Oxegen Festival 2010: It must be something in the air

After being a veteran of, ahem, two festivals on the Isle Of Wight, this year I had decided to venture further afield in order to excite my musical taste buds. After much deliberation, me and my festival friend decided to travel outside of the UK and head for the Emerald Isle for the Oxegen festival in Dublin. What’s more, is that after deciding on a festival with a stunning line-up we proceeded to choose a not so great method of transport, foolishly avoiding the expensive plane for the tedious train and ferry combo.

The journey was arduous to say the least, experiencing more than our fair share of drunk middle aged men, lack of sleep and snoring over-sized ladies on a ferry in the middle of the night. We took all this with a pinch of salt, and continued on what seemed more like a pilgrimage to see the best bands in the world rather than a late night hop across the Irish sea.

After more trials and tribulations, we finally got off a coach in a sleepy state, and over the brow of the hill we could just about make out the world “OXEGEN” in giant green and white inflatable letters. Even though the campsite wasn’t yet open, the atmosphere was different to anywhere else. Maybe it was the Irish showing us Britons how to really party throughout a festival, or the excitement levels had been amplified due to us being so weary, but whatever it was, Oxegen was already beginning to be something special.

As I entered the main arena for the first time it was clear that the organisers had thought out the layout very well, as all the stages were within close proximity of each other without blurring the music together, something that Glastonbury has been criticised for in the past. As we’re on the subject of the Somerset festival, I think Oxegen got a severe case of Glastonbury-itis in terms of the weather, as for the majority of the weekend the heavens poured down, and even my raincoat cried out for some relief from the rain. Saying this, festival goers’ spirits seemed to reach a new, unheard of, level of joy, creating large expanses of mud pits around the main stage. Many Irish people seemed to be following in the footsteps of their ancestors by digging in the mud, playing the role of a farmer, searching for the odd potato here or there.

Oxegen festival has prided itself on being “The best Rock N’ Roll weekend in Europe”, and it is extremely hard to see why it shouldn’t be. With artists such as Jay-Z, Kasabian, Muse, Eminem, Fatboy Slim, Faithless and The Black Eyed Peas all appearing across the weekend, music of this calibre is always hard to turn down. All the artists seemed to perform the gig as if it were their last, whilst applauding the crowd for sticking it out in the rain, whereas Fatboy Slim gave us a welcome antidote with his two hour long Ibiza-esque set. My personal notable mentions go to Example, as he attracted a crowd that seemed to defy the capacity limit of the 2 FM tent, and Florence and The Machine for reminding people that despite the poor weather that they always have got the love, and always will. Despite realising many of dreams by seeing Kasabian play Fire, and being just metres away from Ellie Goulding, the music can only be a part of your experience at a music festival.

Irish people are quite possibly some of the most charming characters I have ever had the pleasure to meet, and even though we were instantly friends with them when they realised we were from London (or so they thought), never before have people been so willing for others to have such a great time. They’re not scared to have a conversation with you, and even though there are some oddball characters, it will always be amazing to share the experience with such vibrant people.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully determine why Oxegen festival was such a memorable experience, as it could be drawn from a number of things. Was it the people? Was it the eye-catching line-up? Or was it simply the luck of the Irish? Whatever it was, there was certainly something in the air.

Hard Rock Calling 2010: A night of rock that will be hard to forget.

The third day of Hard Rock Calling, an annual music event held in London, already had the perfect ingredients to be memorable before it had even started. Across the UK, it was proclaimed the hottest day of the year so far, and with this came a sizzling line-up against the backdrop of Hyde Park.

As I walked through Hyde Park, amongst the normal hustle and bustle of London life, a devoted section of people made a beeline for “Entrance X9”, the gateway to Hard Rock Calling. There seemed a touch of happiness in the air, after the fresh memories of acts such as Stevie Wonder and Pearl Jam performing over the previous two days, and this anticipation could be seen in everyone, regardless of whether this was their first day at the event or not.

By the time I had entered the arena, the atmosphere was strangely tense, although this was as a result of the large mass of people following the football, rather than listening to Elvis Costello belting out his huge hit, ‘Pump It Up’. I did feel a bit sorry for Elvis, especially with the dismal performance that the England team put out, and I know that if people knew the result before the game started, the ratio of spectators would have swung much more in Costello’s favour. I was starting to wonder if this would be the most animated the crowd would be the whole day after the disappointment of England’s exit from the World Cup, but my doubts were extinguished as soon as Crowded House stepped on stage.

They had heard the England result, and managed to do what they wanted, get the crowd forgetting about the football, and religiously singing the words to numbers such as ‘Fall At Your Feet’ and ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’. Before long the audience found themselves fist pumping to the Australians, while also practicing a Mexican wave several times at the request of the band. This seemed to bring the crowd closer together, as the chanting to ‘Weather With You’ reverberated around Hyde Park. I wouldn’t be surprised if it startled the Queen and all her Corgies in nearby Buckingham Palace.

The time quickly passed by, and suddenly before I knew it the star attraction was due on stage, Sir Paul McCartney. He made a fashionably late entrance, but my goodness he was worth it. Mixing up songs from his solo career and also his time with Wings and The Beatles, he performed an eclectic set that lasted just under three hours. Not bad for a man who’s old enough to collect a pension, but that shouldn’t cast a shadow over a man who has been a legend for the last fifty years. The highlight for me was the double hit of ‘Live and Let Die’ and ‘Hey Jude’ straight after one another, with an extraordinary fireworks display during the first exemplifying the pulsating nature of the song. I’ve got to say that during ‘Hey Jude’, it was the best atmosphere I’ve ever experienced, I thought there’d be a huge sing-a-long, but not a togetherness that feels more at home in families.

Such was the attention on Paul, a girl who was desperately crying out for her partner promptly got the response; "Shut up woman, we've come to hear Macca, not you whinging!" This atmosphere lingered well after the gig had finished, with people reciting several lyrics from the day's artists, also frequently joined by a half drunk, half adrenaline-rushed choir.

This experience will live long in my memory, and from the amazing time I had on the Sunday, I’m slightly disappointed with myself that I didn’t go on the Saturday to see another name in music folklore, Stevie Wonder. Next year for sure though, I will definitely consider Hard Rock Calling as a festival to attend.

However, Oxegen festival in Dublin is calling my name...

Is it a bee? Is it a plane? No, it’s a Vuvuzela.

For the past week millions of households across the UK, or even the world for that matter, could have been forgiven for thinking that a swarm of bees had nestled in the back of their TV sets while they watched the World Cup. This has consequently put a sting in the tail of the British public, who have found this incessant droning quite irritating, and made the competition not as entertaining as they’d hoped.

However, as we all discovered, it was not a giant frenzy of bees hidden inside the stadium, it was a mass of people playing an African horn called a vuvuzela. I mean, I had heard of them before the tournament started but did I think you’d be able to hear them right throughout the match?! No, is the answer. Neither did I think they’d cause so much controversy that a request was sent to FIFA to get them banned, although this was declined.

Most people can’t stand the noise, my mum and sister included, and it would be so easy to agree with them. I have to admit it’s not the most pleasant of sounds, and if you’re like me who aims to watch most of the matches, it threatens to make your viewing of the World Cup pretty tedious. It also gives my mum some ammunition to convince me that the Coronation Street theme tune would be much better to listen to in the evenings, however I’ve started to forget the vuvuzelas are even there.

I’m all for tradition as well, and if this is how South Africa expresses itself throughout football matches, then let them. This is the first World Cup on African soil, so we’re bound to experience something new and different during matches. Even though you may not be able to hear fans chanting throughout World Cup matches, I think the vuvuzela adds a new dimension to the atmosphere.

Anyway, what are us Brits complaining about?! Thousands of us have already bought the plastic version that has been exported over here, and are quite happy to test it out in our homes and on the streets. Even my good friend Lou magically found one lurking in her house, so who knows, you may also find a vuvuzela under your stairs or in your garden shed.

The vuvuzelas have also given us an opportunity to crack endless jokes at our own nations expense. After the game against Algeria, lots of quips surfaced, some of my favourites being, “That’s not vuvuzelas, that’s the grass snoring”; or, “That’s not vuvuzelas, that’s the sound of a whole nation booing”. So, the vuvuzelas in a sense have given us some comedic relief from England’s poor performances on the pitch.

It seems that slowly everyone is warming to the African horn, and hopefully this World Cup will be remembered for the right reasons on the field, and not just for that annoying noise that got on everyones nerves.

We’ve spent enough time blowing our own trumpets about England’s World Cup chances, so why not let Africa blow theirs?

British Tennis: Double-faulting or serving aces?

The state of British tennis has been widely and publicly criticised over the last decade or so, and since the retirement of Greg Rusedski and Tim Henman there has been an alarming lack of serious up and coming players, with the obvious exception of Andy Murray.

This apparent dearth of talent has been realised in recent Davis Cup ties, where Great Britain have been relegated to the third tier of the Davis Cup structure, Europe/Africa Zone Group 1, on the back of a 3-2 loss to Poland. Even though they have been seeded first in this group, they still failed to beat the unseeded Lithuania.

Andy Murray has also made himself ineligible to be selected for the team, citing a busy tournament schedule throughout the year as his reason. Although this means the British team doesn’t feature a player from the top 100, this should eventually give the other, much lower ranked, British players invaluable match practice on the Davis Cup stage.

Great Britain are also only represented by two male players in the draw for Wimbledon, both of which are from Scotland, meaning there is no Englishman for the first time in Wimbledon’s 133 year history. This has called Roger Draper’s position, as head of the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), into serious question. With tennis being one of the most commercial sports in the United Kingdom, behind only football, rugby and cricket, and valued at around £1.3 billion, we should surely have more talented players coming through the ranks.

Around half a million adults play tennis every week in the UK, and with this number bound to increase with Wimbledon starting next week, this number needs to translate down to the younger generation if Britain are going to have some bright prospects for the future. Wimbledon always provides great inspiration for children to take up tennis, and the ever growing presence of Andy Murray in the latter stages of the competition can only enhance that.

Of course, Andy Murray winning Wimbledon, or any of the grand slams for that matter, would do the power of good for British tennis, but it is also the myth that tennis is only played by white middle class people that hinders the growth of the sport. While Roger Draper claims that tennis is played by people of a mixture of backgrounds and races, it seems that more is needed to be done to get a larger amount of children interested in tennis.

However with planned spending cuts set to hit tennis more than most sports it has to be questioned how much faith there is in the UK producing more Henmans and Murrays to contest future competitions. This will inevitably make the LTAs job harder to discover hidden talent.

On the other hand British girls are seemingly flourishing, with both Laura Robson and Heather Watson winning junior Grand Slams in 2008 and 2009 respectively. While players like Anne Keothavong and Elena Baltacha aren’t sending massive shockwaves throughout women’s tennis, this new crop of players should encourage younger girls, and hopefully boys, to take up the sport.

So while women’s tennis in the UK is making great strides, men’s tennis is in dire straits, and at present there is no sign that that will change. With Fred Perry being our last Grand Slam winner back in the 1930s, who knows when we’ll have our next Grand Slam winner? While Andy Murray seems to be hitting the right balls to win one of those four elusive Slams, let’s just hope there’s a talented crop of youngsters following him.

The battle between revision and procrastination

As my third and final year at university comes to an end, it almost feels I have no work left to do. However, even with all my essays and dissertation handed in, revision is on the menu for what no one seems to enjoy, exams. With one already confidently (ok, maybe I’m lying to myself here) dispatched, there is still a second exam to tackle before I can enjoy the summer that lies ahead.

Exams are mainly hated because of the daunting amount of revision that needs to be done beforehand. Although how much you do essentially defines how well you do, students, including myself, are constantly trying to find shortcuts as well as various ways to procrastinate. The most ordinary of tasks seem so much more appealing, with fetching a drink preferred to a dose of cultural geographies. Even random suggestions enter your head, rearranging your sock drawer suddenly becomes an attractive proposition, whereas under normal circumstances this would be considered even more tedious, and more to the point, very strange.

During exam period procrastination is seen by students as the best thing since sliced bread, and even mundane television shows reap the benefits of teenagers resorting to staring blankly at the box rather than gazing at pages of notes. Revision marks the start of exam season, and so as you get more and more fidgety during the daytime, an “anything on tv will do” attitude is adopted by many people. Even adverts seem to be watched more closely, a desperate attempt to excuse yourself from looking at notes during the interval.

It is not just third years at university like myself that seem to have a concentration issue. Young people of different ages all have their own ways of avoiding revision at any level, and even though it is laughable now to think I struggled to sit through a GCSE Bitesize video, it still seemed a painful exercise. A painful exercise that somewhat seems very familiar in the present day, although with entirely different content.

I think the fact that the Bitesize programmes always had a clock in the corner made them drag on for what appeared an unnecessary amount of time. Couple this with an unhealthy dose of patronising presenters and you have a marriage made in heaven to make a student cry out for something else to do. Thankfully there are no such videos for my final exams, but then again maybe an over-friendly presenter could be a welcome relief to facing the daunting challenge of revision alone.

You’re all most likely thinking that I should be used to revision by now, and quite rightly too. Through my gluttony for procrastination I may have painted a bad picture of myself as a poor student, but I think most, if not all students, would put revision at the bottom of their favourite things to do. Saying that, my conscience always seems to shine through and has made sure I haven’t really ever had a disastrous exam, as my brain has been forced to absorb enough information. So I guess my common sense is the real hero in the battle against procrastination, and that revision does somehow become appealing when you think of the simple equation; better grades equals better job.

Revision will always be a difficult task to endure for any student, and while it has to be done, I am confident that the art of procrastination will never die. Anyway, I better go, the cutlery needs counting.

This article can also be found at About My Area Portsmouth

NME Radar Tour: Well Within My Range

Being my first gig since January, I was obviously psyched about going to the NME Radar Tour, especially to hear new bands that could widen my musical tastes. I had done my research on the bands, furiously attacking their Myspaces just so I could memorise some songs, and so I set off feeling like I’d never been out of the loop.

As I entered the Wedgewood Rooms, the first band, The Strange Death Of Liberal England, had already started playing, their raw sound reverberating around the venue. There seemed to be a feeling of anxiety in the air, with the room only being half full, but the band seemed determined to put on a good impression with their punchy choruses and screechy vocals making up for the deficit in the crowd.

This indie sound was followed by the folk band, Darwin Deez. These were one of the bands that I was anticipating, and I was not let down. Immediately they introduced a fresh spin to the evening, rocking out some snappy, well executed dance routines before each song, earning rapturous applause from the audience. Their set was equally as impressive, reeling off light, bouncy tunes, while their biggest British hit so far, “Radar Detector”, gave a nonsensical riding-on-air sensation.

Although Darwin himself said he had hurt his ankle, this didn’t stop him and the rest of the band putting on a storming show, as the New Yorkers’ confidence grew, the guitarists furiously bopping around the stage, while the bubbly vocals complimented the fluffy rhythms.

So it seemed that Darwin Deez had set the bar for the night, and one of the main attractions, Everything Everything, was up next. The electro noise was a stark contrast to the poppy melodies that it had followed, but songs such as “Suffragette Suffragette” and “My Kz Yr Bf” got the crowd bouncing along. In between the hard-hitting electronic beats and thumping vocals, Jonathan Higgs’ voice treating us to a few softer numbers, delivering velvety lyrics alongside quiet synths and guitars. The lead guitarist also tried to stake a claim to the area, shouting, “I was born down the road from here”, however getting the promptest of replies, “You should feel lucky you got out!”

By the time the headliner of the tour, Hurts, came on it was feeling like an eclectic line-up. Indie, folk, electro-indie and now four men in suits stood before us, their clean-cut style putting the other acts to shame. Standing rigidly with their slick hairstyles, Hurts acted like they belonged in the rat pack, not on an NME tour. However, as the piano kicked in with its echoic sound, coupled with the choirboy vocals, Hurts really did shake things up to end the night.

There was some negative feedback from the crowd, but this only worked in Hurts’ favour, with their songs gaining more momentum, with the lead singer Theo Hutchcraft actually looking like he meant every word. “Better Than Love”, their new single, was the closing song of the night, and this offered a new take, a more upbeat tempo getting everyone up dancing and jumping.

After such a long time away from the gig scene, it was a relief to experience upcoming bands that are bound to thrive in the future. Every band was impressive in their own way, and are sure to make their mark in 2010, but if I had to pick one that will storm the charts, it would have to be Darwin Deez.

Hopefully all these bands will reach your ‘radar detector’ sometime soon...



This article can also be found at About My Area Portsmouth

Graduation: The End Of An Era

Graduation. A word that fills me with mixed emotions. Looking forward to a new chapter of my life brings excitement, whilst leaving the last three years of my life behind floods me with dread. University life has become all but second nature to me; the late nights out, endless deadlines that are left to the last minute and a care free attitude have been mashed together to form some sort of routine that I have easily been accustomed to.

To try and come to terms to the fact that this routine will be taken away from me in a month’s time is something that is difficult to comprehend. I start to ask myself questions; “Will I ever get a chance to dress up in stupid costumes, go out for the night, and then walk home in them and still feel vaguely normal?” “Will I ever be able to rush a piece of coursework the night before without considering how good it is?” “Could I still pass off pasta as a regular figurehead in my weekly menu?” The answer to all these questions is quite frankly "no"; the themes of these questions only really apply to a student, and couldn’t possibly be accepted in the adult world.

Maybe leaving these so called “lifestyle luxuries” behind is a sign that at 21, it is perhaps time to grow up and get a firm hold on the real world, but after living like this for three years do students, me included, really have a desire to?

Three years previous I looked upon the transition from school life to university in a similar light. Now looking back, that adjustment was almost seamless, with new friends appearing instantly and a steady set of lectures meaning I settled in quickly. The lure of a free will and a doing-whatever-you-felt-like approach also played a part in changing what seemed like a big leap into a natural step.

A part of me is wishing this new adjustment in my life is also as smooth as the last, but another part knows this could only ever be false hope. Who am I to kid myself? Going from being a university student to being in full-time work is a big step. I don’t think I am the only graduating student that has fears of only ever amounting to a regular 9-5 office job for the rest of their life. Maybe it is this, getting a job I won’t enjoy, and not just entering the big bad world of work, that alarms me.

Having said all this though, the thought of finally growing up, perhaps not mentally, is something I am looking forward to. However scary it is wondering how long it is before you’re completely left on your own two feet, or how you will fit your social life around your new job, I see these as some sort of little achievements to aim for, like stepping stones to becoming a fully-fledged adult.

Looking at myself now I still see the same boy who bundled his way into halls back in 2007, and although I feel like I’ve come a long way, sometimes I think I haven’t changed a single bit. As a result of this mirror image, I’ve developed this apprehensiveness over how I will fare in the real world, and how I will cope without the “safety nets” of my parents and a student loan.

There’s no doubt I will miss university life a hell of a lot, it’s been a huge part of my life, being one of my most enjoyable experiences, and most importantly has shaped who I am today. I will take a lot from my time at university and this will hopefully translate into a positive outlook for the next episode of my life, as I attempt to become a fully grown adult.

Maybe I’m not stupidly panicking because it hasn’t properly hit me, and I’m still looking forward to another month of being a “tax-dodger”, so I haven’t quite been thrust into the working wilderness just yet.

When I finally do leave my house in Portsmouth for the last time, get a final glimpse of the university buildings and all the clubs that I once occupied, a titanic wave of memories will flush back, beckoning me to stay, something that will be extremely hard to resist. In all truth it will be hard to leave university life, but maybe I haven’t realised how hard it will be until the four weeks pass by in an inevitable flash, and I end up being able to count the days left on one hand.

Even though the death of my student life is looming, ask me my thoughts on graduating in a month’s time, and I may possibly have a totally different outlook on a working life, but for now, I’m quite content to see out the rest of my days at university.



This article is also published at: About My Area Portsmouth