Friday 24 June 2011

A Festival On My Laptop

Sadly I’ve never been to a big weekend festival, though I am a big supporter of ‘Tramlines Festival’ the free summer festival held in Sheffield which has been excellent the past two years and is looking promising this one. Despite never attending, I do however always look forward to the weekends of the Glastonbury and Leeds festivals as they guarantee a whole host of entertaining live footage from my favourite bands.

The BBC tend to devote BBC3 to showing a mixture of live sets and highlights while also streaming them online and uploading them to view over the next week or so in an archive; it’s an opportunity I always try to take full advantage of. It won’t ever be the same as being at the festival and experiencing the atmosphere, but enjoying the sets of some great artists in the comfort of my own home is a luxury I’m incredibly grateful for. As a general rule I manage to see a good 20 or 30 sets via the TV and Internet and that's a remarkable opportunity as well as an argument in favour of the license fee and the value of the BBC.

Tonight’s highlight from the opening day of Glastonbury for me was Mumford and Sons set. I’m a big fan of those guys and their debut album is one of my most played CDs from the last couple of years; they offer folksy indie full of banjo riffs and the kind of cheesy, melodramatic romantic lyrics that I can’t help but love and they make me want to dance, or perhaps the better verb would be to jig.

Despite the rain, the mud and the facilities which I am sure are in a pretty terrible state already, watching that set made me incredibly jealous of the people in those Somerset fields; Mumford seemed on great form and the crowd really seemed to be enjoying it, both the well known favourites off of the first album and the new tracks off of the album they claim will be recorded very soon ('Lover's Eyes' stood out in particular and there are decent live versions on Youtube if you missed the Glastonbury set). If those performances were anything to go by I will definitely be looking forward to hearing the 2nd album and I’ll be keeping an eye out for any tour dates I can make.

I’m going to be spending the rest of this weekend alternating between coverage of Glastonbury, coverage of Wimbledon and finishing off Battlestar Galactica and I’ll probably write a review of the best sets I’ve watched from the festival on either Monday or Tuesday.

Today's song had to be a Mumford and Sons one, so i thought i'd go for one that's slightly less well known than 'Little Lion Man' and 'White Blank Page', despite my love for those two tracks.

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