This year's festival
I do love this job. Why else would I travel to Oxfordshire to attend Truck? I've paid my festival dues, and stopped going to Glastonbury in 1995, feeling ready for a life without Workers' Beer Company cups, vegetable tempura in a polystyrene tray and dry grass down Doctor Marten boots. But last year 6 Music sent me to Summer Sundae in Leicester and it was a terrific experience. Modest, local festival, good atmosphere, easy to wander offsite and get a train home. Likewise, Truck, which is even smaller, albeit slightly older than Summer Sundae at nine. Marc Riley did his show from the site on Saturday and, listening to it from the air-conditioned cool of 6 Music, I was struck by how little I fancied being there, as torrential rains came down while he was on air, and Julie Cullen was unable to do any of her backpack-assisted roving reportage. There was talk of wellies. While I appreciate the need for water during a drought and welcome it on my back garden and the parched Wray common, I wished for a dry day today. And we got it.



I drove up this morning, listening along the way to Regina Spektor's excellent new album (and Lily Allen's, which is entirely lovable). Up the A34 I passed signs for a village called Compton, which gave me a smile. The rolling Oxfordshire countryside couldn't be further from NWA's hood. All around is yellow cereal crop. Big wheels of wheat. It's rather lovely. Truck signs greeted me on the A3106 and I followed them, and the straggle of indie campers who'd ventured into Steventon for breakfast and supplies, to the site, which really is on a farm. I was a bit fancy with my ARTIST CAR PASS, watching barriers part as I approached them, but all it got me was a space next to a cow shed. Truck doesn't really do backstage. Indeed, the entire festival would fit into the backstage area at Glastonbury. There are stages everywhere. It's possible to stand in the middle and hear about three bands at once. The Didcot Rotary Club do the food. This is admirable, and gives the event a certain summer fete feel, but it also means that, as a festival, Truck is lacking the traditional "food village" of other similar events (no vegetarian curry? no tempura? no Cumberland sausages in a roll?) - it's a burger and a doughnut or nothing, really. Avoiding wheat here is as difficult as avoiding it in your eyeline as you drive up the A34. I ate a roll and a doughnut. It was that or starve.

The show went well from the sweatbox studio in a barn where Goldrush (festival organisers) record. I got gradually more shiny as the three hours went by. I met Henry and Kaps from Mystery Jets, who came in for a chat (like a good festival band, they are camping and have been here all weekend), also Regina Spektor, who was in a bad mood due to some trouble getting into the festival, refused to have her photo taken by Kris from the 6 Music website and bridled at my innocent (and true) description of her new album as more "accessible", but played a great song for us anyway, and The Race, a band from Reading, who brought everyone they knew into our tiny hot bunker for their song. I do like an outside broadcast - you tend to meet the same reliable hairy blokes who do this for the BBC for a living and can set up a working studio just about anywhere. So, I didn't get to see many bands outside of our own sessions (I think I saw the Dungeons in the Barn, which is a barn, but I can't be sure, and I caught The Race on the Truck Stage), but that's what happens when you leave the site the second your show's over.

If I'm going to attend a festival, I don't demand a car pass, but I do prefer the option to come and go as I please, and, ideally, to eat some wheat-free food. Oh, and I do demand that it is a nice place to spend some time. Truck fulfilled nearly all of those criteria, and I salute it.