Tag Archive for 'festivals'

The Electric Picnic is Decadent & Depraved: III

Published
by
Eli
on 2 September, 2008
in Misc. and Music
. 8 Comments

Some notes about the music, I suppose.

Guy Garvey is a class act, and one of the best frontmen going, but he’s a hard man to track down. Security tend not to accept a 6-pint jug of cider as valid identification. Should have gone with the pints, obviously, or pulled some Manchester variant of the potato man routine… the plotting continues.

Going into this thing I had resigned myself to missing out on my usual Sunday evening fix of balding middle-aged men with mullets and walrus moustaches wearing suits and doing karate kicks, so imagine my delight when Grinderman turned up. As a bonus, there was a sentient beard flinging percussion instruments around the place and playing a tiny, tiny guitar. Mortal men would have just looked silly.

Much as The Sex Pistols did… either they’re hell-bent on becoming the most nonsense thing in human history or they’re just acting out Primary School: The Musical. In whatever case, when you come in from a day spent with Henry Rollins and Nick Cave – men with actual testicles – John Lydon gets pretty old pretty quick.

The Electric Picnic is Decadent & Depraved: II

Published
by
Eli
on 1 September, 2008
in Misc.
. 8 Comments

You know you’re there when you pass by a stall selling kangaroo burgers and into a gauntlet of strange men peddling novel ways to urinate. It’s a boom market, because no one seems in any hurry to make festival bathrooms any more pleasant.

This year they’ve graduated into the realms of cruel social experiment. Portaloos have a bad reputation but at least they leave you to your own misery… as opposed to this metal-shack-over-festering-pit configuration they’ve plumped for in our campsite. It’s like looking into the mouth of hell. You expect to see faces forming in it. It’s hard to look away.

Someone must be paying attention, because some proper jacks sprout up during the night. Not that this stops us just using the wall, which is right there and frankly asking for it… but the gesture is appreciated.

The Electric Picnic is Decadent & Depraved: I

Published
by
Eli
on 29 August, 2008
in Misc.
. 10 Comments

I have had an idea. It’s a dangerous one but what the fuck. See, I have two 750ml bottles emptied out and ready to go for transporting booze to Electric Picnic. My original idea was to fill them with sweet dependable Buckfast… but here we go: what if I loaded one with Jaegermeister and the other with Red Bull, stuck some duct tape around them and lashed in two straws? What we have there is an improvised explosive, a jaegerpipebomb…

The consequences, of course, would be bleak and horrible and I would never forgive myself, but the fact is I’ve had the idea now, it’s out in the open. The choice is no longer mine. There’s a historical imperative in play… simply put, now that this has been posited, someone at some point in human history has to do or have done it. I am merely an agent of destiny.

Electric Picnic

Published
by
Colm
on 27 August, 2008
in Misc.
. 11 Comments

Who’s going? We are, and we’re towing the monstrosity that is Wayne Manor.

You wouldn’t know it from the camera trickery in his films, but Christian Bale is actually 70 feet tall. Also, there’s an entire wing of the tent cut out of the picture. It’s seriously massive. We reckon it’ll hold in the region of 500 people but obviously we’ll need to run stress tests, so feel free to shanghai some friends and head along of an evening. (If you’re on Facebook, you can even make it official.)

There will be signposts.

Other late-night entertainment includes Antics in the Fosset’s Circus tent, which will be a good old dose of sweaty indie choonage guaranteed to get your gizzards in a right dancy funk. The silent disco is always a laff riot too, if for no other reason than it’s great fun trying to figure out what channel everyone’s on. What else? Oh I don’t know, but one thing about EP is that you’re never more than five feet away from an intriguing mash-up of fire, juggling, jazz, citrus fruits, unitards, flare guns, sparklers, swizzle sticks and drug-crazed Hungarians. Good times are rolling.

A festival in miniature

Published
by
Colm
on 15 July, 2008
in Music
. 5 Comments

Following much humming, hawing and lurking around toutless.com, myself and the lady headed to Oxegen on Sunday. It’s the first time I’ve been at a festival and not camped, and it was pleasingly hassle-free. For one thing, not carrying a weekend’s worth of luggage meant I was able to get further than three feet from the bus without wanting to kill myself.

Of course, the flip side of that particular coin was that I went in boozeless and had to rely on the on-site bars. I was expecting to be fleeced, but a fiver got you a half-litre of decent enough beer in a big shturdy cup. Eh? Drinking at a festival is cheaper than drinking in a Dublin pub?

(Yeah, I know you can easily get a pint for under a fiver. Last time I was out, though, I ordered two pints of Paulaner and was charged €12.60 for my trouble, so it still averages out to everyone being a bunch of manky grabarses.)

I don’t know if MCD pulled the thumb out or what but the organisation seemed top notch. Queueing throughout the day, including the bus home, was at a minimum and the layout didn’t cause any of the usual headaches. There was of course talk of alleged rapes, alleged beatings and general alleged thievery but shur and it wouldn’t allegedly be Oxegen otherwise.

Bands: We Are Scientists were entertaining as always (creeping towards number one on the would-have-a-pint-with list… Guy Garvey will take some shifting though). Random techno was random techno. MGMT were probably ok, I survived the cattle pen for all of 30 seconds before I decided a pint was more in order. The Raconteurs put on a good show although I did kind of fall asleep for part of their set (rock n’ roll). Everything else was a general haze until Rage came on – cracking stuff, and the main reason I was there. A great set list and the encore was only mighty.

Overall, very glad I went. I kind of wish we’d stuck with our original plan and camped, but what can you do. Roll on Electric Picnic.

[More elsewhere: B'dum B'dum is a year late but still jolly entertaining, UnaRocks is as always on the case, and Jazz Biscuit has aggregated the shit out of the bad boy. Rosie may or may not recover enough to write it up at some point too... the scamp.]