i love your box

festival review >> lovebox >> london >> 16.07.10

i loved lovebox. not that i can remember much, but on that basis i can pretty much assume i had a jolly good time.

the day started with sunshine and a fear of our drinks being confiscated upon our arrival. with this in mind we necked some of our homemade cocktails in a hastily organised drinkathon outside the festival gates, resembling two naughty teenagers about to enter their first school disco for a bit of a fingering. with drinks drunk and legs a little loose, we passed the burly security guards without even a cheeky grope to check for our remaining arsenal of vodka. what was already a blur of a day, was about to get a whole lot blurrier...

my ever fading memories of friday include bombay bicycle club, the mystery jets and the maccabees, three of my favourite bands of today. they could have played boyzone covers for all i remember, so don't expect reports of set-lists or highlights from me. i can assume though from all our smiley photographs now cluttering the world of social networking, we were having a whale of a time. there's photographic evidence of backstage action, some heavy drinking, fairground rides, some wrestling with my now bruised little sister but sadly no evidence of my lost gay man-bag. said misplaced bag resulted in a night on the tiles for us. actually when i say tiles, i mean pebbles. yep, no bag meant no key, no key meant no entrance to my house and no entrance meant no bed. any remotely sober festival goer would have quickly realised that in such circumstances the one mile journey to my girlfriend's house would have been the quick fix solution. not for us. our joyous drunken mood obviously led us to mistakenly believe the pebbles in the front garden would be inviting and cosy. they weren't, but thank you lovebox, thank you for the drunken good times that have led to my now four day old aching back.

as is obvious from the above, with arsenal of vodka quickly consumed, i have minimal evidence in my aching head to back up my claims that lovebox was a lot of fun, however i can reflect from my few lasting visions and photographs that the sun helped, the lack of mud was a massive boost and the 'we're here for a day so let's fucking have it' mindset amongst everyone contributed to what made this day so forgetful - in a good way! what i'm trying to say, is that because lovebox was such a laugh the fact that we can't remember seeing anyone doesn't matter, the lost bag doesn't matter, the night spent asleep in my cold front garden and the now unshakeable aching bones do not matter... i wouldn't have had it any other way. see you next year for more of the same vicky park, pebbles 'n all...

9.5

hello, this is bombay bicycle club, may i take your orderings please? folk, yes we do folk. would you like pilau rice with that?

album review >> bombay bicycle club >> flaws

if you're going to listen to an acoustic album, you need to be in exactly the right mood. my mood today is sleepy, hungover, and ridiculously hot. bombay bicycle club are about to release 'flaws' (out on monday 12th july), possibly the perfect album for my current state of mind.

this is a massive (presumably temporary) step away from the sound of bbc's first album 'i had the blues but i shook them loose', and there's not much on 'flaws' that will get your heart racing or your arms aloft as their first album did with such indie hits as 'evening/morning', but that's obviously not the angle of this record. what the new songs lack in effects and electronic zest, they make up for in haunted acoustic folk, heavily doused in nick drake and neil young. also on show is a maturing voice delivering more endearing lyrics; lead man jack steadman's vocals sound particularly impressive fronting this new found folk sound. highlights include the cover of john martyn's 'fairytale lullaby', the song from which the album takes its name 'flaws' and the stripped back version of 'dust on the ground', which is possibly better than the version found on their debut album. unfortunately i found some songs to be a little repetitive and forgettable as is regularly the issue with an acoustic album, but that's not to say i didn't appreciate the crouch end boys new sound, indeed praise is due for displaying such a brave and creative alter-ego. the band now embark on a nationwide church and chapel tour, but have promised to revisit their more varied classical indie sounds for their festival dates.

as my saturday night draws closer, i realise this isn't going to be the soundtrack to get spruced and bruced to, but for now, as i sit resembling a lobster, struggling in the hot english sunshine, it's perfect.

7

oh man did we have fun

festival review >> isle of wight

a few weeks ago, while trying to avoid my daily mind numbing workload, i decided to write a festival guide. not just a load of text with a “don’t forget your wellies and wet-wipes” note to round it off, no this was on a new level of festival geek. written with a load of ‘computer code’, this all singing, all dancing guide would tell you everything; prices, line-ups, directions, photos, toilet cleanliness etc but it also included the odd sly dig at festivals that had failed to impress me in the past, or those that for some unknown deep-rooted reason i felt particular negativity towards. the isle of wight festival was one of those. i’m not sure why, i’d never been. it was possibly because i went to bestival last year and had one of the best weekends of my life, and therefore had decided that if you were ever going to go to this small island to enjoy music, you’d do what i’d do (which is surely right?) and go to bestival…

all this changed massively when a couple of weeks ago i was greeted with the news from my other/better half that she had got us free tickets to the isle of wight festival! never one to pass up a freebie, all ill feeling quickly disappeared. i was going to the isle of wight! for free! woo! and to top it off, the tickets were vip meaning i’d get the opportunity to run over the geldof sisters backstage in a golf buggy!

musically the line up was not up to much, it was quite v-like, in terms of acts like the saturdays and pink drawing bigger crowds than the brilliant bombay bicycle club. but there were two names on the bill that got my heart beating slightly quicker than the off-road golf buggies… the strokes and paul mccartney. obvious choices? yes, but the strokes are possibly my third favourite band of all time (we’ve all got a top five in our heads) and macca is just macca, the closest thing i’ll ever get to seeing those scallys from merseyside, so it was a gig i was never going to miss.

both were brilliant. paul mccartney was amazing in a kumbaya round the campfire, one massive jolly sing-a-long way. it was a night i’ll never forget but i do wish i’d been a little closer to the action just to throw him some ‘macca guns’*. the strokes played a classic set, all the songs we, the fans wanted to hear and throw our drunken sun burnt arms aloft to – the kind of set noel gallagher always threatens when oasis play, but then throws in some crap liam song just to piss everyone off. we heard ’someday’, ‘last night’, ‘new york city cops’, ‘under control’, ‘reptilia’ and many more but sadly one of my favourites ‘12:51′ was omitted. but 12:51 or no 12:51, i found myself moved by their set. emotionally moved, i couldn’t take it all in. i’d been drinking (heavily) in the sun all day and there i was watching the strokes blow thousands away with their thumping drums and amazing guitars. oh, and a leather-biker-jacket-clad jules wasn’t too bad on vox either. not wanting to look like a big baby, i held back the tears in front of the girlfriend, but i’m not ashamed to admit this gig, this festival, isle of wight did something to me. maybe it was the sun, maybe it was the booze, or maybe, just maybe, ’cause it was the fucking strokes.

*in-house joke, sorry.

10