A LOVE LIKE NEW: THE END OF PALM READER
Dave Musson
It's lunchtime when we arrive at Upcote Farm.
Situated in the idyllic Gloucestershire countryside near Cheltenham, the farm is dotted white with sheep and the smells and sounds of agriculture fill the July air. A tractor trundles off behind a hedge in the distance. Some cows gather on the other side of a dry stone wall, gazing quizzically at the unfamiliar car.
At least, that's what I lazily imagine it's like for the rest of the year. This week, Upcote Farm is 2000 Trees, a music festival founded in 2007 by rookie promoter James Scarlett and a group of music-loving, festival-going friends.
For the past two weeks, Scarlett and his team have been transforming the farmland into a tiny town of stages, marquees, campsites, food trucks and portable toilet units. It’s a gargantuan operation undertaken twice a year, first for 2000 Trees in the middle of summer and later, elsewhere, for ArcTanGent.
The magic of a festival is in all the things that happen around the music. It’s in the atmosphere, in the food, in the camping, that a festival can differentiate itself. By and large, they do nothing for me. If I had a pound for every conversation I’ve had with someone surprised I’d never been to Download, I could afford to go to it.
Festivals aren’t really designed for me. I take my live music in small, intense doses, in clubs and academy venues and the occasional arena show if – and only if – it’s the only way to see a band I love.
2000 Trees is the UK’s leading big little-ish rock festival and Scarlett books some of my favourite bands year after year after year. I have the same thought every summer: I don’t go to festivals but if I did, it would be 2000 Trees.
I did go in 2019. I saw a series of bands that justified the price of a ticket twice over, ate some tasty street food and generally had a lovely time in the sunshine. I watched Turnstile, Conjurer, Haggard Cat, Milk Teeth and Jamie Lenman (twice).
And I watched Palm Reader. I always watched Palm Reader.
Having first discovered them six years earlier, by the summer of 2019 I’d seen them on countless occasions, bought nearly a full wardrobe of t-shirts and built a modest vinyl collection consisting entirely of Palm Reader releases.
The most recent at that point was Braille, which had put a band beloved by the UK underground on the map. It strengthened Palm Reader’s unwanted status as a criminally under-appreciated gem but catapulted their creative reputation into the stratosphere. It had been a tough road but the band had made it to album number three, each an improvement on the last, and were among the most respected musicians in the scene.
The classic Palm Reader line-up – singer Josh McKeown, guitarists Andy Gillan and Sam Rondeau-Smith, bassist Josh Redrup and drummer Dan Olds – needed no introduction to the 2000 Trees audience. After Woking and Nottingham, the festival had become the band’s third home.
I can reel off those five names with the same enthusiastic ease as a football supporter reciting the England team that won the 1966 World Cup final. That’s who the recorded version of Palm Reader were to me: five hard-working musicians blessed with sharpened creativity and capable of an outsized impact on the lives of their fans.
In 2024, after thirteen years, Palm Reader’s appearance here will be their last. They announced in March that the band would be coming to an end with a small final headline tour in July and a last, brief pause for breath before a swansong here, at Upcote Farm, at the festival where they feel most at home.
This is Palm Reader’s last ever show. If I’d had to, I’d have walked here.
“It’s an affront to cosmic justice that the five men who created Beside The Ones We Love were back at work the next day.”
Bad Weather is a fully formed debut album and yet a barely adequate indicator of what would follow in the next seven years. It established Palm Reader’s progressive, aggressive, intelligent and intoxicating blend. It’s raw but mature, abrasive and jagged yet melodious.
Palm Reader’s debut album oozes intensity but ‘Bitter Hostess (Grace Pt. 2)’ is their first diversion of many into beautiful, quiet interludes that boost the range of their records and show off the depth of their musical chops. From firecrackers like ‘Spineless’ to infectious anthems like ‘Seeing & Believing Are Two Different Things’, Bad Weather has the lot. It’s Palm Reader’s least best album.
The second record blew the first out of the water. Beside The Ones We Love was recorded with lightning speed in Birmingham and came out in 2015. It’s explosive but expansive and ambitious, full of crushing riffs and far more groove and thrust than an album with such harsh edges has any right to have.
It, too, was bettered in just three years. But Beside The Ones We Love is an outstanding record released in the dark days before heavy music finally emerged from an era of creative atrophy.
McKeown – not only the vocalist but also the essence of Palm Reader’s song-writing and musical identity – put in a virtuoso performance and carried it into the years of gigs and touring that followed. Palm Reader shows between 2015 and 2018 were phenomenal and McKeown was at the forefront of that, roaring through a suite of highly charged songs that sounded like nobody before or since.
‘I Watched The Fire Chase My Tongue’ was a soaring mainstay of Palm Reader sets for a decade. It’s full of twists and turns but never incoherent. ‘Stacks’ is more outwardly vituperative and was another live favourite when the band toured their second album.
Dave Musson
The real heart of Beside The Ones We Love beats behind two very special songs. ‘Travelled Paths’ is stripped back to the bone. Bands of such ferocity are seldom capable of naked vulnerability but Palm Reader, armed with the perfect singer to make it work, did it without missing a beat.
‘Sing Out, Survivor’ is extraordinary. It’s epic beyond belief and topped off with a vocal performance that holds its own not only with McKeown’s finest but those of more celebrated stars at the top of their game.
Even as their second album attracted critical renown, the members of Palm Reader grew frustrated with their lot.
As well as talented musicians, they are astute observers of the inner cells and walls of the music industry. They know what’s good and what’s not. They understand with painful clarity when the latter makes a dent the former can’t. Palm Reader were a band for people in bands, an accidental secret for fans in the know. They were underappreciated and they knew it and they felt it.
In my adolescence, rock music was so mainstream as to be barely alternative. Nu-metal was big business. Bands needed a lot of luck to get signed to a major label but those who did could make a fortune even from mediocrity. It’s an affront to cosmic justice that the five men who created Beside The Ones We Love were back at work the next day.
Between 2015 and the release of Braille in 2018, there was a real possibility that they wouldn’t make it that far. Half a decade of digging deep, grafting for the craft and producing invisible excellence was taking its toll on morale. Being darlings of a scene doesn’t keep the lights on but the premature abandonment of Braille would have been a tragedy.
Thankfully, Palm Reader stuck to their guns. The third album gave the band a new lease of life. It was an artistic triumph that broadened the scope of Palm Reader’s sound. Now perched atop the raw and ferocious, a new approach to heaviness: measured and melodic, possessed of still more emotional weight.
Braille was acclaimed as the work of a band who were all grown up, comfortable in their musical skins and willing to take a gamble in order to expand upon their sonic guts. McKeown unveiled a distinctive, characterful clean singing voice but there’s no little edge to ‘Internal Winter’.
But Braille has an added dimension. ‘Inertia’ and ‘Swarm’ are fabulous examples of the band’s penchant for towering compositions. The last track on the album, ‘A Lover, A Shadow’, is a stunning piece of music, masterfully written and performed by a band able to touch perfection.
I went to see Palm Reader often during the Braille cycle. They played in a support slot under Rolo Tomassi in Birmingham right after the album came out. Three weeks later, they performed a remarkable set at an album release show at the Bodega club in Nottingham, where they'd been based since 2015.
Dave Musson
A few months after Braille came out they supported Glassjaw at the legendary Brixton Academy. In December 2019 they played in front of a small but febrile crowd at Nottingham’s Rough Trade.
Palm Reader were reliably, routinely superb. With a diverse trio of records and three solid years of ferocious performances behind them, the band were critically revered and on a roll.
Then 2020 happened.
Before hitting the stage at Rough Trade, bassist Redrup informed me that the band would be recording their fourth album in the coming January. That night they debuted ‘Stay Down’, which turned out to be a mere slice of an exceptional record. In March, I saw Palm Reader twice in three days on their tour with Woking comrades Employed To Serve, first in Milton Keynes and then in Birmingham.
They were my last gigs until 2022. The coronavirus pandemic had a devastating effect on live music in the UK. Brexit didn't do it any favours either. With Sleepless ready and heading for the pressing plant, Palm Reader were grounded along with everyone else.
To make matters worse, the horrific scandal that took down Holy Roar Records cast the release plan into disarray. There were people hurt who matter much more than delayed albums, a point members of Palm Reader and bands similarly affected made at the time.
Church Road Records (the label run by Employed To Serve’s Sammy Urwin and, in the aftermath of Holy Roar, his bandmate and partner Justine Jones) picked up Sleepless and unleashed it on a covid-riddled world the day after the screening of a performance in an empty St Edmund’s Church in Rochdale. Palm Reader played five of their new songs in that set, ushering in the dawn of the best record they ever made.
Sleepless is Palm Reader’s insurmountable masterpiece. Polished but crushingly heavy, laden with melancholy but spiked with flashes of euphoria, album number four is a flawless construction played with fire and flair. Every song features new ideas, tones and touches with which Palm Reader hadn’t previously experimented.
‘Willow’ boasts perhaps McKeown’s finest vocal of all. ‘False Thirst’ feels half its actual length and serves up everything good about Palm Reader in one place. It’s catchy and melodic with incredible vocals and deft musicianship, but it’s monolithically heavy too.
‘Both Ends Of The Rope’ is a portentous ode to the span of Palm Reader’s career and packs one of the crunchiest riffs they ever wrote. The jewel in the crown is ‘A Bird And Its Feathers’. It’s unique even amid the Palm Reader pantheon – slower, more intense, more adventurous than anything else..
Dave Musson
I took Palm Reader for granted for the first time while they toured Sleepless. One gig came and went without me. Then a second, and a third.
Covid played its part along with depression and just being an adult with work to do and responsibilities to handle, but ultimately there were shows I could have attended and didn't. By the time Palm Reader announced their split in the early part of 2024, I still hadn't seen those wonderful songs live.
Five days before my second visit to 2000 Trees, I watched Palm Reader play their last ever headline show. They packed out the Rescue Rooms venue in Nottingham. It was the first time I'd seen them in their final form, a dextrous and indulgent seven-piece complete with a third guitarist and a keyboard player, each an indicator of the evolution of the UK underground’s finest band.
The final show in Nottingham was an emotional affair but, above all, a celebration. There were a few tears but very many smiles. Palm Reader tore through a set that drew from the whole of their career. They showed their every face. It was magical.
“It’s a stunning end preceded by love and tears and choruses belted out from the front row so robustly that I’ll feel them in my throat for days.”
Here at Upcote Farm, the imminence of the end casts a shadow but the honour of saluting Palm Reader into the sunset is a thrill. In between the hot dogs and beers and Brummie poutines, a string of UK bands unknowingly try to take our minds off the evening ahead.
Mouth Culture are playing by the time I arrive. Cruelty and Burner, both bands I know and like, do what Cruelty and Burner do. Guilt Trip are less familiar and provide a handy distraction for a while. Unpeople are sensational, turning in the kind of performance that might be described as levelling the place, were it not so damned fun.
Alas, the time comes. Palm Reader's final show is transcendent.
They attract a main-stage crowd for a second-stage billing. The festival’s Cave stage is not just full, but spilling out into the open air. The back and sides of the crowd are ten rows deep before it’s even under the marquee. I’m at the front, leaning on the barrier in front of the stage, eager to soak it all up one last time.
Dan Olds is back behind the drum kit. Sam Rondeau-Smith returns to play the final few songs, the last of which is ‘A Bird And Its Feathers’ and features no fewer than four guitarists, namely Rondeau-Smith and Andy Gillan flanking more recent touring additions Matt Reynolds and Joe Gosney.
Dave Musson
It’s a stunning end preceded by love and tears and choruses belted out from the front row so robustly that I’ll feel them in my throat for days.
There’s levity, too. At the side of the stage is Reynolds’ bandmate Tom Marsh, the drummer of noisy nuisances HECK and Haggard Cat, who bursts off the apron without warning and scampers up the barrier and over my shoulder before burrowing into the mosh pit.
Two shocked members of the security team directly in front of me think they’ve missed a crowd surfer and allowed him to stage dive. Marsh has no idea of the puzzlement and visible irritation he’s caused. Imagine how funny it was the second time.
Palm Reader might never have played a better show. They are at the peak of their powers. They go out on the highest of highs. McKeown addresses the audience during a long pause in the last song. He speaks of connection, neatly capturing the reason he’s here and the reason we’re all here too.
“Thank you for being here,” he says. “Thank you for always being here.”
Dave Musson
That’s what this band is all about. Palm Reader is a love I share not only with my gig-going friends but with thousands of other people who took this music from the underground and made it the central pillar of their tastes.
Music, in the end, is what matters the most. Palm Reader are generous, ethical, funny, entertaining people. They’re also a brilliant band with the discography to prove it. They mean so much to their fans.
As the very last notes of Palm Reader ring out in a tent full of shell-shocked fans, it’s clear that this is a truly special connection that will die hard.