Another Form of Relief

On sunday, I, along with a couple of friends, attended my first music festival. This may seem pretty strange for someone who writes a music blog, but things like festivals are in short supply in this corner of the country. Earlier on the year, I read about the Electric Gardens Festival. It’s a new event, a two day specialist festival covering dance and electronica on the first day and more traditional indie rock fare on the second day. It shouldn’t take a genius to figure out exactly which day we attended. As such, early on sunday morning, we set off on the short drive to Canterbury in an attempt to find the festival site. A bunch of random country lanes and a ton of dirt tracks that aren’t great for a car of my size later and we’d arrived at the festival.

We got there about an hour before the first performances so we decided to explore the festival site, discovering that there wasn’t a great deal to it. A small area held the second stage and the tiny Myspace tent as well as the overpriced food and drink areas, and a short walk led us to the hill where the main stage was located. Not many people seemed to make it in time for the start of the event, meaning we were able to sit pretty much where we liked to view the main stage, awaiting the opening performance from The Boy Least Likely To.

The Boy Least Likely To played to an initially pretty dead crowd, but as the performance went on, people moved closer to the stage and began to warm to them. They actually seem genuinely happy to be there too (the band, not the crowd), joyfully babbling away between songs and talking about how they don’t really know Kent. This led to one of the band members (Peter) announcing he was actually from a town nearby leading to the band asking if anyone happened to know him, but sadly no one did. They played a few songs I wasn’t familiar with, but also the standards like ‘Be Gentle With Me’ and their now obligatory cover of George Michael’s ‘Faith’.

MP3 The Boy Least Likely To - Be Gentle With Me (expired)

During their performance I spotted Kate Nash in the crowd, so once they finished playing, we headed over and had a little chat with her. Annoyingly, she was playing the festival, but she played on the day before, meaning that once again any attempt to see her play had been thwarted. Anyway, she was very polite and apologetic about missing the Beacon Court show a couple of months ago, and even gave us free badges. Which was pretty awesome and the only thing that was free at this festival. Which leads us to the food situation. We were starting to want some food by this stage, so headed up to the food tent, and discovered that each “meal” was £5 (though reduced from £7!). When I say “meal”, in reality I mean a crudely put together burger or some slop in a tray. You could also wash this down with a £2 bottle of Sprite from the Ukraine, or some other foreign country that I couldn’t quite identify. Now this may all be standard for those who regularly attend festivals, but it was a bit of a shock to the system for me.

Following our food we wandered over to the second stage (in reality, a circus tent) to catch the peformance by Absentee. We were a little early so ended up catching the end of a set by Findlay Brown. I hadn’t heard of him or his music before, but I quite enjoyed what I heard, even if he was a little too Ryan Adams at times. It was perfect music to sit and relax to out of the sun though, and enough to make him look in to him a little more. Once he finished, Absentee arrived on stage, and spent an absolute age setting up. This wasn’t their fault, nothing seemed to go right for them, and they eventually ended up starting over halfway into their allotted time. Even when they did, the set was still plagued with technical problems. The vocals were too low, and the bass was so strong that it actually made the ground shake. They tried their best, but combined with a non-responsive crowd, it was hardly the perfect performance.

MP3 Absentee - Something To Bang (expired)

After this, it was time to head back to the main stage to see The Young Knives. Neither me or Joe were familiar with them, but Hiren kept talking about how good they were, so we made our way to the front of what was quite a large crowd to see them. I didn’t know what to think when three guys who looked even dorkier than me hit the stage, but they quickly won me over with a bunch of catchy songs and impromptu joking between the songs. They gave it their all and seemed heartened by the number of people that had turned out to see them. I don’t really keep up with what’s popular these days (I sound so old like this), but I can see these guys becoming another of the current crop of successful British bands very quickly.

MP3 The Young Knives - She’s Attracted To (expired)

Wandering around the site, we then spotted Melinda and (I think) Laurie from Absentee, so we proceeded to harass them as well. They also turned out to be very polite and down to earth, happily chatting about the festival in general, which bands to see and, somehow, university courses. It was after this that everything decided to go a little pearshaped. We headed back to the circus tent to see Adem, although I’m still not entirely sure why. Anyway, I started to feel a little ill a bit into their set and quickly progressed into full blown asthma attack mode, which I guess is the result of a day of sitting on grass, baking to death and being surrounded by smokers. Either way, it meant my festival day was over, meaning we left before we got to see the final run of the Electric Soft Parade, Battle and Brakes in the Myspace tent. Which was incredibly annoying as I particularly wanted to see the last two. I guess if I do though, it’s going to have to be indoors or something.

So what did I learn from this weekend? Mostly, that festivals don’t do me a great deal of good. While seeing a bunch of good bands in one place was awesome, the disorganisation of it, the overpriced and crappy food combined with the fun medical issues outweigh that by a hell of a lot. Which kind of sucks, but it’s something I’ll have to deal with. Looks like it’s back to my once a year indoor show or something now then, yay!

Edit: More Electric Gardens coverage can be found at Delete as Appropriate and Jukebox.

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