I remember t-shirt weather
Jul. 18th, 2018 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaThere is no Glastonbury Festival this year, which has left ChrisC and I without our usual summer holiday plan. We lightly considered a variety of alternatives, didn't come to any very serious conclusion, and ended up buying a bunch of tickets to various one-day events around London.
Marmozets, [King Nun], Sundara Karma, [Rat Boy], [Bad Sounds], Circa Waves, Sam Fender, Pale Waves, The Vaccines, Two Door Cinema Club.
There were two massive gigs in Finsbury Park in June - Liam Gallagher, and Queens of the Stone Age.
And then there was all this infrastructure sort of lying around, and so they used it for a one-dayer on the Sunday.
As far as I can tell, both the big gigs were a bit fraught with amenities-related issues, and suffered from a lot of complaints about the lack of capacity in both the bar and the toilet departments. In the bars case, I infer it was the Workers Beer Co. suffering an unprecedented 40% staff no-show (maybe a casualty of the excessive Summer Weather we've been having of late?) ChrisC - who went to see QotSA - reports that some of the banks of toilets were slightly hidden away, and the most obvious set near the main stage were curiously laid out to create an appalling bottleneck on entry.
Anyway, the Sunday had much lower attendance, so less competition for amenities. It still had fairly awful bar queues, so I didn't bother, and I was pre-armed with ChrisC's insider knowledge of where to find the less-obvious toilets.
Community festival, we thought. Well, that sounds like a nice family-orientated event. And it's headlined by Two Door Cinema Club, who are surely a bit past it now. This event is clearly aimed squarely at local families, and will be much more low-key and laid-back.
We showed up, and went through the airport-style security and mildly fearsome bag-checking, and then went... err... this is not an especially family vibe. There are no families. Also why is everyone so young? Seriously. We were a clear twenty years older than almost everyone there.
Community had just two stages: an obvious large one, and a much smaller one. The bands were more or less staggered, so you could zip between them if you felt like it and catch at least some of everyone. So we mostly did that, except a bit where I decided it was hot and my legs were tired, and flopped by the little stage while ChrisC did the zipping to see You Me At Six on both of our behalfs.
Marmozets were pleasingly enjoyable noisy, female-fronted rock. Marmozets and I are not acquainted, but they're easy, feel-good-in-the-sunshine music. In fact, not knowing much about the bands was a bit of a theme, because I've been quite busy at work and didn't get much (re)vision in. A side effect of that and the slow time-to-write-up is that I've actually slightly forgotten a few people.
Rat Boy sticks in my head (even though we were hiding in the shade at the time - did I mention it was hot?) simply because he seemed to be good, but every single song wasfrom a different genre. Maybe he hasn't quite decided what he wants to be. Maybe he has decided he doesn't need to - he can move from rap to screaming 15-fingered metal guitar if he wants to. And good luck to him.
The hot weather led to surprisingly high take-up of the taps provided to fill water bottles, and there were monster queues for those, too. And... well. Festival Republic, the organisers, are rather corporate. And they had clearly gone round all the food stalls and mandated the drinks: you will sell (i) still water (ii) Pepsi Max (iii) sugar-free 7Up (iv) diet Tango. So, if you wanted pop, you could have diet pop. Or not.
ChrisC, who is something of a hardline Coke drinker, was somewhat put out. My soft drink of preference is fizzy water, so I was also somewhat put out. ChrisC managed to find some kind of bootleg stall that would sell him a Yazoo. And actually, sugar-free 7Up doesn't taste that different to the regular kind. But really. This diet pop trend is getting a bit out of line already.
Festival food seems to be improving, though, and there were various nice-sounding options, although it was mostly too hot for them to actually appeal. The main change in recent years is the now massive ubiquity of macaroni cheese. Which I approve of, although I cannot really define exactly why it is that them using the American name of mac 'n' cheese annoys me so much.
Anyway. Sam Fender is a Geordie singer-songwriter, who covers ground from approximately Bruce Spingsteen to quite soulful (and he's got quite a voice). He was on the smaller stage, which was less bustly-busy and listening to him was a welcome chilled-out interlude.
I had quite high hopes of Pale Waves, who are basically gothy synth-pop which is something I can definitely get behind. They were... OK. But I wasn't as blown-away as I hoped. I still intend to have another listen to them recorded and give them another chance; goths don't do well in the sunshine :)
I was continually slightly confused about The Vaccines, as I was sure I ought to know songs of theirs but persistently couldn't think of any. It turns out that they are basically a slightly posher, English Ramones with short songs, punchy guitar riffs and simple choruses. Everyone except me clearly did know the songs and was up for cheerfully singing along. By the time we got to the second chorus of each song, so was I.
I really am not joking about everyone being yong, by the way. And I can report that, by large, and the next generation is, when it's bastard hot, a lot more sensible in the suncream and drinking water department than mine. I only saw one person badly the worse for wear during the day, and he was probably my age; there was a definite lack of lobstered human by sundown. Also extremely minimalist clothing is in vogue in a way I don't remember it being when I was a teenager - I can't imagine having had the confidence to walk around in basically a bra and microshorts. Bandeau tops are a big thing, which I was going to claim was an innovation, but halfway through the day I remembered the ghastly 80s phrase "boob-tube", so may be I am just selectively forgetting things.
Anyway, by the time Two Door Cinema Club came onstage, almost everyone had either gone home to meet a parental curfew or decided that they couldn't be arsed with this old-person music, and the audience had thinned out dramatically. Which was fine; the rest of us danced around like idiots, and sang along, and enjoyed the fireworks.
All in all, a thoroughly decent day out. But it felt more like a gig than a festival. Which is nice, but no substitute for Glastonbury :)
Marmozets, [King Nun], Sundara Karma, [Rat Boy], [Bad Sounds], Circa Waves, Sam Fender, Pale Waves, The Vaccines, Two Door Cinema Club.
There were two massive gigs in Finsbury Park in June - Liam Gallagher, and Queens of the Stone Age.
And then there was all this infrastructure sort of lying around, and so they used it for a one-dayer on the Sunday.
As far as I can tell, both the big gigs were a bit fraught with amenities-related issues, and suffered from a lot of complaints about the lack of capacity in both the bar and the toilet departments. In the bars case, I infer it was the Workers Beer Co. suffering an unprecedented 40% staff no-show (maybe a casualty of the excessive Summer Weather we've been having of late?) ChrisC - who went to see QotSA - reports that some of the banks of toilets were slightly hidden away, and the most obvious set near the main stage were curiously laid out to create an appalling bottleneck on entry.
Anyway, the Sunday had much lower attendance, so less competition for amenities. It still had fairly awful bar queues, so I didn't bother, and I was pre-armed with ChrisC's insider knowledge of where to find the less-obvious toilets.
Community festival, we thought. Well, that sounds like a nice family-orientated event. And it's headlined by Two Door Cinema Club, who are surely a bit past it now. This event is clearly aimed squarely at local families, and will be much more low-key and laid-back.
We showed up, and went through the airport-style security and mildly fearsome bag-checking, and then went... err... this is not an especially family vibe. There are no families. Also why is everyone so young? Seriously. We were a clear twenty years older than almost everyone there.
Community had just two stages: an obvious large one, and a much smaller one. The bands were more or less staggered, so you could zip between them if you felt like it and catch at least some of everyone. So we mostly did that, except a bit where I decided it was hot and my legs were tired, and flopped by the little stage while ChrisC did the zipping to see You Me At Six on both of our behalfs.
Marmozets were pleasingly enjoyable noisy, female-fronted rock. Marmozets and I are not acquainted, but they're easy, feel-good-in-the-sunshine music. In fact, not knowing much about the bands was a bit of a theme, because I've been quite busy at work and didn't get much (re)vision in. A side effect of that and the slow time-to-write-up is that I've actually slightly forgotten a few people.
Rat Boy sticks in my head (even though we were hiding in the shade at the time - did I mention it was hot?) simply because he seemed to be good, but every single song wasfrom a different genre. Maybe he hasn't quite decided what he wants to be. Maybe he has decided he doesn't need to - he can move from rap to screaming 15-fingered metal guitar if he wants to. And good luck to him.
The hot weather led to surprisingly high take-up of the taps provided to fill water bottles, and there were monster queues for those, too. And... well. Festival Republic, the organisers, are rather corporate. And they had clearly gone round all the food stalls and mandated the drinks: you will sell (i) still water (ii) Pepsi Max (iii) sugar-free 7Up (iv) diet Tango. So, if you wanted pop, you could have diet pop. Or not.
ChrisC, who is something of a hardline Coke drinker, was somewhat put out. My soft drink of preference is fizzy water, so I was also somewhat put out. ChrisC managed to find some kind of bootleg stall that would sell him a Yazoo. And actually, sugar-free 7Up doesn't taste that different to the regular kind. But really. This diet pop trend is getting a bit out of line already.
Festival food seems to be improving, though, and there were various nice-sounding options, although it was mostly too hot for them to actually appeal. The main change in recent years is the now massive ubiquity of macaroni cheese. Which I approve of, although I cannot really define exactly why it is that them using the American name of mac 'n' cheese annoys me so much.
Anyway. Sam Fender is a Geordie singer-songwriter, who covers ground from approximately Bruce Spingsteen to quite soulful (and he's got quite a voice). He was on the smaller stage, which was less bustly-busy and listening to him was a welcome chilled-out interlude.
I had quite high hopes of Pale Waves, who are basically gothy synth-pop which is something I can definitely get behind. They were... OK. But I wasn't as blown-away as I hoped. I still intend to have another listen to them recorded and give them another chance; goths don't do well in the sunshine :)
I was continually slightly confused about The Vaccines, as I was sure I ought to know songs of theirs but persistently couldn't think of any. It turns out that they are basically a slightly posher, English Ramones with short songs, punchy guitar riffs and simple choruses. Everyone except me clearly did know the songs and was up for cheerfully singing along. By the time we got to the second chorus of each song, so was I.
I really am not joking about everyone being yong, by the way. And I can report that, by large, and the next generation is, when it's bastard hot, a lot more sensible in the suncream and drinking water department than mine. I only saw one person badly the worse for wear during the day, and he was probably my age; there was a definite lack of lobstered human by sundown. Also extremely minimalist clothing is in vogue in a way I don't remember it being when I was a teenager - I can't imagine having had the confidence to walk around in basically a bra and microshorts. Bandeau tops are a big thing, which I was going to claim was an innovation, but halfway through the day I remembered the ghastly 80s phrase "boob-tube", so may be I am just selectively forgetting things.
Anyway, by the time Two Door Cinema Club came onstage, almost everyone had either gone home to meet a parental curfew or decided that they couldn't be arsed with this old-person music, and the audience had thinned out dramatically. Which was fine; the rest of us danced around like idiots, and sang along, and enjoyed the fireworks.
All in all, a thoroughly decent day out. But it felt more like a gig than a festival. Which is nice, but no substitute for Glastonbury :)
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