Day in a Field

This weekend saw us heading down to the second ever Field day. Last year the festival was plagued with problems, sound quality was poor, not enough toilets or bars. This year there were more bars and apparently more toilets. If there were more toilets this year then I am quite glad I didn't go last time. The lines for the toilets were ridiculous and pretty soon people were going against pretty much any upstanding surface they could fine. I didn't ever experience any problems with the sound but there have been some murmurings to the contrary. I did experience problems with the weather though, and a new personal hate, umbrellas in crowds at festivals. They get in the fucking way and nobody can see anything. If you were one of the many many people using your umbrella to either hit me as you walked about or block my and everyone else's view, even when it wasn't raining you should be shot.

But this was a music festival in England, nobody expects thing to run perfectly. Then what would we have to complain about? But what about the music. The lineup was good, even with some of the better names on the lineup dropping out. Dan Deacon, (Lion with a sharks head) who you should go and see live whenever you can, he makes crowds look like this...

From Dan Deacon Myspace

Dan had his passport stolen and has had to cancel a string of European dates which is upsetting. The Mystery Jets also had to pull out due to illness. (Hideaway (Switch remix))

We started the day by watching a tiny bit of the Magistrates (The Inbetweens) from outside the tent. They sounded OK and having heard them referred to as Klaxons lite a couple of time I can kind of see why. After a little bit of wandering in the rain and pints costing the usual festival price of over £3 it was time for White Lies. They sounded impressive and by all accounts are one of the next big things in British music. They play big, dark sounding, atmospheric indie rock and are very tight. Theres no point posting a White lies track, they will be unavoidable in the coming months. However they used to be a band called Fear of Flying who to be honest I preferred, less Editors sounding more Video Nasties. (Threes a crowd,) ( Secret Eyes)

There were a number of singer song writers at the festival, we saw three who ranged from the Ok (Lightspeed Champion, Never Meant to hurt you (Good Shoes Cover)), to the very good, (Laura Marling, Its only my opinion) to quite possibly my highlight of the day, Jefferey Lewis. (Back when I was 4) The man is a fixture of the New York anti-folk scene and one of my all time favorite song writers. He is also a cartoonist of some skill and some of his songs are accompanied live by him holding up drawings to illustrate the songs.

The other contender for festival highlight was the Mae Shi. I saw them 3 times last week, Monday while flyering outside the blue last, no one offered me a bump, (Ali Love, Lost in the K hole (Live on XFM) ,but a very nice man offered me a ticket to the Mae Shi for a free, still very grateful. They were amazing, later that same night they played another show at DURRR, which was anything even better.

They looked like this. Photo from the DURRR flickr. Taken by Alex Warren.

They were great again at Field ay, although I would reccomend seeing them in as small a space as possible. ( See you again (Miley Cyrus Cover)

We did miss Benga, (Night (DJ Zinc remix) and Brodinski (Tiga, Sunglasses at night (Brodinski and Yuksek Remix) but all in all it was a pretty good day, at least in terms of the acts we saw.