We say hello to our neighbours, swig some multi-vit juice from its bottle and brave the huge, crushing line to get into the festival. It´s hot and we are all feeling rather trashy. We grab some food tickets (bonnen) and drink tickets (drankenbon) and spend them on large Boston-style slices of mushroom pizza and about a gazillion cups of coke.
I forgot that they don´t serve redbull at this festival.
All they have is Coke. Oh, and Coke Lite. And Coke Zero.
The bastards.
Oh, by the way - in order to make this as painless as possible, I will just be summarizing my reviews of band sets. Ok, here we go.
Band #1 - Kaizers Orchestra - A strange Flemmish band. Watched them from outside the Marquee tent. Orchestra meets hard rock, maybe.
Then we had Flugel.
Band #2 - The Pigeon Detectives - from outside the Marquee stage, the White Lies sounded pretty awful and generic Brit-rock.
Band #3 - The Cribs - I liked ´Hey Scenesters´ and the last song of the set (which was pretty much post-rock played over a video/sound recording of a spoken word artist) but otherwise, it was pretty unimpressive. Also, the sound of the Marquee stage was fucking awful. Seriously, the bass was SO LOUD the whole time any band was in there. You couldn´t stand to be in front of any of the side speakers.
Much more exciting was the poffertjes we ate.
We also napped in the sun. We were still feeling a little seedy...
So we drank more beer. Because kriek makes all pain go away.
Band #4 - British Sea Power - Weeee! So good. Charismatic and musically on-form. They were, for many people, the highlight of the festival.
Band #5 - Henry Rollins (spoken word) - Ok, so I´ve been wanting to see Henry´s spoken word show for years. He is just...amazing. He didn´t stop for two hours. He just talked and talked. He is one of the most intelligent, well-read, widely-travelled, well-informed (in an autodidact kind of way), witty, angry and kind individuals I´ve ever have the pleasure of being in the presence of. Let´s face it, people; the man should be an elected official.
Band #6 - Mercury Rev - Middle-aged hippies making wonderful music while set in front of a screen with token 60s-esque psychedelic visuals (think babies crawling on globes, tie-dye and dolphins diving through solar systems). The lead singer is a little funny looking, which just makes them even better. I never did hear "Nite and Fog" though.
Band #7 - Flaming Lips - Well obviously they were going to be good. Wayne was out on stage the full hour before the set that it took to set up, obviously micromanaging the theatric displays to come. He did the ball thing...
...and they opened with ´Race For The Prize´(arguably the best song to open with - they pulled the same trick the first time I saw them, at Big Day Out ´05). And the rest of the set was great. Streamers filling the air, the works.
We were sated. We could have left the festival right them. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma´am. But we went to check out...
Band #8 - Holy Fuck - Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah. Yeah. Yeah. What else is there to say? How can you go wrong with a set of good, trashy electro?
Then sleep.
z z z
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