Great Escape Festival Diary: 16/v/08

We go in search of afternoon entertainment. Soweto Kinch and Mr Hudson play an impromptu pretty fun mini-set on the Theatre Royal Balcony. Energetic and entertaining, it gets the juices flowing. And I see another band (I don’t catch the name) at the Water Margin. It’s probably just as well that I don’t know the name. They were awful. The singer sounded like Bono channelling the Swedish Chef from the Muppets whilst doing it all in the club style like Vic Reeves. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. It wasn’t meant to be funny.

Our main target of the day, especially as we’d missed kings of PrepPop, Vampire Weekend, on Thursday was Yeasayer. So we planned to essentially squat the Pressure Point til they came on. This means seeing every band, which what with Kelly Stolz’s cancellation, means only seeing Broken Records.

This is no hardship. Broken Records are a sophisticated folky, rocky outfit from Scotland replete with brass and strings. Charming, erudite, if a little morose, they hammer out a big sound. Excellent.

And it’s a long wait til Yeasayer, and we get chucked out to queue for more than an hour before we get back in to the surprisingly small space. Unfortunately, we have to watch another half hour of Yeasayer’s needlessly pedantic soundcheck (‘Bit more/less wedge, stage left” again and again).

The charmless lead man has a few digs, asks why we couldn’t just queue outside some more, and then declares that having us watch them soundcheck is like ‘people watching me masturbate.” It’s an apposite comment: I have no doubt that they’re a bunch of wankers now. How’s the music? Pretty much as you’d expect: polished and precise. Just listen to the record.

Avanti! Noah and the Whale at the Unitarian Church. This young rock folk crowd were more bored than I was and sounded a bit like late Johnny Cash. No bar. I really needed a bar.

I don’t go and see Devon Sproule (truly amazing apparently) and see Bishi instead. And she’s lovely. Really good: but maybe not best suited to a late gig in a shabby pub room. I can imagine her wowing a sunny field somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire. Alright.

And then we go dancing and we’ve still got it on the dancefloor (well, I think so)…and it’s a good way to end a good day. But the next morning, I definitely realise that I’m not as young as I used to be.