Gig played on 08+09+10/12/06

All Tomorrow's Parties, the indie/alternative weekender of choice for most fans of left-field music has gone up in the world recently. The winter incarnation, The Nightmare Before Christmas, has outgrown the more Spartan surroundings of Pontins in Camber Sands and has moved across country to a venue over twice the capacity. And if the organisers were worried about attendance they needn't have been; if anything the event is oversubscribed, leading to massive queues to get in to see all of the big names. But to ensure that no one misses out all of the big names kindly play twice.

What could be better after a four hour nerve jangling car ride than kicking things off with arch sonic experimentalists Nurse With Wound? Their combination of bass, percussion, samplers and keyboards to make an ungodly noise is by turns amusing and disconcerting. But everyone's really here to see the main headline act of Iggy Pop and The Stooges. And there he is like a shaved Alsatian in a wig and tight jeans pouting, strutting, screaming and rutting.

They tear through "TV Eye", "No Fun", "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "1969" with audacious bravado making you wonder, 'Where does Iggy go from here?' The answer is, of course, he encourages a mass stage invasion which eventually the panic stricken security admit defeat to. A handful more songs, he dives into the crowd, his trousers are gone and not long afterwards he is as well. There isn't a single band on the rest of this bill, either young or old, who expend this much energy.

Sonic Youth, festival curators, treat us to a hits set of sorts and old gems such as "Teenage Riot" nestle up to newer material off "Rather Ripped" such as "Do You Believe In Rapture?" The band are in playful mood and Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore hold their guitars high above their heads and strike them together like lightsabres, as Kim Gordon twirls round the stage like a ballerina. Later, The Melvins prove to be an irresistible draw and play bowel prolapsing doom/grunge that sounds fatter than an American kid locked in a house made of cake.

Gang Of Four (despite rumours circulating that they'd just split up) turn up to play a typically wire taut and serrated set including Marxist-funk classics "At Home He's A Tourist" and "To Hell With Poverty". The only thing to come near Iggy, however, are the utterly monstrous Wolf Eyes. They are three, possibly criminally insane, young men who pound, bash, throttle and pulverise an extensive array of instruments and computers to make a hellish racket almost totally devoid of sense or structure. They make Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" sound like Morcheeba. Unseasonally good fun.

by John Doran