Saturday 31 August 2013

I Survived Leeds 2013

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.

Wednesday 21 August 2013

My Top 20 Awesomest Music Videos

Because music is wonderful, but sometimes you can emphasise or even completely change the meaning of a song by how you present the video. Some videos are really boring and just stick to the basic 'performance in front of dramatic backdrop' thing, but some will be a story, and put into a physical format all the things you see in your head when you listen to the song. So here is my top twenty.

20. Duke Dumont feat A*M*E - Need U (100%)
I did only see this video the other day, and by accident as well, but I find it highly amusing, especially the bit with the surgeons at the end.

19. All Time Low - I Feel Like Dancin'
This is the first All Time Low video I saw, and I think it played a major part in my decision to keep listening to them. It's funny, and at the same time it takes the piss out of some major 'artists' and the whole corporate side of music. (and Alex looks quite good in the video...)

18. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Can't Stop
There's the whole sculpture thing going on, which makes it quite interesting to look at, and RHCP know how to give a good performance as well.

17. Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At?
I remember seeing this video from a very young age, which at first made it quite easy for me to just accept how bizarre it is. I actually forgot about it until my mum made me come and watch the video with her the other month, when the strangeness of it finally hit me. It is brilliant though, and an awesome song as well.

16. Darwin Deez - You Can't Be My Girl
I just like how creepy Darwin is in this, lurking about in the background. It actually took me a minute or so to notice he was even there, but I love the way they've done it.

15. Leathermouth - Bodysnatchers 4 Ever
I have no idea what's going on in that video, but it's creepy and I like it.

14. Green Day - Jesus Of Suburbia
I can't remember if I listened to Green Day before I saw this - I mean, everyone does really, it's Green Day, they're unavoidable - but it was this video and the song that caught my attention, and I still love watching it because there's all the weird little bits I've already noticed that I love, and then there's so many new things I see in it each time.

13. Pierce The Veil - Bulls In The Bronx
Although it doesn't exactly go with the story behind the song, it's still a pretty awesome video. All four of them manage to look so incredibly bad-ass the whole way through, and are putting at least 5000% of their effort into it - watching Mike in this lights a deep burning fire within me that urges me to take up drumming again.

12. The Cribs - Housewife
It's all creepy and gothy and weird, which is good. The cover art for the single is also kind of weird, which makes me like it more.

11. Christina Aguilera, Mya, Lil' Kim, Pink - Lady Marmalade
Because . . . women . . . in lingerie . . . and lace . . . you see my point?

10. Without A Face - TSA Song
It's got Darth Vader in it. It's got Without A Face in leather. It's got awesome dancing and stuff. I don't know what I'm supposed to say that can make you understand this better. Just watch it.

9. Panic! At The Disco - Build God, Then We'll Talk
From one of the most bizarre and brilliant albums I've ever listened to. There's never anything quite like P!ATD, really. This video is one of their weirder ones, which is saying something. It's a whole relationship in mime, but good mime, I promise.

8. Fall Out Boy - Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet
It took me ages to find this video the first time, because it's on a different channel to the others, and actually goes by the name of 'A Weekend At Pete Rose's'. I've read about the whole idea for the video, but it was a while ago and I don't remember the specifics, but that's some obscure reference that baseball fans or something will get - same with the song title. Really quite a macabre video, with an excellent performance from Bendon Urie and Spencer Smith of Panic! At The Disco, it's all very . . . well, I couldn't do it justice in words alone.

7. My Chemical Romance - Famous Last Words
Ok, I really pushed it back, this could have been the number two video if I had no self-restraint. But this video means a lot to me. It's as dark as the song, and all broken and twisted and really just sums up the whole Black Parade album for me. I admit that I do sometimes cry while watching this video, and I very rarely cry at films or songs.

6. Bring Me The Horizon - Sleepwalking
I feel like the video really perfectly fits the feeling of the song, that sort of alternating between this mind-shattering numbness and apathy, and then this feeling like you're bleeding and drowning and that you must be noticeably broken, but nobody seems to notice at all. I like the really intense performance surrounded by the completely oblivious onlookers.

5. Muse - Panic Station
Duuddddeeee. I just don't understand it, any of it. It's just like whwaaaaaattttt?!

4. Blink 182 - I Miss You
I just really like the creepy, lonely gothic atmosphere to it, from the soft focus to the spiders and the ethereal figures. Also, apparently, shooting the video took so long that Mark Hoppus had to put superglue on the ends of his fingers because playing the double bass for so long was rubbing the skin off them.

3. All American Rejects - Dirty Little Secret
Cool song, spliced in with many different 'dirty little secrets'. Are they real confessions or ones they made up? I don't know. But I feel like some of them are, at least. It says a lot about the things people think but don't tell anyone, from liking the smell of their own poo, to fearing for your own sanity.

2. Black Cards - End Of Pretend
The song's brilliant, and even though the video's quite random and erratic, I feel like it fits. It's made of loads and loads of GIFs, which all seem to fit together in this in a weird way, from the creepy skeletons to the cat pawing at the feet of the hanged woman. Plus, it's good to see Doctor Who randomly turn up, and I like spotting all the different GIFs I've seen on tumblr.

1. My Chemical Romance - Helena (So Long And Goodnight)
Of course it was going to be this. It was always going to be this. There was never any other option. I knew the moment I decided to make this post that this would be the number one spot. The song itself deals with grief, and the video shows that so well, with the living and the dead dancers, and the red and black colour scheme . . . I just . . . I just fucking love this video.

Tuesday 20 August 2013

ARE YOU READY FOR LEEDS YET?!

(I got onto a computer! Crazy, isn't it. Mine's still broken though, which makes posting regularly very annoyingly difficult)

On Friday, this very Friday, begins the 2013 Leeds Festival. I am going to this festival. I am so excited that I have been having trouble sleeping, which is somewhat troublesome because I should probably get the rest now seeing as I'll be up and about pretty much all day every day when I get there.
This year has an amazing line-up, the best line-up you could hope for after 2011 featured My Chemical Romance. We've got Bring Me The Horizon, Green Day, Deaf Havana, and - most importantly for a fair amount of people, I think, because until this year all the newer fans like myself thought we'd never get to see them perform live - Fall Out Boy. Stoked does not cut it.
So, to try and help work through my own excitement enough that I can sleep tonight, and also help any of you who are somewhat unsure who to go and see at Leeds this year, here are the songs by my favourite bands and artists that will be there that I am most excited to see. (apologies for the breakdown in my ability to express myself as the post goes on, I was getting more and more excited)


Thursday 8 August 2013

I will try to do new posts when I can, but my laptop is broken at the moment, which makes writing large documents and linking videos and such kind of difficult, especially since my tablet is about as much use as a chocolate arse when it comes to using the internet and such . . . like it was designed to do.

Sunday 4 August 2013

A Band You Want To Meet (30 of 30)

All of them! All the bands! Every band! What kind of ridiculous questions are these?! However, I will say Without A Face for this. He's a really cool person and does awesome music, but he's down to earth, and I've seen his online concerts enough that I don't think I'd totally lose my shit on meeting him.
See, I could be fine meeting him. Here is his song Nickelcrap:

Saturday 3 August 2013

A Band You Liked As A Kid (29 of 30)

Erm . . . I don't know if I've been alive long enough for this one to work really, because I technically still am a kid. Certainly the faces you can catch me pulling if you go into the common room at the right time would seriously contest any of my claims to maturity. I still like pretty much all the music I did when I was younger, anyway, that I remember.
I'll pick Hard-Fi though. I don't really listen to them now, but when the Stars of CCTV album came out and I was maybe eight or nine, I was all over it.

Friday 2 August 2013

Hottest Musician (28 of 30)

Hands down it would be Laurie, but he's asleep so I can't ask him if he's ok with me putting his picture up on here. Plus, I'm guessing that, even though you'd agree if you saw him, the aim of this thing is to pick more 'famous' people. I could say I was being hipster.

In second place, then, I will pick Frank Iero. I'm past the menacing fangirly obsession - if he turned up naked on my doorstep I'd just give him some pyjamas to wear and find him some vegetarian food and we'd watch television - but there is the way that he looks at his guitar in some photos that just really makes me want to be a guitar sometimes. This song (yes, it's MCR again . . .) is Vampire Money.