Though a few of the bands scheduled for the earlier dates have pulled out, it still sports a great array of music, and furthermore, it’s all for a good cause.
The Truck festival has donated over 200,000 to charities since its conception in ’98, last year making major donations to The Mali Development Group, which supports peer-education about AIDS in Mali, and Noah’s Ark, which takes young people from Berinsfield on life-changing trips to Africa.
The festival was conceived in 1998 by a bunch of friends looking to put the community spirit back into a format they saw increasingly slipping into the hands of major promoters, and after an initial struggle to convince councillors of the positive effect of rock music in the area, the local community got behind the idea, and it slowly got off the ground. It’s now a tradition at Truck for the local school, Rotary Club, and even the vicar to get involved, and the cross-dressing barmen have entered into local folklore…
Bands at this year’s re-scheduled festival include the renowned likes of Idlewild, Blood Red Shoes, Josh T Pearson, Brakes, iLiKETRAiNS, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Electric Soft Parade, with more excitement generated by burgeoning underground acts like Fanfarlo, Metremony, Oppenheimer and the eccentric inventor Thomas Truax, while the teeming Oxford music scene provides the backbone of the event, the late addition of local heroes Foals one of the bonuses of the September postponement.
Truck is also proud to this year have some of its original ’98 line-up present in various guises, including Emma Pollock from The Delgados, Euros Childs of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, and Silent League, who feature original members of Mercury Rev. It’s all there in the mix, and, set in the homely country expanse of Home Farm in Steventon, it should be a unique, fun and worthy weekend.
