I know this is a bit late, but getting hold of things I can type on isn't too easy at the moment.
Anyway, I have indeed returned alive from Leeds Festival 2013, and I am going to tell you about it whether you like it or not (unless you can be bothered to scroll past or just close the tab, I suppose).
I don't remember all that much about how we got there, but we arrived at about 4pm on the Thursday. It was hot and bright, and we got our tent set up next to a slushie stand in the blue website before spending the evening with some of Laurie's - my boyfriend, the other part of the 'we', I'm not just a narcissist - friends in the next campsite.
That is, until the skies opened sometime after nightfall and froze us. Half the festival goers retreated into their tents, leaving the other half howling at the clouds in a grim, quite British fashion, daring them to even try and ruin the festival. I'm pretty sure it provoked some people to take their clothes off in the manner of some kind of Celtic warrior.
The weather was warm and clear again the next morning, and we woke up with an insatiable thirst that can only happen when you've been subconsciously listening to cries of, "GET YER SLUSHIES HERE, NICEY ICEY!" for several hours.
After a breakfast of some of the food Laurie had brought - some chocolate chip brioche that had compacted together to make a sort of squishy chocolate chip energy bar - we had a look inside the arena. Lots and lots of shops, selling food at inordinate prices, merchandise, clothes, flower crowns (I bought one), and all sorts. The staff were all exceedingly friendly, and amusingly lax about traditional security values; a guy on one stall got into a discussion about drugs with us and asked if we happened to know of anyone selling weed at a reasonable price. He also offered us a free temporary tattoo of a jaguar if we would let him do one of a penis somewhere on our face.
The first band we saw were City Lights, on the BBC Introducing Stage. They were pretty good and, if nothing else, keen to make sure everyone was having a good time on their first few hours of the festival.
After that, I heard the distant roar of heavy guitars - the call of my kind. Dragging Laurie in my wake, I followed the sounds to the main stage, where we found the first main act of the festival, Bury Tomorrow. I had vaguely heard of them before then, as they are in the kind of genre I prefer, but I'd never really listened to them. However, the Southampton five-piece were so happy to be playing the main stage while still a comparatively small band that they put on an awesome show, and I will definitely be having a look at them when I get my goddamn laptop working again. However, for now, check out
Royal Blood, one of the songs I saw them play. If you like Parkway Drive and Of Mice & Men, it should be right up your street.
I spent a while just chilling out at the back for some of the next bands, as they were more Laurie's thing - Tribes, for one, and Villagers on what I think was the NME stage (or the Radio One stage, I don't remember, they were all just tents to me). Both put on good performances, but were somewhat hindered by the acoustics of the stage area.
What I was waiting for on the Friday, what everyone in their right minds was waiting for, was Fall Out Boy. I squeezed my way through the crowds leaving after The Lumineers' performance to get in place, and in the process stumbled into someone I happen to know from town.
After a long wait, pressed in so tight I could barely move, they appeared. Andy shirtless, Joe in a sleeveless denim jacket, Patrick in plain black with his signature hat, and Pete with his red-and-black bass and a t-shirt saying 'Suck My Richard', they came on stage and started immediately with Thriller, the opener to their
Infinity On High album. They followed with the perfect mix of old hits and new - Dance, Dance, This Ain't A Scene . . ., A Little Less Sixteen Candles . . ., Alone Together, The Phoenix - you get the picture.
"A couple years ago, I ended up in a tent with some drunk people, there were two guys and two girls, and the next morning one of the girls said, "He tastes like you, but sweeter" . . ." Pete announced before Thnks Fr Th Mmrs. Foxes appeared for Just One Yesterday. Towards the end of the set, Pete handed his bass to a tech and suddenly appeared on top of the crowd, so near I could see how his face moved as he grinned at us. The people around me were sweating and screaming, so excited to see such a brilliant band back in Britain - fuck that, just back together again - that there were great waves pushing forward, trying to get closer to the front. It was amazing. When they were finished, I'd managed to get facepainted, kicked in the crotch by some ignorant fool who couldn't keep her damn feet away from my cervix, and was so excited it was suggested that I was high.
I honestly was too busy fangirling in the aftermath of their performance that I don't remember any of the rest of Friday. All I remember after that it rained a lot in the night. I woke up on Saturday, yet again to the now-quite-annoying slushie vendors, after a sleep somewhat disrupted by the scousers who insisted on having a very loud conversation outside our tent at about 2 am every night of the festival, after arriving on the Saturday shouting about how "you can't trust Manc twats".
This was when the mud was becoming a severe problem. It had been bad on Friday, too, but now it had gotten waterlogged to the point where you couldn't tell what was solid ground and what wasn't. There were vast pools of water, and my trainers were weighed down by a thick sludge that wouldn't come off. It reached the point where I gave up on trying to stay dry in a moment of grumpiness after some brainless, welly-clad dick decided that because they were in their nice, warm, waterproof clothes in the middle of an icy rainstorm that broke out during the afternoon, that meant absolutely everybody wanted to have the dirty puddles kicked at their face as they tried to get out of the way, so I just stamped through the puddles and ended up with sodden feet. People who do stuff like that should be thrown out by security.
After seeing a few songs by Wavves, and then Kodaline's set on Saturday morning, we planned to see Crossfaith. Due to what turned out to be a very happy error of timing, we turned up early. At first, we thought the guy on stage was an incredibly enthusiastic sound man who preferred to sing whole lines from songs as opposed to the traditional "check, check". Half way through the first song, however, we realised that they were an actual band, a band that turned out to be Arcane Roots, who are pretty damn good (have a look at the ironically fast-moving
Slow).
When they finished, it actually was time for Crossfaith. I was excited to see them after their fantastic supporting slot for BMTH at Academy 2 in April, but unprepared for their reception. We weren't stood that close to the front, but the whole audience erupted into violent thrashing and jumping the first time they hit a chorus. Laurie doesn't even like metal, but he enjoyed them enough that he left me for a few songs (I was feeling kind of fragile and had my rucksack with me, which is prohibitive to most jumping) to enter the fray. Even I ended up involved anyway, after we sang happy birthday to the drummer, Tatsuya Amano, and they performed their trademark cover of Omen, getting everyone to spring up from the ground. I wanted to dive into the crowd, but the straps of my rucksack were rubbing my neck raw.
I was feeling tired and planned on standing at the back when we got to Bring Me The Horizon, excited as I was to see them, but the moment the banner went up on stage I found myself drifting closer, anticipating another performance like the one I saw in April.
They appeared, faces painted like animals, to the eery moans at the start of Shadow Moses, and for a moment Oli appeared to have vanished - until he popped up on top of the barrier, grinning at his fans.
It was a solid performance, full of mosh pits and people on each other's shoulders, and a set of mainly
Sempiternal material with Chelsea Smile and Blessed With A Curse, but I don't think it's the best I've seen of them. Maybe it's just because I wasn't as far into the crowd as I would normally get, but they just . . . they just didn't feel quite as memorable as I'd want.
Now let me take a moment to talk to you about the Silent Disco. We went twice, first time on Friday night, I think, to meet up with Laurie's cousin
Kat for a bit. It took us a while to get there, the ten minute walk from the tent turning into a half-hour trek through the mud and pouring rain, but we arrived eventually. I wasn't sure exactly what the premise of the Silent Disco was, but as we approached all I could hear were bellowed accapella choruses of various different songs that bizarrely mixed together to sound a lot like the Hokey Cokey. I was handed a set of headphones and herded out of the way of the entrance, and after some confusion worked out that it's basically like a large-scale version of what I do at the tram stop - put my music on loud and dance about. What makes it slightly unusual is that there's a couple of hundred other people also dancing to the music in their headphones, and the music is not your playlist, but that of the DJs at the front of the room. That made it slightly difficult to get into, on the occasions where my two choices of song were both crap, but generally they stick to popular songs enough that you'll get something you at least know.
The second time was on the Sunday, a more dry, warm night. We were in a larger group, and everyone was just there to party for the end of the festival. There was Arctic Monkeys, there was Rage Against The Machine, there was Kanye West, it was awesome.
Sunday was a very good day. We finally got hold of some wellies and could get through the mud - although mine were 3 sizes too big and kept nearly coming off - although there was no rain that day, and it was bright and warm and sunny all day.
We started the day off with Darwin Deez, who were excellent and I was very excited to see. They started off with a bizarre dance sequence to a medley of songs from which I managed to pick out The Spice Girls' Wannabe. They played enthusiastically and they were fun, with Darwin going off on a guitar solo during one of the songs. They did Radar Detector, Red Shift, Bad Day, all the good ones. It's quite nice music for when you're a bit tired and you just want to hug and be a bit soppy.
After that were Deaf Havana, whom I was also quite excited to see. I don't know if it was because the crowd were tired, though, or because they were sticking to newer stuff and what I wanted - what a fair number of people wanted, according to Facebook - was some of the
Meet Me Halfway, At Least. They just fell kind of short of what I expected of them.
Everyone was waiting for the closing act of the festival. Eminem. We were hearing rumours about his performance all weekend. People were saying he'd only do songs from 2009 onwards, which would have been absolute balls because everyone wanted to hear The Real Slim Shady.
As it turned out, we didn't get to see all of the performance. After seeing Foals that afternoon we were back in the tent having an unsuccessful attempted barbecue and then sorting out our stuff, and then we noticed the state of my feet. The mis-sized boots had caused these huge raw patches on my ankles that were incredibly painful to walk with, so the start of Eminem's performance - which we could at least hear the crowd cheering for, all the way from the campsite - was spent waiting in the First Aid tent, which is a grim place to be. Mud-covered people with glazed eyes vomiting into cardboard bowls, people crying in corners, people staggering in, howling at their friends for giving them too much MDMA. Yeah. I went in hoping to just get some antiseptic wipes and two plasters, but it turned out there was an hour wait, so I left and we staggered off to the main stage.
On the main stage, generally, there's sort of two areas. In front of a metal barrier, there is the crowd area proper, for the more hardcore fans. Behind that, there's generally a couple of hundred people milling about with a beer, watching the act from a distance. Not so for Eminem. The place was packed out, from stage all the way back to the stalls. Everyone standing, everyone rapping along.We arrived just at the start of Stan, which provoked me into unashamedly excited squealing, because he was doing it, we were there, we were actually fucking there and Eminem was performing Stan, right there in front of us. He did more, he did an awesome set. After finishing with Lose Yourself and a fantastic light show, he left and ended Leeds to calls of "we want more!".
Tired but happy, we set off home the next day. Everyone was exhausted. Waiting for the bus to get us back to Leeds city centre, we were kept company by a mud-encrusted man in a deckchair who claimed to have been dragged out twice by security, and fended off another who insisted that Laurie's bags were all his. At some point, after a long pause to eat lunch, followed by a lack of sufficient energy to get back up again, we managed to get back to Manchester, and eventually back home, where I spent the next two days lying on the sofa and groaning at bright lights.
All in all, an absolutely amazing experience, and completely changed my mind about festivals. There were bands, there were things to look at, I was with friends - it was brilliant. I'm just somewhat disappointed that I didn't have enough free time to get any merch.
