1 post tagged “festival”

Man, what a weekend! It started friday evening, rushing out of work to chuck some food in the horse, then off to the Paradiso for the London Calling Festival which ran more or less for 2 days straight. In between I did find some time to excercise Himself, who went completely nuts with the great autumn weather.

The sun, the wind, the rustling yellowed leaves and his clipped coat made that he felt a very happy horse indeed! Less appreciative was I when he started to share his joy with me by cartwheeling through the "woods" with me on his back (I say "woods" because it sounds much more grand than it is, still for Amsterdam suburbia, it's not bad at all!). And after all that, I was dead chuffed because I got to live another day after his cartwheeling-flying-buck-leaps.He's a very flexible horse, he is. So after that I just had to take him out again yesterday, to make sure that was a one time, not to be repeated experience. A blanket and no wind kind of helped :-] (though he was still one happy horse!).

But, back to London Calling. Just wow. I felt a bit apprehensive at first, because I was surrounded by tons and tons of people, who could not have been more than 16 years old, at most. Actually, most of the bands these days seem to be younger than me, looking to be straight out of highschool. Maybe that's why I like these old geezers musicians better, because they make me feel young! Har. Whatever. London Calling kicked off with the Holloways in the small upstairs room at the Paradiso. And I liked them! They really set the mood for the whole festival. While I saw a few bands I did not like so much, there were many yummy ones to counter for them. Some managed to bring everybody to their feet, resulting in crowdsurfing in the little upstairs room, people grabbing the mics after jumping the stage and singing along, bands sending off security who were trying to get the people off the stage and singers, guitars and everything disappearing into the audience. I

t was absolutely fantastic for atmosphere! It's also left me with a long list of new young bands to check out (Milburn, The Rifles, Holloways, Little Man Tate, Klaxons, Pigeon Detectives, Maccabees, Bromheads Detectives) and about 500 pictures.

Tomorrow I'm off to Den Bosch to see Muse, though I'm a dunce and forgot to ask the time off... So now I can only get half a day off and that I have the kindness of my boss to thank for (he did tell me to bring the UMTS card, so I can dial in from Den Bosch if I have to.

Heh. Work from the car, that'd be fun). More good news on the gigging front... I saw a poster in Paradiso announcing Jarvis will play there January 22. I haven't read anything about it anywhere else though, so I have no idea when it'll be on sale. Time for Ticketmaster alerts, I guess. Quite happy that tickets always go on sale on Saturdays here, so it shouldn't be a problem. Right when I was all happy about that, I saw another poster reminding me of Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan playing there too. AND! I just found myself a Kasabian ticket. 2007 Is shaping up so nicely! It's going to be a hell of a gigging year.

Oh, by the way, more pictures on my flickr page.