Started in 2009, this festival resembles a church hall evening social rather than a psychedelic frenzy, and that is its charm. It’s a small, friendly and parochial event, bringing a varied lineup of ostensibly druggy music to a genteel audience, few of whom appear to have taken anything stronger than bitter and roll-ups.
Lewes is the most whimsical and bohemian of towns. But then psychedelia – at least in its more fey English form – is the most whimsical and bohemian of genres. I spot one girl carrying a tin kettle and hope it might contain mushroom tea. It turns out to have been repurposed as a handbag.
The lower end of the bill appears to have been assembled by an online psychedelic band-name generator: Soft Walls, Zofff, Wax Machine. The latter are very 1967, with added sax. Soft Walls, meanwhile, with their big, fuzzed-up songs, slashing guitar chords and tick-tock-thud drums – are closer to 1989 (when, I’d guess, none of them were yet born). No Pink Grape or Moby Floyd, but perhaps next year.
Zofff are a supergroup, in a niche way, a space-rock instrumental quartet centred on the guitar of Bic Hayes (Cardiacs, Levitation). Virginia Wing’s staccato electronic drone is let down by an equipment malfunction they might, with a little more aplomb, have passed off as deliberate hyper minimalism.
Yet to do themselves justice on record, Novella are terrific live, a long, heady rush of motorik rhythm, layered guitars and spectral vocals, feminising this often rather male mode as refreshingly as Stereolab once did. Headliners Cult of Dom Keller are a heavy-duty lot: a rumbling juggernaut of a band propelled by bass that smacks into you like a stack of cue balls in a thick, wet woollen sock.
Psychedelia’s roots lie in places like this much more than in Swinging London. It’s good to see it come home.
