2009-07-31

T in the Park 2009

I was at T in the Park this year doing Off The Beaten Tracks sessions in association with The Skinny on Saturday and Sunday.

I turned up on Friday to collect my passes, scout out the location we had been given to film, and hopefully see a few bands. After the usual attitude from people at the accreditation tent, I spent almost two hours trying to get my passes and get into the site. They don’t make it easy. Headed to the ‘Media Village’, scored some food and a coke, scouted out the best place to film, went to watch bands. Missed Maccabees annoyingly. Saw some Edwyn Collins, Jamie T, Idlewild, Yeah Yeahs Yeahs and Nick Cave. The crowds for YYYs and Nick Cave are pitifully small considering. Nick Cave must have played to about a thousand people. Really. At a 90 thousand (?) capacity festival. This will become a theme for the weekend. YYYs bring on a pipe band to play with them for a song. The place goes mental. It’s very strange being at a festival sober. I’ve enever done it before, and TintheP is perhaps not the best place to start. There are casualties everywhere and it’s only Friday evening. The carnage is in full swing. However, being on your own and sober means you get to see a lot of bands, which is great. I get a laugh when I get home and speak to one of the bands we’re filming the next day. “Is 4.30 OK?” I ask. “Hang on, I’ll just see what bands are on then. Don’t want to miss any bands I like,” they reply. I honestly can’t remember which band it was.

  • Maple Leaves
  • Edwyn Collins
  • Idlewild
  • Jamie T
  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs
  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
  • Crystal Castles

Saturday, and I have Colin with me to help with filming, as Alex has baby duties to attend to. We arrive early to find out we can use the odd little ‘country kitchen’ that has been set up for interviews. Score. We see Mumford and Sons (really good) and M83 (amazing) in between trips to the T Break tent. We catch 10 mins of Lady Ga Ga (interesting but ultimately shit) before heading back for the day’s sessions. We do 3 sessions over the next few hours (5 were booked but only 3 turned up). First was The French Quarter from Stirling. Their songs are quiet. Very quiet. Good, but quiet for an area where people are buzzing about and we have the main stage and King Tut’s tent nearby with bands playing. We’ll see how that turns out. Next up is Mike Nisbet and his band, who are a bit louder, and also good. They visibly melt in the intense sunshine while playing their songs. At some point around this time we have a visit from a Scottish radio presenter who chucks a little diva strop because we’re filming where he wants to do a radio review, and it would appear that he is more important and therefore should get to use the space, He is dealt with swiftly. Last for the day is Trapped In Kansas. They are also pretty quiet, but we manage to tease some more volume out of them. Their songs are fucking amazing. I can’t wait to get them edited. We miss their set later to see a sloppy, problem-soaked start to the Of montreal set. Wish I hadn’t bothered.

Finished by about 5.30, we get the gear back to the car and head back into the arena to watch bands. Sober again. We see some really good bands, again playing to very few people. We finish the evening by watching the Manics set, which is a weird choice of songs, but great as always. The fanboi in me smiles a lot. We arrive home very burnt.

  • Mumford and Sons
  • Mike Nisbet
  • M83
  • The French Quarter
  • Lady Ga Ga
  • Broken Records
  • Metronomy
  • Bronto Skylift
  • Of Montreal
  • Manic Street Preachers

Sunday and Alex and I are working together, which saves my stress levels a lot. We get there too early because for once the promised roadworks don’t affect us. We sit around and pray for the rain to stop. It kinda does. We meet Adam from We Were Promised Jetpacks for our first session of the day. Adam belts out 3 songs which sound great, while the rest of the band hangs around behind him pouring pints of Tennents. I head out afterwords to see the Twilight Sad, who I barely recognise with a lack of hair. They’re really good. Dave from The Skinny is waiting to speak to them afterwards to herd them over to our filming location for their session. It turns out they need herded as they’ve started the partying rather early. They arrive in very good spirits, if a little away with it, but have not brought a capo, which is essential to the songs they are going to play. A capo is eventually found, and we get 2 lovely acoustic songs from them, before Andy disappears into the chaos clutching 2 cartons of wine. James sticks around, using an upside-down tray cover dome thing as a beer receptacle, and then treating us to an a cappella performance. At this point we bump into Tango in the Attic who, having emailed us a phone number with a digit missing, have been rather elusive all weekend. We quickly grab them to do their session, which goes really well considering the circumstances. Everyone by now is getting fired into the Tennents and is therefore very happy. We pack up the gear and head off to watch some more bands. We see some more really good stuff, including the Pet Shop Boys. Blur turn up really late and people look like they’re going to riot. We go to watch Mogwai play to a quarter full tent. They’re amazing as always. We hear the last 5 or 6 Blur songs carrying across the site, but opt to have a sit down and a drink, having seen their set at Glastonbury weeks before, and wanting to have that as our last Blur live memory. To wave us goodbye, someone has not stationed nearly enough staff in the car park, and the ones who are there don’t care, so there is hours of waiting and frustration for our lasting memory of TintheP 09. Smooth.

  • The Twilight Sad
  • Elbow
  • Pet Shop Boys
  • TV on the Radio
  • We Were Promised Jetpacks
  • Mogwai

2009-07-29

Glastonbury 2009

This post is a month overdue.

Glastonbury is huge, isn’t it? To the point that you can’t possibly comprehend its size unless you go. Everyone tells you how massive it is, and you know it will be, but not to this extent.

We arrived Wednesday lunchtime, left Monday morning, and barely stopped drinking in between times. I had a fucking blast. Wednesday was spent hanging about drinking with our camping neighbours, exploring the site, and more drinking. I fell asleep up the hill near the stone circle for a while, just after looking over the whole site in the almost dark and thinking how amazing and huge it was.

Thursday was weird. Apparently a much larger amount of people arrived earlier this year, so by the time Maximo Park came on to ‘open’ the festival on the small Queen’s Head stage, you couldn’t get near that area of the site, let alone in the tent to see the band. We wandered, we drank Brothers Cider (amazing), we saw some of Golden Silvers and possibly another band, and then we saw East 17. That was weird. The tent was packed, they came and did ‘Steam’ and then proceeded to do about 7 songs, including a couple of terrible new ones, and finished with ‘Stay Another Day’. As soon as they finished, we started getting texts telling us Michael Jackson was dead. We didn’t believe it first, then we did, then went around telling strangers, and they didn’t believe us. Weird day.

  • Stornoway
  • Golden Silvers
  • Beardyman
  • East 17

Friday was the first day of proper music, and I was a bit overexcited and ended up peaking too early. The end of the day is a haze. The start of the day was pretty much the only rain we saw all weekend. I did, however, see The Rumble Strips who were surprisingly amazing, Slow Club play ‘Christmas TV’ at the entrance to the Guardian Lounge after I got a telling off for trying to sneak in, an always-exuberant Fucked Up, a dull Fleet Foxes and many more. Bands seen:

  • The Perceptions
  • Rumble Strips
  • Slow Club
  • Fucked Up
  • Filthy Dukes
  • The Virgins
  • N*E*R*D
  • Fleet Foxes
  • Lily Allen
  • The Specials

Saturday. Woken up at 5am by Paddy and Colin coming back destroyed from the Eagles of Death Metal gig at Trash City (which the band didn’t turn up to) and putting the world to rights. Fell asleep till about 8am, then had to go and regain my sanity with a solo mission to the guardian Lounge. That place is a godsend. I sat on a comfy armchair, read that day’s Guardian, had a croissant and a smoothie and listened to soothing music. It made me feel human again. the day was spent watching trying not to get too drunk too early. Saw some really good bands, but two stick out above the rest by far. At about 5pm while watching Emmy the Great, I suddenly remembered the Futureheads secret show was happening close by in half an hour. We arrived to find hardly anyone there. A (marvellous) comedian was doing his thing and people were sitting on the grass chatting. When it was announced that the band were coming on, we ended up standing right at the barrier, right in the middle. The Futureheads played a short hits-heavy set while we downed as much coder as humanly possible. It was amazing. Later on that night, having randomly bumped into friends we hadn’t been able to contact all weekend because of bad phone reception, we took up a spot on the hill for The Boss. It was fucking amazing. Best time I’ve had in ages. That’s all. Bands seen:

  • The Low Anthem
  • Metric
  • Temper Trap
  • Spinal Tap
  • Broken Records
  • Emmy the Great
  • The Futureheads
  • Crosby, Stills and Nash
  • Passion Pit
  • Peter, Bjorn and John
  • Florence and the Machine
  • Bruce Springsteen

Sunday was pretty grim. We were destroyed from days of alcohol abuse and had no energy left. It was hot, we were dehydrated. I felt dizzy most of the day. We saw some really good stuff though, including highlights Amadour et Mariam, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Tony Christie clearly hating ‘Amarillo’, and Blur. I had been really looking forward to Blur all weekend, but not as much as some bands. What they pulled off was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. The atmosphere was absolutely incredible. Bands seen:

  • Micachu and the Shapes
  • Art Brut
  • Tony Christie
  • Amadou et mariam
  • Tom Jones
  • Yeah Yeah Yeahs
  • Madness
  • Roots Manuva
  • Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
  • Blur

The whole point of Glastonbury is that there is much more to it than just watching bands, which makes it different to every other festival I’ve been to. We wandered around a lot and saw some of the sights of Glasto, like the green fields (hardcore crusties terrify me though) as well as cafes and theatre tents and the stone circle and dance tents and loads of people in weird costumes and all sorts of weird interesting shit. I just can’t really remember that much about it.

Andy Lobban

Edinburgh, Scotland