Day 323

I'm writing from the studio this morning. I've just had a bit of an all nighter here. Good times. Hexxed practice in a few hours. I should probably sleep soon.

Anyway, hi there. How's it going?

Electric Picnic was amazeballs!!!

Lots of highlights, including Jónsi: making sweet love with big anthemic, emotional and, actually, quite dancey vibes. What a voice, what a performance and the visuals were stunning!

Beardyman: Probably my favourite performance of the weekend. The guy is simply a fucking genius and it depresses me somewhat that I once thought I might be good at this old beat boxing shit. He said it himself: He came along and now all other beatboxers are irrelevant (cocky bastard, but he's right!!!) Got to chat to him and ask him about his set up and stuff. He uses 4 Kaoss Pads. 4!! Plus Ableton Live, 2 x Korg Micro Synths, another loop station of some sort, and a pitch shift / vocoder (I think). His set was non-stop and he had about 5000 people in a tent all jumping up and down for about an hour. Ledge-to-the-mutha-uckin'-end!

Bonobo: Guys were well chilled and lovely. Great band and it pulled a lot of people over to the main stage. By the end there were hundreds of people nodding their heads or dancing about.

Hot Chip: Only caught the end of these guys, but it was good shit. Great crowd response and all very lively and full of action on stage.

LCD Soundsystem: Similar... Good upbeat, disco-y stuff. I found the music a bit too repetitive at times, but the front man is quite mesmerising. His delivery and presence really kept my attention, so it all worked quite well.

Mumford & Sons: I felt it all got a bit samey after a few songs, but they were good. Main problem were all the noisy, drunken numpties singing along, drowning out the band.

Leftfield: Fucking rocked! It was all the old skool stuff. Only one song of their 2nd album, the rest from Leftism. I thought they must have had new stuff, for them to be touring again, but no. Still, I love all that old stuff, so I was well pleased.

Some comedy stuff was good: Ed Byrne made with the funnies. There was a Who's Line Is It Anyway? type improv group with Phil Jupitus, which was OK for a wee while, but got a bit stale fairly quickly.

Caught some poets in the spoken word tent, who were alright, but nothing I haven't heard a million times before: Gosh, isn't the World really hard and shit and being working class is so hard and shit and I'm so angry... BLAH BLAH BLAH. Yawn. Then there was "Obligatory poem about sex, which is cringeworthy, not because it dares to talk about sex, (oh gosh!) but because it's being delivered as though this is so exciting and risque... It's not...

Still, there were other interesting anecdotes and stuff to be had in the spoken word area.

And So I Watch You From Afar played a blinder. Big turn out for them too. I was giving it stacks to their set, it was just what I needed on Saturday afternoon. It's a shame that so many people don't move or jump about at gigs any more. It annoys the fuck out of me that the security won't even let people get up on other people's shoulders. It's such a fucking buzz kill. Still, I got into it and happily lost my mind, so fuck everybody else.

Massive Attack: Absolutely amazing lights / text / big multi-layered visual stuff, full of political messages which was exciting and enlightening at times, but a bit depressing and distracting also. I couldn't help thinking "ach, just play the fucking songs and stop trying to make us all feel guilty". It just felt a bit of a downer, considering they were the big finale to the whole festival. It was good though. Horace Andy was there. What a voice! Angel was much fun, especially when the lights lit up the entire crowd and you could see thousands of people being rained on, while being blasted with 100s of decibels of sound. Quite cool.

Enjoyed the Silent Disco (again).

Unkle were decent enough. Sound was terrible up the front.

Hmmm what else?

The Barcardi Stage had great beats and DJs all weekend. Only caught a bit of it, but I was really digging that shit.

Phil Selway was nice. Chilled. Nice arrangements and choice of instruments. I liked that his band was made up of multi-instrumentalist, it was like musical chairs, and at the end they all climbed onto the drum kit for a big percussion jam finale.

Aside from that, the food was great at a few places, I had the best shepherd's pie EVER! at one wee stall. A decent enough fry up at a wee family run cafe. Another had amusingly whacky staff and nice cake. There was all sorts of food there, mexican, chinese, italian, indian and it wasn't too dear. I also really loved the aesthetics and architecture of the place, especially the Body & Soul area, which had some installation stuff and lots of little tents and stages that looked very home made and natural.

The camp site we stayed in was fine. I didn't think much about it until we walked through the 'normal' camp site on our way home, then I noticed the difference. I am glad we paid a bit extra for that separated site, we had clean toilets, showers (though average waiting time in the queue was about an hour) and security. The place was just clean all weekend, which was a plus.

Being sober at Electric Picnic was fine. Seeing all the drunken and mashed up people was grand, it never got to a point where I thought, "get these crazies away from me!!" except maybe during Mumford & Sons when I just wanted them to shut the fuck up and listen to the band instead of singing over them, but hey, you can't really blame them I suppose. People were pretty well behaved actually, as far as I could see. There was a real mix of people too. Plenty of older folk and wee kiddies. I guess Electric Picnic is a bit more "posh" than your usual festival, then again it's the only festival I've been to, (besides Glasgowbury, but that's tiny in comparison).

Anyway, that was Electric Picnic. I've hundreds of photos up on my Facebook, if you don't use Facebook... Well... You can probably do without them... I can't be arsed uploading them all again. I imagine you'll probably live.

Since Electric Picnic I've been trying to get back into making music again. I've been feeling a little inspired by some of those bands and performances. I've been looking for work again. I've applied for plenty of jobs and sent out CVs etc. Sigh. Yes, I need to get out of this security job soon (as I'm sure I've said many times before)... I will get out of the security job soon. There. Positive attitude.

I've been reading a lot more of late. Currently I'm on Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. Ummm... It's about sex addicts. So yea. Fun. Read some others recently and got some more books off Amazon, in the post.

What else? Aye, sorry for this being a fairly dry, unimaginative list type post, I'm just kinda tired (it's 6:30am) and I'm at the studio having just spent 8 hours working on music. Working on music!! YAY!! That's right. New music and stuff... Yes.

Right, think that's enough for now.

Oh and I just turned 31. I had a nice time with my family and didn't get too bothered by the fact that I'M OLD AND I'M SLOWLY RUNNING OUT OF TIME AND SOON IT WILL BE TOO LATE TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH MY FUCKING LIFE!!!! ........ No. Positive mental attitude. I'm gaining more experience. Yes. I'm becoming more wise and more ....... awww bollocks to this... Night night...