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Now typically I steer clear of any website clashing/wars and just stick to my own stuff and whatnot, but after reading an article from one of my fellow bloggers and close friends. I thought I’d share the article to those who aren’t fully in the know about the things behind it all and show my support for every word he’s said. It’s one of those things where you could either ignore and hope it doesn’t get worse or something you just need to start taking action on and pointing out that there is something fundamentally wrong about them.
Part 2 of this epic adventure that is V Festival 08 (though I doubt you have more anticipation for it now since it happened quite a while back haha). Mainly a photo dump of the actual gig. Anyway, the lineup sucked so badly that all I saw were Sugababes, a bit of Stereophonics and Muse, so lets get straight down to it
Welcome to my lovely two part post on V Festival 2008, thought I’d separate the social part of v festival and the gig part of v into two posts to make things easier to digest, granted there’s not much to talk about in the gig section so it will probably be photo flooded whilst this one will most likely be content orientated. So yeah, after being guestlisted for the lovely v festival at Staffordshire on a Sunday, I had arranged all the travel and accomodation a few weeks in advanced to ensure things go well (”well” being i can actually get there and have a place to stay), I booked a lovely hotel at the Wolverhampton Quality Hotel (where quality is oozing from the hotel so much that the word quality popped into the name of the hotel, that’s how awesome it was!) and some tiddly train rides to Wolverhapton (was about 3 hours to Wolves but 2 hours back, silly trains). Fact was I was going for the day and wasn’t really keen in heading home early or camping (that wasn’t allowed anyway what with the wristbands and not having weekend passes). The hotel seemed like the best (and warmest) option and I was surprised that it was only £48, including bed and breakfast. I had booked a holiday for Monday to ensure I had sufficient amount of rest once I arrive home (besides I don’t think work would appreciate me coming into work all muddy and bloody from the festival (mm soft skulls).
I think it’s time to delete some of the old change logs for Musewiki. This should help make backing up a lot easier since the database is becoming pretty epic, though I suppose the main cause is actually the photos but nonetheless, a purge is in order. I shall propose to do it on the 15th of July (because I like that number) So make sure you’re not leaving out anything that needs restoring.
Lately I’ve been pondering, Muse have seriously become one of those bands where some fans just can’t get enough of the band and have to see them more than once during each tour. Of course, Muse are reknown for making stunning performances on stage and have won enough awards to pretty much be one of the best live acts in the Uk. But what makes a person take a nice plane to another new destination to see the band?
Now, to get some perspective on how dedicate some people are, I know people who’ve been to about 22 gigs for ONE TOUR. Not their entire gig list, just for one tour. I’ve seen the elderly females travel from the other side of the pond to catch an extra glimpse of the band and I’ve seen the ridiculous folks who came all the way from Japan to see them (wait a sec, that applies for all bands (and I’m still confused as to how the Japanese go on holiday so much, I hear that they seldomly use their holidays)). Feel free to beat those figures, I’m pretty sure there’s someone mad enough.
So yeah, this is more of an ask the readers on why they do it. Two of the staff on the Muse board crew are going to see Muse at Dublin so I wanted to see what your opinion is on gigging abroad, and whether it’s worth the effort of going.
I can understand people who’s hometown is hardly recognise which forces them to go other destinations but some people like me live in the city which makes it incredibly easy to catch the band a shed load of times. Anyway, get commenting.
Don’t forget to take note on the witty photo caption haha 
I dislike deleting photos I take, these days when I come back from a gig I have about 500 shots that I need to sort out, pick and then upload onto flickr. Now usually in gig environments you’ll discover that there’s a high ratio of crap shots and good shots purely because of crazy fans pushing you, random hands in the way, or the band moving too fast etc but once you throw all them out you have about 100-200 shots of nice shots.
Now what happens next? Do I upload them all? Now if all shots were unique then hell yeah, upload them all, but this is from one gig. A magazine doesn’t show millions of photos for one gig so neither should I. It’s only best to strip out all the similar but not as epic shots and only keep the epic ones. That means comparing them against one and another and SLOWLY killing the photos off. It usually takes hours to do and is a toughie when the photos are all sharp and presentable. I do have a few rules of deciding which photo goes through, usually judging on how interesting the lights are, and how dynamic the musician’s pose is. Once we’ve declared the winners, we start killing loads of photos that are simply “bad duplicates“.
I was able to grab a ticket at the last minute and go see the band play at a very respectable and epic venue, the Royal Albert Hall, which is renowned for it’s awesome acoustics and dazzling lightings (saw a few musicals there beforehand). It was all part of the Teenage Cancer Trust charity and made everyone feel happy inside that they’ve donated some money from it all. Anyway, I’m sure most of the information can be found at Musewiki so I’ll get straight into the review.
Oh and I spoke to a ticket tout (to research on how much they were charging) about buying Muse tickets and he said £70, tut tut. He was willing to go lower but I left since I was quite disgusted.
The gig was spectacular. They did a lot of new things, a lot of right things and all in all it was a rocking gig. When Take a bow came up I immediately gave them the nod of approval knowing full well that if Take a Bow was the opener, Knights of Cydonia will be the last song (which I prefer a lot). The acoustics were amazing as well as the lighting. Their choice of songs were really good, introducing a few new riffs as well as playing some old songs such as Fury which really lighted up the stage for the die hard fans. The highlight would be when Matt got up to the organs and played Megalomania. Really making use of the venue’s facilities. Makes you wonder if that could have been an end song? (Epic but not rocky). From the gig you would have thought Matt had learnt some new facial expressions because he was pulling all sorts of faces during the gig. The highlight songs would have been, Knights of Cydonia, Megalomania, Fury and Bliss. The balloons coming out, although old, felt like it wasn’t done in a long time, probably because you rarely GET to play with the balloons on venues such as Wembley Stadium etc. It reminded me of the Brixton gig due to it’s size and everything.
Anyway, enjoy some photos! I uploaded about 50 shots so be sure to check them all out on my flickr page
I’ll be having a nice 1 week + holiday so I won’t be blogging much / at all, during that period. So yeah, thought I’d be nice and release one of my slightly hidden covers that I did last year. This is using pro tools so it’s slightly cooler but it’s all recorded pretty live which gives it that very raw edge. Unfortunately I sing in this one, this is probably the only cover you’ll ever hear me sing. I don’t like singing because my voice sucks and I don’t think it’ll get any better so yeah. First ever song where I really went all out on trying to get mixing and mastering done right, my first shot at it and all so I’m still learning. So yeah, I’ll be up north now, enjoy.
