the set thinking ‘wait, I didn’t know this was those guys!’.
Moving To New York, Greek Tragedy and Let’s Dance To Joy Division arrive like old friends, albeit the sort who remind you of sticky nightclub floors and photographs that should have been deleted from Facebook years ago. Later cuts like Method To The Madness and Lemon To A Knife Fight are greeted with a roar as loud as any other song that was blasted from the Truck Stage this weekend (with the possible exception of Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles).
A blast of a firework, a strum of a guitar, and a visibly emotional Scouser completing his work thanking the crowd for supporting his band for the last twenty-odd years.
And by the end of Sunday night, Truck has also completed its work.
For one weekend, we’ve spoken to strangers, danced like fools, and formed brief but temporarily heartfelt friendships with people whose surnames we’ll never know. We’ve abandoned our personal space, our dignity and, in some cases, a perfectly good camping chair.
Tents are packed, bags are slowly dragged towards cars and shuttle buses, and thousands of tired festivalgoers return to the real world, smelling faintly of smoke, aftersun, and Thatchers.
But nobody talks on the journey home, obviously.
There are limits.
