so this the big follow-up, the difficult second album. listening to the kills' second album [in my opinion it is their weakest but still great] and have the context of having emails unreplied too which is a tad annoying, i'll be honest. as well as this i have cracked the thick of it, i am up to date and ready to join in the frivolities of discussing it length in the future-rather than pretending to have seen it. you always look like an arse when people are talking about a film and you for no real reason say that you have seen/heard what is being discussed.
observational comedy, i bloody love it. just like peter kay, rola cola/rain and the big light. genius. anyway...
onwards to get to the point of this post, the isle of wight festival 2009. my first festival, and so far my only one. the reason i got going to the festival in the first place was due to browsing nme.com whilst not doing work/reading for my dissertation and seeing that the pixies would be playing, as would the prodigy.
a small and muso and geeky note here, the prodigy and the pixies. the prodigy are called the prodigy, whereas the pixies are actually called pixies. it really annoys me when people get band names wrong: you wouldn't call the beatles just beatles, and you wouldn't call led zeppelin, the led zeppelin would you? it is partly phonetics and grammar but it's a small the when referring to the pixies. as in the Pixies and not The Pixies. this is nonsense but at least i have removed it from my chest.
so yes, i urgently phone my brother as he was to be the person who told me to listen to them in the first place, and as a kind gesture about this time last year we still hadn't found upon a suitable gift for my 21st birthday-and so we put these two things together and so we would go to the festival together.
i awoke from a short sleep after getting home from the soton gradball only probably about 5 hours previously and so had a resolve and a shower. resolve tastes awful. for the record, and i can't really say that it really cuts through a hangover as promised by popular culture. but anyway feeling quite rough i got up and finished packing my bags that i was too excited to finish packing the night before. i hopped onto a bus and met my big brother at southampton central station. excited, tired and hungover i waited outside the station, even though he had previously stated by text that i wouldn't be able to miss him anyway. this was true.
looking like a nutter, he was kitted up in a fluorescent jacket from his site work. i must explain, he is the one of two [with me being the other, weird that...] sons who had a proper plan as to what he would do with his life. from gcse's took the correct education to become a chemical engineer, which indeed happen. with a degree from gimperial college you would expect him to be employed fresh out of uni, this was true.
he was also clutching our tent, and he said that when on the bus in london the driver asked him whether it was a bomb. personally i love this idea, overt terrorism-let's not hide anything. have a massive bomb being carried by a man in a fluorescent jacket. al-qaede would have reached a new low.
after waiting around at the ferry place we were the first onto the ferry and so just flopped into [each other's arms? no, incorrect. stop being weird] the first seats we saw as we got on. i whipped out the waitrose lunch that i had hurriedly purchased before getting the bus into town. i don't travel well on ferrys, and also i have a crap track record of school coach travel too-however despite feeling like a twat from the night before, when i proudly told my pissing on a bus story to my brother [he was less than impressed] i was not sick at all on either ferry journey to or fro from the island. i remember a previous time we got the ferry to isle of wight for my dad's 40th birthday, choppy seas that time meant that i kept a close eye on the toilet bowl. several times. nasty stuff, as well as school trip's to the continent-where i magically found what i had just indulged in sprayed back into the toilet. in lumps.
dairy milk, that's the main memory from year 9 trip to aachen. feeling fine then eating a lot of it, then seeing it again a matter of two minutes later in the toilet. what a good journey. however once properly there i just remember eating pink panther wafers and tomato ketchup crisps in the youth hostel as the other food was awful, brilliant times :)
but on the bus having arrived on the island, we sat on top behind a group of fucking bellends. honestly, cunts. also the funniest thing was the 'lads' had a typical pedantic whipping boy, who didn't quite fit into the group but still was 'welcome' in the group as he mainly organised everything for the rest of the wankers. my brother and i looked at each other and hoped that these utter nutters, wouldn't be representative of the whole festival. they weren't, thank christ.
after we [i say we, but if i'm honest i was as ever 'gloriously useless' and so just got in the way and got rightfully shouted at] put up the tent, we went for a stroll around the site. it was bloody lovely weather, and as we had set up on the thursday the place was just warming up and people were like us setting up. finding the main food paddock, my brother had now gained sufficient experience of the palce to say that it wasn't as good as glastonbury. he said this only a few times, but it felt like a constant nitpicking. but anyway, i lept to buy a pizza as i was fucking hungry and as we had only brought snack bars and custard creams.
it was good, but it was like £8. i had expected pricey prices, but these prices were indeed that. i also had to buy a toothbrush as i had forgotten to bring one-as i am an official oaf. also as it was a thursday there was no real music on, having checked on the efestivals site aparently the human league were playing on the thursday night but alas we did not attend. i do believe we just played shithead and rested our tired little bodies and minds. to be fair we were 21 and 25 at the time so we are pretty old. i am now a year older [clearly not, that'd be awful maths] and i can imagine that we'd do much the same thing.
so on the friday evening, and by god tiem passes slow when you're with only one person and it is hot and you can't be bothered to get up, and the only beer to buy is fucking carling. honestly, no one likes it-so why the blazes [yeah! i'm old skool like that] is it still available to buy?! i'm not even joking or being sarcastic, i know of no-one on this fair planet who would want a pint of it. it's shite! the only place that it gets regularly chugged is in students unions and also at the tap'n'fuckin'tin, in snakebites.
i have a personal vendetta against this drink. i was watching a programme on beauty in art the other day [yeah, i'm cultured-sue me] and he said that people often pursue vendettas against something that they themselves felt wronged by, and or tricked into believing. i believe this to be true, i despise the idea fervant atheism and also socialism/communism-and i used to be a very hardened [naughty naughty] believer in each-so phrase holds true. but in the first year i remember being bored and wandering down to our jcr bar [it was shit, much like my accommodation and much of my first year in general] and sat and drank 6 pints of snakebite [1/2 lager, 1/2 cider, black currant]. i thought it was cool.
i woke up the next day with the majority of it in a handily and soberly placed bucket by the side of my bed [i do this, i clear a path and make sure 'drunk andy' is safe. this reminds me of a time when we were out in chatham, my friend chris riley got out an extra note and hid it in another section of his wallet, as he knew that when drunk he'd fail to remember where it was and thus not spend too much. i can't remember if he did spend it or not, nutters...] but also a very considerable amount on my duvet and also pillows. that smell is fucking rotten, and so i shall never have a pint of that shite again. and it was made with half carling and half strongbow. massively disgusting, but still at 19 you think you're pretty cool, and that drinking is still well cool. ah, young times.
so back to the isle of wight in june, the biggest act that we were to see on the first real day would be the prodigy in the evening. the weather stayed rather lovely for the entire festival-only a smattering of light showers. so on the friday, more time was spent wandering the place, absorbing the atmosphere and all that sorta jazz. i remember that we got there as the ting tings were ending-not a massive loss. not really a big fan of their simpleton music, shut up and let me go. i am quite probably a music snob, but i simply don't like their uber-simple sound and how they seem to have nothing other than some twat on drums with raybans and a stuck up little bitch singing about nothing.
but we were in the main stage area for a while, as on the other stage were a number of classy female acts-it would have been interesting to see the noisettes as i have heard they are good [they were playing on the big tent, the other stage]. instead we both listened with intense awe to the quite brilliant, wholly original and totally 'not' boring. i do strongly dislike them, and for what i think is a very good reason. in the second year, i had their second album pumped through my floorboards constantly [and i do mean constantly, every single minute] of a weekend. the same annoying d'n'b rhythm with some arsehole wanking onto a keyboard, and also a deformed keytar player on stage. i mean really, they played their top 20 hit-a cover of voodoo people, a cover of THE band of the day. it was ok, but by the end of the day we knew [as if we didn't already] what a fuck-off good band was.
no-one seemed to properly like them, and so all the morons who did like them were up the front dancing like twats but all the normal people were staking our places for later. after the aussie wank bags were basement jaxx, again pretty uneventful. i think they lose some of their prowess [which they may or may not have] on the large stage, and also played a one minute clip of sex on fire, with a bunch of whooping morons going 'yes, this song is amazing'. it isn't, it's overplayed, overproduced and it isn't the kings of leon that many people [oddly, including myself] love. it's shite!
jaxx played the hits, which was nice but still i shall move onto the prodigy.
having discovered their setlist on the nme website, i feel refreshed. it was a great set as they mixed a lot of old with a few new classics [their album invaders must die has got some great songs on it. i didn't even know that warrior's dance is off the album, i thought it was an older classic. brilliant!] i never knew how commercially successful they were as well, at least here in the uk. they have had like 16 top 20 singles and 4 number 1 albums. well done lads, the outsiders are doing it. only the fat of the land album has done anything on the us charts, and it is an exceptional album. they played breath, firestarter, diesel power and smack my bitch up off of it. until the day after the day after, possibly the finest setlist ever. also, neither my brother or i were very drunk but still having a bloody good time-a few people were dancing around quite a bit and purely by accident knocked into me, only a tad. and despite being drunk and drugged-they were hugely apologetic and kept saying sorry, even though we were all fine. it was great, at some gigs i simply want to stab them.
at ian brown on friday there were a few annoying cunts, and also a really weird man. he knew all the words and kept nodding his head [and no i'm not talking about ian brown. god that is HILARIOUS!!!] and nearly hit this poor guy in front, he was only a teenager and looked frightened. to be fair, so would i-the guy looked like an utter nutter. the teenage guy walked away... also at the gig, a really quite attractive female [i would say about 25 years old?] kept smiling at me, it was nice :) chances are that she was smiling at a tall and dashing professional who was standing behind me, but still. probably didn't help that i caught her on the back of the head when i danced like a twat to fool's gold. smooth haha
but yes the prodigy were amazing, the people were quite very friendly and i thought that this really is festival life. it was a great friday night, as we returned to the tent and that was the first day over with really. on the saturday, i believe we didn't do much. time seems to go really slowly when you are in a tent... ipod batteries run out quite quickly and the solar power charger takes ages to work, and as a not to keen reader i remember spending hours sitting and waiting for the time to pass. a bit dull but still.
headlining on the saturday night were the stereophonics, whom we didn't really see as we were both tired and maybe getting a tad irritated with each other's company [i know this sounds odd, but it is possible for siblings to fall out-especially if you spend around 70+ hours in each other's sole company. i know, very odd] and the fact that there weren't really any acts that we wanted to see that day we just found new ways to wind each other up, i can't remember anything specifically but you know how it can be.
fuck the waffle, as i do eventually want to finish this. i mean i have sod all else to do instead, but it has taken for fucking ever.
pixies on sunday were the best. i mean actually the best gig i have ever been too, the crowd singing to where is my mind and dancing to debaser. 10/10.
got up at 5am on the monday to pack away. got home and was very very tired. done. sorry for the rushed ending, but losing ability to function means that i have lost faith in this elongated post.
keep it rockin'
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