While the All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival may have only blessed Australian shores once so far, curated by Nick Cave in January this year, the UK-born festival celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2009. Over the past decade, the festival has steadily built a name for itself for those who take their music that little bit more seriously.

In celebrating the birthday, ATP departed from its traditional approach of naming a curator, instead inviting its past curators and guests for a weekend of looking back at all ATP’s achieved with a big party and some excellent music along the way. The fact that so many of these artists are still ambitious, respected musicians speaks volumes about the standard of ATP’s creative direction over the years.

ATP in its UK form takes place at the Butlins resort in Minehead, on the Western coast of England not far from Bristol. The venue is one much affectionately abused by loyal ATP goers who gleefully roll over its many horrors and vile trappings, but perhaps best captured by Nick Cave, “It’s like Auschwitz with curtains.” A surreal Club Med-like getaway resort for English families in the summer, in winter the chilly grey ocean is tempting no-one, so ATP takes over and its troupes of young, hip, bearded things cram the local Minehead buses, as the perplexed local bingo-going retiree population just try to do their grocery shopping.

Day 1 – Friday
After checking in on Friday afternoon and getting settled into our chalet rooms, decked out in camper beds, bizarrely a bath but no shower, and two channels of ATP TV constantly screening hand-picked movies, music docos and cartoons all day, we cracked a beer and were greeted by the sounds of a band somehow setting up a full drum kit, guitars, amps and a sax in the tiny room next to us. It was going to be a good weekend.

You can tell you’re at a ripper festival when it’s only five minutes in and you’re watching Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks. ATP’s devoutly serious approach to music shone through immediately as Malkmus played through the most crisp, clean set-up – miles above the Prince of Wales gig in Melbourne recently – that had even him cooing; “We were at Manchester last night and all I could hear was punk-rock spit.”

The rollicking goodness of Baltimore and Elmo Delmo were particularly gorgeous, framed in extended sprawling gooey delicious riff-work that, while a little sedated, won hearts over. Some new material was shown, such as the proggy punch of Spazz and the excellent Senator, and some poppy favourites in Gardenia and Baby C’mon. While the crowd seemed restless at time, anxious to get the party started, Malkmus’ cool delivery set the weekend’s standards high from the start.

After the Jicks, Iceland’s magical Múm graced the Centre Stage. The seven-piece pop experimentalists zipped through songs new and old – some mesmerising, such as Marmalade Fires and Blessed Brambles – but much of the material from this year’s Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know seemed to rely on the quirk factor; kazoos, harmonicas and cowbells were all wielded as perky trinkets, reducing the songs to a tired twee cliché of Icelandic pop.

As performers Múm were animated and entertaining to watch, but such songs lacked the ethereal beauty of their earlier sound, possibly due to the move away from ambient electronics towards sunnier pastoral sing-a-longs that bordered on the experience of having eaten too much candy all at once. When they closed with Green Grass of Tunnel from 2002’s Finally We Are No-One, it immediately showed up the rest of the set, revealing in its sweeping ghostly beauty a vision of the magic that this band is capable of when the songwriting imagination is strong. The last five minutes could’ve been moment of the festival.

Back at the Pavilion, we caught a bit of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs performing Fever To Tell, but the big stage and seamless, well-oiled performances felt far removed from the small N.Y. punk clubs, missing the sticky carpet factor and the raw delight that made it such a great debut.

To close the night, the majestic Chicago quintet Tortoise played a dazzling set of their instrumental fusion of flowing jazz/post-rock/electronica, delighting a crowd which seemed to know every song. All obviously accomplished musicians, moving between guitars, the two drum kits and electronic synth, they showed their mastery with a set of controlled, crackling wonder.

Day 2 – Saturday
Day two started with Japanese duo Afrirampo, a loony explosion of tight drums and guitar who charmed the crowd with their high-energy enthusiasm, tribal-like warrior cries and generally batty antics. In their red-painted faces and Xena-like costumes, feathered and sparkling like exotic birds, they clambered about the stage, playing a mix of playful experimental rock that swung between sweet sing-song vocals and anarchic explosions, spliced with exchanges of endearing broken banter. Weird and wonderful.

The real magic of Saturday though belonged to Dirty Three, who were flying the Aussie flag proud. Warren Ellis bounded onto stage raving rapturously about ATP, having played the previous weekend for the My Bloody Valentine-curated event and curatoring the event themselves in 2007. The charismatic Ellis lengthily introduced each song with hilarious anecdotes that had the room enthralled before the music even began, “This is a song about getting all the emo bands in the world and making them work in a fish and chip shop.” But even a mute Ellis would’ve won them set of the festival.

Playing songs both old and new, the gristly beauty of their music stole the show, with Authentic Celestial Music, Some Summers They Drop Like Flies and Hope. Driven in crashing crescendos, majestically balanced nuanced instrumentals, Dirty Three played like a band possessed, precise and spectacular with their own colonial flavour. When Afrirampo returned to the stage, distributing balloons, and Ellis quipped, “This is not a Flaming Lips concert, by the way,” before kicking into Sue’s Last Ride. I could’ve kissed that beautiful bearded man. Stunning.

While I would’ve loved to report that Melbourne continued to represent in equally astonishing style, The Drones pulled in a disappointing show. In a bizarrely short and withdrawn set with hardly any audience interaction, the intimate visceral fury that usually takes Drones’ performances to mythic levels was missing in action.

The songs were there – Shark Fin Blues, She Had An Abortion That She Made Me Pay For, The Minotaur – all the good stuff and strong enough to carry a set, but not enough to ignite it. Without making excuses, much of the band’s UK tour had been cancelled due to illness, which may have contributed to the band’s failure to connect with the audience, or to any of its own material.

The final bizarre performance of the night was Sunn O))), gods to hardcore noise enthusiasts and perplexing, if not a little terrifying, to the rest of us. The American group dressed in long flowing black hooded monk’s habits and took the stage, blasting out the entirety of their debut album The GrimmRobe Demos, a layering of dark, thick, rumbling sound.

To the devout, their drone doom metal represents the culmination of where noise is heading, though to the uninitiated it’s more like an hour-long interminable riff without breaks, melody, rhythm or development of any observable kind, rendering the sound frightening, strangely hypnotic and demanding. This is not background music. The experience of extended, slow droning tones reverberating through every atom in your body feels titillating to the point of being masochistically life-endangering, thanks to the sheer intensity of the noise. While their set seemed to divide the audience into camps, I think many were just generally transfixed and baffled by the whole thing.

Day 3 – Sunday
Sunday morning and that hangover’s hurting a little bit more than yesterday, but we’re quickly back at the stages. The Texan Bible-Belt preacher’s son Josh T. Pearson opened up proceedings, cutting a fine lean figure in black, a little like Fagan cross with Jesus and a Southern accent. Formerly fronting the short-lived cult band Lift To Experience, Pearson’s solo act, with the aid of LTE’s drummer, is a haunting, dark affair recalling William Blake’s treatment of mortality, god, heaven and hell in songs that tremble between apocalyptic destruction and the quiet mournful yearning of the soul. Mind-blowing stuff.

Next came the wondrous Deerhoof, experimental pop freaks from San Francisco, who didn’t put a foot wrong. They were excited, sharp, buzzing, putting in one of the top performances of the festival. They played new songs, old favourites like, and a whole mash of astonishing covers for the birthday event including Going Up The Country , a track by Swiss band LiLiPUT and an appropriately gleeful rendition of All Tomorrow’s Parties. They were charismatic and chatty, obviously having a ball as they jumped and crept around the stage, uniformly jumping at 45 degree angles on-riff for one song, and playing a perfect set of their delightful brand of joyous angular experimental pop.

We caught the end of Devendra Banhart, who seemed to be picking up on the noise buzz from his fellow acts, playing a darker, rougher form of songs than I’ve heard him do before. Songs like Lover and I Feel Just Like A Child were charismatic and infectious, bouncy affairs, driven by a bigger band, but still felt miles behind Deerhoof’s exquisite set.

The last band of the festival to utterly blow me away was Austen, Texas post-rock masters, Explosions In The Sky. Asking for the starry lights to be turned on before they began their set, their form of incredible nuanced tapestries of shimmering guitar-driven sound that they have been perfecting over the last ten years rivalled Dirty Three for top ATP moment.

Playing mainly from the last two albums, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place and 2007’s All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone, they had the whole room communally enraptured as they oscillated between tense gently lilting guitars, soaring to all-out dramatic crescendos. I got those shivers of joy near the end that mean you’re listening to something really special. For the sleep-deprived and physically gone, it was the perfect way to end three days of wonderful music.

Happy birthday ATP.