Fun in a Field
September 1, 2008 by Ailbhe Malone
Filed under Anablog
I spent the weekend on a boat in the countryside, listening to snippets of 2fm’s Electric Picnic coverage on a radio. From what I could gather, it sounded great. Very loud though. No word has filtered back through to Analogue Towers, but plenty of discussion is going on over here. Everyone seems to be saying the same thing:
1. Grace Jones was amazing.
2. Candi Staton was equally amazing.
3. The Sex Pistols should quit (or should have quit) while they were ahead.
4. Festival Toilets….
I can’t really throw any light on this, but I’m sure you lovely people can. Go on, how was your Picnic?
Didn’t see one act for more than 20 minutes, this year was the equivalent of what remote control did for Tv & the ipod did for music! next/next/next/next!
great fun
Good but not as good as other years. There were very few stand-out acts musically out of the ones I saw anyway. The dance village was too far away from the main arena making getting to certain acts a chore, and from what I heard, the bodytonic boys were nay impressed with the poor turn out for many of their headline acts. The whole thing just felt a bit like oxegen. Still good but definitely lost some of its charm. Having said that, the Orb in the Body and Soul on Sunday night were amazing! The vibe there was great too, truly keeping with the original festival ethos.
Weak weak year overall. Frightening amount of the cowards in blue. Security were fine as always, if over bureaucratic. Line up was a joke in comparison to Oxygen. Sigur Ros, Vyvienne Long and My Bloody Valentine were fantastic. Goldfrapp and Grinderman were good. Sinead O’Connor was disappointing. Toilets were fine, much better than last year. Crowd was older (I’d say average age 35). Highlight for me was Henry Rollins spoken word appearance. Lowlight - garda raid on our (drug free) van; “Three people died here last year” - true, but none of the deaths were drug related, fuckwits.
Average age 35?! Fuck!
My friend tells me that Crystal Castles stole the show, that The Orb blew peoples minds in the Body & Soul area, that MBV were (gasp) too quiet, and that The Roots were “amazing”. But all of this is just hearsay.
The line up was very weak but it was justified by the organisers through the ‘rebrand’ to a music and arts festival. In other words, more gimmicky stuff and less of the meaty acts we probably would have prefered instead. Don’t get me wrong, I love Body and Soul etc but we literally took an hour out of our weekend to look at ‘the gimmicky bits’ as I put it and that was all we needed…
Also Ciarán, Roots were indeed amazing. Personal highlights include Diplo and Chromeo, nothing like 2.5 solid hours of dancing to end my festival.
Wow, i thought The Roots were as bad as their Olympia show last year. MBV were defo loud enough for me. Rollins was pretty special - quite a goofy man considering his violent stage presence with Black Flag. Cops everywhere. Security were decent/sound enough. Missed ALOT but saw alot too. I would have said average age was late twenties but at this stage everyone has differing opnions on literally every aspect of the whole shebang…except for the good pies that were available. And did anyone opt for the bags of wine at all? They were legend. Fill up the bag and I was set for the day for booze.