Cat grows wings... hang on wtf!?

Coolness

THE Reading Festival 2008 Review

It's that time of year where the festivals are all ending, and we have to readjust to the horrors of everyday life. This being the first festival in which I'd actually camped over the whole weekend, I can safely say that I now realise camping is half of the fun of it all. A great, friendly atmosphere meant that hour long chats with random people were far from impossible, and many a friend were made.


The bands of the weekend

1 - Biffy Clyro - Blessed with one of the best crowds of the weekend, a topless trio blasted through a phenomenal set packed with energy from the openening Saturday Superhouse to the end. One of the few times where moshing was genuinely great fun and not just insanely painful cramped and pushy, the set became my highlight of Reading 08.

2 - Rage Against the Machine - Undoubtedly the most highly anticipated set of the festival, what with Bulls on Parade being blasted from sound systems of punters around the campsite, and chants of 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me' whenever groups were ordered to put out their fires, it was pretty clear that the band weren't set to disappoint from the moment they appeared, dressed in Guantanamo Bay clothes, and bag's over their heads, and launching into a flawless performance of Bombtrack. The set was relentless and the energy didn't let up; Zach de la Rocha bouncing around the stage and Morello unleashing some awe inspiring guitar riffing, which climaxed in mass moshing and chanting to Killing in the Name Of. It was hard to see how Saturday and Sunday could live up to such a blinding first day.

3 - Does it Offend You, Yeah? - Playing a slot before Rage at the Festival Republic stage, the local band's electronic sounds got the crowd moving and the songs really came into their own live. Annoyingly we had to leave early to catch Rage but they warmed us up for the headliners nicely.

4 - Pendulum - Even before the band had begun, the NME stage was well and truly packed out; not helped by the cancellation of slipknot, who were due to play on the main stage at the same time. Scenes of mass jumping barrier jumping to escape the intensely packed crowd followed, but those who persevered were rewarded with a high octane set from the Aussie D'n'B / Rock band.

5 - Hadouken - Their charismatic frontman, along with with the fact that you could actually make out what he was saying and a great crowd meant that new life was breathed into tracks from what to me seemed like a pretty poor Music For an Accelerated Culture. Surprisingly good stuff.

Oh and I'm told by my friends that Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip and Babyshambles were both similarly great - though clashing with Rage I couldn't go see them...


Top Random Sights Spotted

• Man wearing a gasmask when he went to the toilet
• Random dudes doing a limbo chain using gaffa tape in the walkway (We then had a long ol' chat with them)
• Man dressed up in that Borat outifit
• People moving along a path inside their tent, rolling it along like some sort of freakish hamster wheel
• Lightsaber duelists
• A 'Stereo Battle' when two groups with portable stereos met in the path late at night


Other Bands of Note

1 - Lightspeed Champion - Good chillout band that seemed to spread happiness to the festival. It was hard not to raise a smile at the Star Wars theme being mixed into the epic Midnight Surprise, and Dev makes a great frontman.

2 - Killers - Despite it seeming like I'd heard the entire set the year before, watching the band headline Glastonbury, and despite tales of poor sound issues plaguing the performance from those stood further back, the Las Vegas band played a pretty good set and a couple of new songs.

3 - Yeasayer - Coming on late due to sound issues, the band eventually came on to play a shortened but enjoyable set that included 2080 and Sunrise

4 - Santogold - Enjoyable performance from the strange sounds of Santogold and her freaky dancers. Arguably Les Artists stands head and shoulders above her other tracks live though.

5 - Flogging Molly - Playing a packed out Lock Up tent, one of the few bands I saw who I knew nothing about turned out to be great fun, with their brand of Irish Punk Rock inspiring moshing as far back as outside the tent.

6 - Justice - Starting out with a couple of poorer album tracks, the band soon up-ed the game with crowd pleasers D.A.N.C.E and lastly their remix of Simian's We Are Your Friends. Only fails to be classed as a highlight because of some wanker in front of me who thought that it'd be really great to blow on her foghorn every few seconds. Didn't exactly make listening the most pleasurable experience.


Disappointments

1 - Justice running on late and causing me to miss nearly all of the Bloc Party set (Which apparently wasn't that good anyway)
2 - MGMT being far too packed to enjoy, shoving and pushing as opposed to dancing or moshing meant we decided to escape to outside after the opener, Electic Feel.
3 - Dirty Pretty Things having surely the worst crowd of the festival, refusing to join in even in a pretty-good rendition of Nirvana's In Bloom. Perhaps Carl could have helped by sticking in a Libertines track or two to get a singsong going?

Stuff I've heard of and wished I'd witnessed

• Insanely big piss take mosh pits & Wall of Death's at the worst-band-of-the-weekend The Plain White T's (See below)
• Gladiator style
• People slashing abandoned tents by the road, hiding in them, and jumping out of them to scare people.
• Everyone thinking the Foo Fighter's were doing a secret gig disguised as a band called the FF's, and a random crappy band turning up and getting booed off the stage.



All in all the festival was brilliant, and the urge to be back there right now is massive. With Glastonbury apparently on the way down, with poor ticket sales this year, and sound issues the last, it looks as if Reading and Leeds are becoming the festivals of the country, arguably of the world, and If I wasn't so broke from this years, my ticket for 2009 would already be purchased.

I'm Back! (Again)

So, as once again I'd forgotten to say I was taking a brake from the blog, I was at Reading festival the last few days, and it was perhaps the best weekend of my life thus far. I'll blog it properly another day.


Meanwhile, try this thing
http://www.findyourtribe.co.uk/

From the looks of it, it appeared to be pretty good, but then the results are pretty wank.
Apparently I'm 'PC World' 'With Signs of being a Trendy'. I guess I answered too honestly. Just because I know how to use a computer, use facebook, and have this blog doesn't mean I don't value 'human interaction' and in fact haven't 'not left your room for a week or so'. Add to that I've never dated someone met online, very rarely buy things online, and only watch tv only cause our tv sucks and you're left with a big pile of fail.

Failblog

Heh




Moar

Books what I read

5 Books read over the course of my holiday. Brief reviews follow

Jay Mcinerney - Bright Lights, Big City

Often likened to the works of Bret Easton Ellis, and written in a curious second person narrative, Bright Lights, Big City centres around a, likely semi-autobiographical, nameless protagonist, whose life has recently gone downhill, with his wife having left him and his career as a 'fact-checker' for a magazine appearing to become increasingly dead-end.

The novel tells a constantly enjoyable, though never outstanding story of a man who must come to face up to the failures and reality of his life, and Mcinerney manages to work in an impressive amount of wit to the writing that keeps it an enjoyable read to the end.

* * * * 4 Stars

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

After reading two works by Ryu Murakami, I thought Id give the surprisingly unrelated Haruki Murakami a try, and began with this short novella. Almost instantly Murakami's ability to create a startling atmosphere is evident - though I am always unsure how much of this is due to the translator - and before long a mysteriously surreal late night scene is created, with intriguing characters from the quirky Trombone player Takahashi to the 'sleeping beauty' Eri Asai. The novel progresses in a manor similar to that of a film, and, in fact, at times it almost seems as if Murakami was aiming to write a screenplay as opposed to a novella.

The end of the novella is frustratingly inconclusive, almost breaking off halfway through the story as nearly every loose thread of story is left, if not unresolved, then at least very much unexplained. It almost feels, however, as if this is not a problem, as the main draw of the book is arguably not the central mystery, but Murakami's beautiful prose, settings, characters and descriptions, and his themes of loneliness and isolation, that are the real attractions of his work.

* * * * 4 Stars

The Outsider - Albert Camus

Widely regarded as one of the all time literary greats, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this tiny novella by Albert Camus tells the tale of a man who, in short, refuses to lie about or 'put on' his emotions. The plot follows him as he presents no signs of sadness and remorse at his mother's funeral, before, days later, committing a, to borrow a phrase, 'random act of violence' that results in his imprisonment.

Very well written (or, again, perhaps just very well translated), The Outsider acts as a very interesting character study, and indeed, a fascinating look at the of views of society on those who will not lie or enhance their feelings to appear more humane to those around them. Mersault is an interesting protagonist and drives the plot to it's thought provoking end.

* * * * * 5 Stars

The Rules of Attraction - Bret Easton Ellis

Written two years after the excellent Less than Zero, Easton Ellis' Rules of Attraction follows the lives and romances of three university students, who form a curious love triangle including a bisexual and a gay romance. Ellis employs a variety of unusual literary techniques; the novel begins and ends mid-sentence, possibly to suggest that 'life goes on', one section is written entirely in French, and the first person narration constantly switches between the various characters, providing humour in the varying reactions of the different characters to certain situations.

Another device which appealed to me were the cameos made by characters appearing in other Ellis novels. Sean's brother, Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) makes an appearance when Sean goes to Visit his father in hospital, and Clay's brief appearance as 'that guy from LA' brought a smile to my face; 'people are afraid to merge on the campus after dark'. But still this cannot quite save the novel from the fact that the central characters are simply somewhat unlikeable, and neither Sean, Paul nor Loren have the same appeal as Clay or Blaire from Less than Zero.

* * * 3 Stars

Noughts and Crosses - Malorie Blackman

Having finished reading the four books I bought with me on holiday, and lacking the motivation to begin the epically lengthy Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks), I picked up this and began to read, remembering it as being one of the books which I had missed out on in my own youth. What I got was a surprisingly engrossing story set in a world where a racist black (or Cross) population rules over the whites (Noughts); an inversion of western society decades ago, presumably designed to force the largely white audience to be able to empathise with the characters to a stronger degree. Arguably this was not quite necessary and I, having begun the books thinking of the Noughts as Blacks, found it hard to rethink my mental images of each character.

The plot itself itself is a very clever one, with sections of the book mirroring real life happenings in the civil rights movement; most noticeable of these being the first day of school for the Nought teenagers into Cross school - a passage that draws largely from the events at Little Rock High school in 1957 (GCSE History, Pow!). Throughout the book Blackman is constantly daring, making plot turns that, given that Noughts and Crosses is widely regarded as a 'children's book', seem highly unpredictable and bold. I was all ready to put this book down for being too predictably child like, but Blackman never underestimates her audience and the novel ends on a devastatingly bleak note that stays with the reader long after finishing.

If I have one complaint it would be concerning the writing style, which often seems slightly immature, relying too heavily on the thoughts and constant rhetorical questioning in the heads of the two protagonists; 'Did he just say that? No, he can't of' which begins to grate fast. Aside from this, however, I was stunned. It seems strange but of the 5 books that I read in Sicily, it was in fact this,the only Children's book, that turned out to be the best. The central Romeo and Juliet-esque love story is one of the most complex and convincing I have come across in a novel, and I would be tempted to argue Noughts and Crosses the greatest piece of Young Adult literature ever written.

* * * * * 5 Stars

I'm back!!

Been in Sicily the last two weeks. Forgot to post before I went to say so. So this blog is in fact still alive. Just.



*Licks Lips*

Bastards. Sky have picked up rights so I guess thats another 350mb a week of downloading to do...

I read 5 books on holiday aswell. Five!! Thats more than I've read the rest of this year. Might do another book reviewery post......