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In a Green Man Minute: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

The Who? **
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** Seen at the 2007 Green Man Festival. Festivals, like all closed social systems, have rules. One of them is that the last band - the very last band, the band that headlines the final day, the band that enjoys the number one ranking - gets to be the loudest band, gets to tell the sound technicians to push the levels to the proverbial “eleven”, and stand over them as they do it.

The Jicks availed themselves of this privilege. During his interview the day before, Stephen Malkmus said of Joanna Bolme (base), Janet Weiss (drums) and Mike Clark (synth), “these guys can really shred”.

They took the stage; they didn’t fear the noise; they blasted this folk festival back to the rock age. They were the loudest band I have heard. I wore earplugs, but after the gig, after I had removed the plugs, normal sounds drowned in my ears like whispers in a wind tunnel. (For a taste of just how loud they were, see the second video clip below.)

The intervals between numbers were as entertaining as the songs themselves (new stuff; Pig Lib stuff; and, as an encore, “Baby C’mon” from Face the Truth). Malkmus did a slow striptease as he heated up: off came the hoodie; off came the lumberjack shirt. He told jokes, and dissed the rival V Fest, underway in Chelmsford and Staffordshire - “you need Viagra to get through Kasabian… but we endorse the Cribs!” He also endorsed the Wire, in another moment of banter that Your Correspondent was able, after earlier fumbling, to capture for Boswest TV: see the first clip below.

After the set, as we stood in a near-empty Green Man beer tent, holding pints in plastic cups, my Lovely Assistant wondered aloud whether the drumming of Janet Weiss (ex-Sleater Kinney) didn’t imperil the Jicks’ sound, by nudging it too far, ontologically, in the direction of the Who. But it was a contented wondering-aloud - or, perhaps a better term, a sated wondering-aloud, the wondering-aloud of a person who had got everything she came for. The Green Man Festival’s stakes were being pulled even as we sipped, and yet our ears were ringing with it.

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Stephen Malkmus on England’s third best band: