overview

When the floods which left most of southern England underwater last July cruelly washed away Truckfest 10, it briefly looked bad for the festival. However, within hours the organisers - those lovely people at Truck Records - had shunted the whole event back to September, and this spring they're back with not one, but two festivals.

Billed as Truck's smaller, environmentally-friendly sister festival, Wood has taken on a lot of the principles that have made its older brother so successful over the past decade, but it has a very different feel and a blossoming identity of its own.

Held in the beautiful Braziers Park, a community dwelling in leafy and affluent South Oxfordshire, near Henley-on-Thames, it has a laid-back and liberal, mostly middle-class feel, with a maximum capacity of 1,000.

While Truck has gained a reputation for drawing together an ambitious and diverse line-up of bands for such a small festival, Wood's ethos is not focused on music. There is a full programme of acts across three days on the Wood Stage - a picture postcard log cabin at the bottom of an amphitheatre-like slope, and in the Tree Tent, but the spotlight is on the myriad activities and workshops you can take part in.



Tai-Chi classes are held out in the open, gong showers are available at a very reasonable price and there's woodwork lessons, instruction on how to make a wallet out of an OJ carton, circus skills, African drumming and an eco-friendly scavenger hunt in the woods for the kids.

The food is delicious, with Tadka Dhal, butternut squash and goat's cheese sandwiches and leak, potato and nettle soup among the items on the menu in the cafe. It's very tasty, but designed perhaps more with a lazy summer's day in mind rather than the granite-grey skies, finger-freezing temperatures and resolute drizzle Wood is blessed with for the first two days. Style appears a little more important than substance and value for money.

There are some excellent innovations on site, from the compost urinals and wood-burning-stove-powered sauna to the 'Magnificent Revolution' tent, with its sound system and lights powered by a row of bicycles, which are, surprisingly, an incredibly popular attraction at all hours of the day and night. There are a couple of glitches, as you'd expect from a new festival, such as the Wood Stage having to "power down" for a couple of hours because the sun had not poked its head through the Oxfordshire cloud often enough to charge the solar panels, but on the whole things run smoothly and without fuss throughout the three days.



The organisers are also pretty clued-up on recycling, with all waste being split into the right categories and - a neat idea this - posts stuck in the ground for you to stick your empty beer cups on ready to be collected and recycled later.

As a result there's next to no litter anywhere on the site, even by Monday morning, and it helps add to the feel of a very family-friendly festival, with children happily playing around the site and joining in with the workshops. Mums are able to visit the 'Breastfeeding Bus' for a bit of privacy. Most of the bands are drawn from the local area, with Oxford's folk and singer-songwriter scene healthily represented throughout the bill. Friday night's highlight is The Epstein. Their gentle Americana, coloured with mandolin and slide guitar, bursts into extended multi-textured bluesy rock-outs and if the genre of shoegazing-cum-bluegrass didn't exist before, then it should be invented for these guys. Let's call it Shoegrass, demonstrated to good effect on 'I'll Be Gone' and the excellent instrumentals '6.06pm' and 'Last Of The Charanguistas'.

Stornoway's upbeat, cheery folk is inoffensive enough and their singer's voice does have an uncanny resemblance to that of Tim Booth from James, while their keyboardist looks remarkably like Kip from the film Napoleon Dynamite. 'The Good Fish Guide' is a bizarre little ditty that sounds not unlike 'The Monster Mash' and is, as the name suggests, a list of good and bad types to eat, from the band's personal perspective. Odd.

In the Tree Tent Indigo Moss, also known as Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, him in pinstripe suit and panama hat, her in a flowing, floral dress, conjure pretty little duets that evoke Desire-era Bob Dylan. The chemistry between them is obvious and the songs exquisite, carefully-spun folk tales.



KTB keeps the early-evening crowd entertained with her bouncy acoustic numbers, although 'I don't want to dance like Holly Valance' with the clumsy line "I don't want to dance like Holly Valance, nobody's dancing like me/They look for a mistake in every move I make, I just want to be free' wasn't one of her better ideas, one assumes.

All the way from Charlottesville, Virginia, Devon Sproule's star is very much on the ascent at the moment and her short Sunday set is a real delight. Playing early evening, with the sun setting behind the little chocolate box stage, while a pair of toddlers merrily kick a football back and forth between themselves just a few feet in front of her, it's an idyllic scene, evoking a bygone age. She's charmingly bashful, witty and has an enchanting voice that feels like a warm blanket placed carefully around your shoulders.



The shuffling, bouncy opening song 'Old Virginia Block' pays tribute to the home she has left behind to tour the British and European festivals this summer for the first time and she's a name that's going to become increasingly familiar over the coming months. 'Keep Your Silver Shined', with the line "Racing out ahead to be the reddest heartbeat beating" and the yearning, bitter-sweet 'Come Comet or Dove' stand out from a touching, wonderful collection of songs. Lightspeed Champion is also about to embark on a huge, world-trotting tour, starting at the Royal Albert Hall as support to The Wombats, and taking in America, Canada, Europe and - the hottest ticket of all - T4 on the Beach, in Weston-super-Mare.

He trades in all-together more catchy pop numbers than Devon and, with many of the crowd having made a Sunday-evening exit, he's greeted by a crowd of around 50 tired-looking people. His set, perhaps as a result, seems untidy and is almost like watching him run through a private rehearsal, particularly when he indulges himself with Hendrix-like workouts on his guitar.



With the sun set on the first Wood, the communal bonfire faded to embers, and the reverberations from the last gong shower having fallen silent it's clear that the festival has been a success. Relaxed, welcoming and practising a healthy, green ethos but without ramming it down your throat or being dogmatic, it has clearly captured the imagination of the local population. Whether it can have a broader appeal to a wider market remains to be seen, but it seems Truck's new baby sister will be around for a while.

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