Silly Season

Aah, I remember festival season as a whippersnapper Dead keen on music and trying to see everyone. When two bands that you wanted to see clashed you chose and stuck with it for fear of missing even a bit of one. I'd hardly drink anything to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Now I'm not sure what has happened. I guess I don't take festivals as seriously. I seem to have become one of those people that goes to a festival to escape from reality, to wander about getting distracted by shiny things rather than trying to see as many bands as possible in a day - I used to hate those people. Or maybe I just don't like music. 

Standon Calling was this weekend. And as ever I had a great time. But I'm not certain that I saw any bands. Well not the whole way through, by the third song they'd normally been dismissed as sounding like a not-as-good Toots and the Maytals / Longpigs / Freakpower and I'd wandered off to try to get a hit of something genuinely new. Or watch some Mexican wrestling. Or Rockaoke.

Bands that I did enjoy:
Interiors - terrible name. Kind of like Belle and Sebastien.
Imperial Leisure - not certain if that's a terrible name or not. Sound like Audiobullys.
The Cuban Brothers - you know the Cuban Brothers, you saw them at bestival that year, more vaudeville than band.

And Beans on Toast. What kind of festival gives Beans on Toast an hour set on the main stage? A ridiculous one. And what a set. He won the crowd over early on. Bigg Jeff sang along to Who is Bigg Jeff. He did all the 'hits' - I was surprised that MDMAmazing was an actual singalong with an actual amount of actual people seeming to know all the actual words to a fairly obscure and quite wordy folk song. But I guess that that's the Standon Calling way.