Uhh, this got a bit side-tracked and I promised myself a gazillion times to finish it. But I’m now determined to finish this series soon at least before this year’s festival.
SATURDAY
I began today after a day of music yearning for more, the first day was pretty good so I was reasonably excited. First up, after losing a friend for the morning, me and my mate TC went to see the fantasticaly energetic and probably rabid Pulled Apart By Horses. I did not know any of their stuff, but I loved the set, so head-bangingly dancable and loud and shouty that they totally fit the relatively little festival republic stage that they were playing. I definitely recommend that you seek them out
Pulled Apart By Horses – I Punched A Lion In The Throat (I would like to see this song title lived out)
After that, me and TC saw The Rakes. I love The Rakes and they were perfectly brilliant. They did 3 albums, and sadly later this year, they disbanded. I felt so lucky, they were great, just full of energy and vibrant, probably alcohol-fueled, dancing. Me and TC sang along to all the songs going absolutely mad. Thus far they were surely my favourite, purely for the incredible emotional meaning and probably, I suspect their own knowledge that this would be one of their last gigs. Highlights included “The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect” (Download), “22 Grand Job” (dedicated to all the old fans!) and “1989″. I would be writing now, “if you haven’t seen them, go see them now” but you can’t, just pray that their members second band incarnations, meet some kind of equal soundtracking of the average 20 year old down-on-your-luck life.
I watched hardly any of Enter Shikari as they copied Rusko’s brilliant Snatch-sampling intro to his classic Cockney Thug, so i was annoyed and left to go for a piss. The next set that came along was the briliant surprise of Them Crooked Vultures and I guessed they would be the secret set, without knowing they played at Leeds the day before, I just had an intense feeling that they would come on and lo and behold they did. It was such good, tight set, i knew none of the songs at all and seeing them play convinced me that I would like this band. They were kind of overwhelmed about half way through with chants of “Dave Grohl” for the drummer-that-everyone-likes-even-when-he-sings-and-plays-guitar.
After this, I was relentless in convincing my friends to see the legend that is Ian Brown, partially using the excuse that we would be close to see Maximo Park after. He was alreet, nothing special. The sole exception being the inclusion of seminal Stone Roses classic “Fool’s Gold” and his bald brass player’s numerous solos. After this was Maximo Park, a band I love rather alot to be honest. Their set was brilliant, and unlike other bands did not focus on the sole tracks from their most recent album, but rather the best from all three. My favourites like “I Want You To Say” and “Our Velocity” were played and I thoroughly enjoyed it, download this brilliant live version of “Graffiti” now!
As much as I convinced my friends to watch Ian Brown, TC was just a pestering us to watch The Prodigy, which coincidentally became the worst decision of my life, if you don’t know me, I’m not a fan of moshing, or getting attacked while listening to music. Thus, I didn’t like this set. It was mad, pill-poppers and weed-smokers descended from all other sides of the festival to watch the prodigy and then proceeded to go mad. Where we had order and nicety before, the crowd went absolutely insane. I proceeded to jump the barrier eventually, as ahead of me i could see hundreds from the front section of the crowd attempt to escape. Seriously, the crowd control is not only terrible, it is ineffective. Next time I will be avoiding the prick magnet acts.
The only reason I was amidst that crowd was for the arctic monkeys anyway. So that dampened my evening, I was basically near the back of the audience, for an act I had been patiently waiting for and basically camping for over the last few hours. They came on and I was reasonably impressed, a nice show and was able to see some chavs near me singing along to every word, never knew they had it in them. But anyway, the set was consistent, apart from not including brilliant songs like ‘Teddy Picker’, but other than being consistent, wasn’t really inspiring if you catch my drift? Just seemed like a bog-standard repeat of the songs off the new record with a few others added. Oh well. That was saturday.