T - Day 1 (Part 1)

Right. It's been a while. Apologies. So, where were we? Ah yes - drunk and going to bed. Brilliant. We woke up not that much later to the sound of hundreds of still-drunk scotsfolk queuing in the mud to use the loos. Hurrah. It was also bloody hot, which was extremely exciting.

Breakfast happened.

Breakfast. And some muddy trainers. It tasted better than it looks here.

Sated, we made our way into the main arena, retreading the unpleasant muddy path we'd stumbled back up a small while before. Well, I did - Zanna had forgotten her wallet. Or her keys. Or something. Anyway, she trudged back to the tent, and I forged onwards, arriving at the main stage just in time to fall in love with the Saw Doctors.

I'd never come across them before, but they've been around for ages, and are the kind of band that makes you glad music was invented. A bunch of hairy middle-aged gits from Ireland, they sing songs called 'Never going to go on Bebo again' and 'To win just once' that make you want to ruffle their hair, buy them a beer and then drink whiskey with them 'til four in the morning. It's as if The Wonder Stuff had grown up, had children with Status Quo (but in a world where Francis Rossi isn't a twat) and those children had then grown up, got old, got grizzled and formed a band. A genuinely lovely start to the day.

As a quick aside, it's inevitable that some of the choices we made during the day are going to irritate people - as is always the way with festivals, there were clashes and occasions where Zanna and I wanted to see different people, and we'd made the decision not to split up. You may not always like the choices we made - hell, I didn't always like the choices we'd made - but it had to happen. Anyway...

The lovely old Irish chaps were followed by a trip to the Pet Sounds tent to check out Charlotte Hatherley. I've always had a soft spot for Ash (1977 is one of those albums that takes me back to almost a specific adolescent week) and so this was mostly a solidarity thing. I never really got the point of Charlotte when she was in Ash - it almost seemed to me to be more of a marketing thing than a musical one. (That said, everyone reading this knows what I do for a living, so perhaps I should just stop being a pompous arse...) She failed to set the world on fire, but was fairly pleasant in a 'girls-doing-it-on-their-own-if-you-like-your-pop-feminism-a-little-edgier-than-Spice' kind of way. And she still has extremely pretty eyes. That said, Zanna wasn't impressed, and if anyone's going to buy into that kind of tosh, it's her.:


It was then time for one of the best moments of the weekend - The Thrills on the NME Stage.

Don't laugh.

Listen to any of The Thrills' albums, and I promise you won't be disappointed - as long as you're expecting a middle-of-the-road Irish band that wants to be the Byrds, front by a singer with a quirkily attractive croaky voice, who sounds like he's always on the brink of tears. And proper tears, too, the kind leave you curled up on your own in the corner of the room, snot everywhere. Bless him.

I hate them for this - I really, really hate them. But only because they're so achingly good at festivals. Conor Deasy's voice, so reedy on record, becomes emotive and powerful in the middle of a field. Vaguely cuddly tracks like 'Don't Go Back To Big Sur' and 'Santa Cruz' take on a strength all of their own - they plead for you to love them, they need for you to love them, and somehow it works. It's like they're only truly comfortable when completely dwarfed by their surroundings - put them in a studio, or in an arena and they suddenly become painfully self-aware, and it just doesn't work.

But if you can see them at a festival, do - really do. As the first tempo change in Santa Cruz kicks in, Conor dances like a buffoon, and the sun breaks out from behind the clouds, then you'll be dancing like a buffoon too, and so will I. Just don't get over-excited and play their albums on the way home. That hurts.

So there we are. Three bands in. One perfectly lovely, the other two really quite special (albeit in a slightly odd way). The next band get their own post.

I'm in love.

Time for T Again - The First Evening

So. There we were. Tequila and Tennents-fortified, we made our way from the campsite to the main arena.


It. Took. Fucking. Ages.

I could probably have thrown a rock and hit the back of the main stage from our own personal mud-patch, but to actually stand on the other side of it involved trekking through the remainder of the vast, sprawling campsite, and then down half a mile of high-walled, regularly patrolled path to actually get to the arena. The floor was caked in thick mud, there was a light to heavy drizzle in the air, but everyone was still excited.

We were, after all, the lucky ones. By all accounts, there were still huge tailbacks outside, and certainly when we got back to the tent at about 2.30am, there were still people trying to put their tents up in the dark. Sympathetic though I obviously was, I couldn't help but think that they'd brought it on themselves - don't want to be late? Set off early. Don't want to get stuck in traffic? Set off early. Don't want to miss Bloc Party? Set off early. Set off late? Don't complain when you arrive late, get suck in traffic and miss Bloc Party. Anyway.

We made it in, and stopped by the T Break stage, where we caught the last five minutes of a band called San Sebastian who are currently doing big things in the pages of the NME, if nowhere else.

San Sebastian. Meh.

Without wishing to be rude to the guys, as they seemed like perfectly nice chaps, they weren't particularly inspiring. The kind of chug-a-long-a-shoe-gaze band that 10 years ago would have been lucky to get a recurring slot in that pub round the corner, but that are now headlining stages with the word 'Future' in their title. Ugh.

Most people were, of course, sludging their way through the mud to see the Monkeys. The Arctics. Those cheeky Northern Scallies. Don't you just love 'em?

Well, I don't, particularly. As I've said before, '...Dancefloor' is a great song - as close to the perfect rock/pop song as we've come this century. I just wish they had something else. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a fervent rejector of hype, which is, in many ways, just as bad as following it (I refused to entertain the notion of the White Stripes as a band for ages, purely because Dominic 'Tw*t' Mohan told me that I should love them. My loss.) but there's something about the Arctic Monkeys that just winds me up.

The Arctic Monkeys, ladies and gentlemen. Note how excited the people in front of us are to see them.

We only arrived in time for the last two songs - traditionally the time when a band likes to really ramp it up, to send the crowd home on a massive high. Those cheeky, anarchic monkeys though had decided to dispense with tradition and send people home with a snooze, ploughing through a couple of seemingly interminable 'difficult second album' tracks. And so we decided to find our own high, and fucked off up the ferris wheel - they were much more fun from there:

And the Monkeys from the big wheel. So much more fun when they're blurry.

Apparently Alex what's-his-face then went and got off with Alexa Chung, the prettier but less funny one from PopWorld, which is about as pure an example of a singer having more fun than his audience as it's possible to imagine. What hacks me off most about the Monkeys is the constant eulogising of their wit - this isn't a celebration of a particularly clever band, this is an indictment of the idiocy of the majority of mainstream UK music at the moment. Go to Sheffield, Manchester, Bolton, Hull, Liverpool, any town in the North of England and you'll find yourselves surrounded and bombarded by the kind of acerbic wit that makes the Monkeys look like Antonia Quirke - it's just that the majority of 'music' fans in the UK choose to listen to neanderthals like Kasabian or hideous whiny travesties like Snow Patrol or Coldplay. Ugh.

Anyway, the first day was done, and the highlight was the Ferris Wheel. And the tequila. So we headed back into the campsite, where the party was just getting into full flow. I won't go into detail, because this blog isn't about me drinking and my sister failing to - suffice to say, three hours of drinking (Snakebite in a can! Snakebite in a can!) and dancing like twats to mid-90s indie classics ensued.

Two of the lovely people - Lisa and friend

There were lovely people there. We met them and danced with them and drank with them. It was awesome. And then at 2am, when they kicked us out, we went back to the tent, Zanna passed out, and I drank til 5.30 with the guys who were camping next to us - drunk Scotsmen really are the best people in the world. And that was that. Night night.

PS It's important to point out at this juncture, lest you get the wrong impression, that the first day was awesome, despite the weather, the mud, and the musical mediocrity. That's the joy of T...

A Quick T Break (last pun, promise)

A couple of quick dates for your diary, then back to the T talk.

First up, if you're at a loose end on August 7th (and if you're not, untie yourself) you could do a lot worse than heading to The Hideaway to check out a guy called Nicholas Hirst - keyboard player with The Conway Story - who's playing an acoustic set. It promises to be brilliant - his words, and also mine.

Secondly, with even more warning, on Friday August 31st you've got the Drowned in Sound 'End of Summer' party. They know their stuff at Drowned in Sound, and with Russian Circles offering their first ever London headlining slot, and more than able support from a couple of other topnotch other bands, it promises to be a hell of a night.

Hope to see you there...

What a life it would be, if you could come to mine for T...

Zanna drove. She's better at that than she is at drinking.

The day began sodding early. I'd planned to head up to my sister's the night before after a couple of quick drinks at my friends' engagement party, and sure enough, after a couple of quick drinks at my friends' engagement party, my friend Jerry punched me in the plums, I had a few more drinks, and went home to bed. But that, children, is another story.

And so, the next day, I got up extremely early, and was on the 07.20 to Warwick Parkway, where my sister was due to meet me at 9.30 so we could start the [insert spurious number of your own here - we certainly didn't know] hour journey up to Kinross. She turned up at 11.30. We were off to a fairly mediocre start, but at least my balls weren't aching anymore.

And the journey...? Well, there's not a huge amount to say about most of it. We didn't take the M6 toll, we just took the M6, and England sped past - England at its best, you might say. It leathered it down with rain sporadically, and whilst spirits remained fairly high, the thought of camping in the Scottish mud was starting to weigh us down a touch.

But the sight of Edinburgh and the Forth Bridge ushered all negative thoughts away. It's a city I've always adored, and the fabulous span of the Firth of Forth always gets my pulse racing - particularly when it means that Balado and T are but an hour away.

Or so we thought.

About three miles from the front gate, we hit the traffic. By Christ, did we hit the traffic. There's always something slightly surreal about the incongruity of a country road traffic jam
- your classic M25 jam is characterised by beeping horns, shouting and furious lane changing in the desperate hope of gaining an extra couple of yards. Your country jam, however, is normally inordinately peaceful - broken only by people wandering over to the car in front for a quick chat, and, in the case of the Tennent's-soaked T-bound hoards, people nipping out to the bushes to have a piss. Bless.

We really weren't going anywhere, and a quick walk ahead revealed the blue domes of King Tut's Wah-Wah tent in the not-too-distant distance, so I suggested that I walk on, set up the tent and then come back to meet Zanna when she'd parked the car.

It was fucking miles. And it was raining. And as such, I am forever grateful to three people - the tractor driver who gave me a lift for about half a mile through what was (at that point at least) the worst of the mud, and who was the most Scottish man I've ever met (I'd tell you his name, but I couldn't understand a single word he said) and the first two people I met while I was setting up the tent, who, to cut a short story shorter, gave me tequila (I'd tell you their names, but I can't remember them. They gave me tequila.).

So eventually, the tent was up, the car was parked and I met my sister with a pint of Tennent's in each hand. At this point, we'd already missed Lily Allen, The Coral and Bloc Party on the main stage - we'd also met a bunch of strangers, got fucking muddy and drunk free tequila.

It was muddy, and it was grey. But we were drinking.

Our Festival experience was already paying off. Hell yes.

Back from T...

The Ferris Wheel. Awesome.

And so we're back. And it was phenomenal. Some bits were better than others, obviously: the last leg of the journey there sucked, in a very real way, and Razorlight were always going to happen, but we left before Snow Patrol, Amy Winehouse didn't bother to turn up (don't you just LOVE her?) and it was sunny throughout. You're not going to hear me complaining.

I'm obviously not going to write one monster post on the Festival as a whole - that would make for some very dull writing, and some even more dull reading, which nobody wants. So I'll break it up - bit by bit, band by band, day by day, that kind of thing. One post may even serve as a eulogy to the English countryside , which is not something I ever saw myself writing. Hey - turns out life can surprise you.

And I've come back pretty excited about music, which can only be a good thing - I'll tell you why as we go. I've also got a few concerns - more on that later. But, overall, it was a completely joyous experience, - T remains, in my humble view, the best (and certainly the sunniest) festival in the UK. Let me tell you why.