10/09/07
Jestival at Bestival Festival and now Restival. -
Categories: I had my first ever festival gig yesterday at the Bestival weekender. I had been looking forward to playing the festival for ages and had spent time thinking of a set that might work. I was only doing 10 mins, sharing a 20 minute slot with the excellent Tom Wrigglesworth.
As the slot drew nearer I realised two things I wasn't happy with. One was that unlike most of the other comics on, I had been up for the whole weekend and had consequently not slept enough, eaten properly and drank too much. Not too dissimilar from my month in Edinburgh then. This state of health was the not the best for coping with the second problem. This latter problem was that being first on at the comedy tent meant the audience were wondering in and out, some people were on severe come downs and just hiding from the sunshine, six people were eating curry and two people were actually asleep.
Hence my set was a lot tougher than I wanted it to be. Al Pitcher did a nice warm up at the top which was ruined by a woman demanding she was kicked out of the tent. Al made her smoke a cigarette so that the security guard ran in, picked her up and kicked her out to rapturous applause. This created an environment where people would just walk up to the stage and shout things at Al. He was fine with this of course, but when it got to me, my brain was not in working order to deal with impro. So I just belted out my set, and struggled to get any kind of atmosphere going. There were pockets of interested audience, but as soon as it didn't involve them, several people wandered off and started chatting and it all became a bit tough. I ploughed through to the end and walked off in a sulk. Bad way to have a first gig back I felt and I'm hoping its not the start of a bad run.
The rest of the weekend was pretty good. I don't know if its a sign of age, but after three days of camping , drinking and watching bands, I was quite sick of the lack of showers, beds and proper loos and was quite ready to get back. I'm not some sort of cleanliness freak, but there is something about uncleaned portaloos that scars the mind for about 6 days after having to use them. It took all my adult willpower not to childishly yell 'UUURRRGGHHH' every time I had to use one.
Our tent was situated right near some total arseholes too, which meant that even when we did hit the sack, they would be shouting and singing to make sure we didn't get any sleep. Well when I say we, their aim was to keep their friend 'Emma' awake. A selfish enough prospect I feel, but little did they know how far they had actually surpassed their aim by keeping several other people up as well.
To be fair I had been too organised and hired a tent and booked ferries before I got the festival info, and it was only after I found out I could have stayed in the artists area which was a shame. For once my over exaggerated sense of urgency had got the better of me. This general confusion and disarray seemed to be the theme of the whole festival though and after a 7 hour traffic filled journey on the Friday, we only found where we were going after being directed to the wrong car park 4 times. How a festival of that size can have no one working there who has any idea whats going on, I'm not sure.
Despite all this, it was a good weekend, with the highlight being Billy Bragg on Saturday afternoon in the hot sun. He was truly brilliant and played some classic stuff with a few new excellent songs. I was never a huge fan and my girlfriend hadn't even heard of him (I know. Her music taste is quite appalling in places) but we were both in awe of his great audience banter and touching songs. Other good things included Mr Scruff's special pies of the day (goats cheese and spiders, spam and tissue), Chemical Brothers, the incredible Flutebox (beat boxing and flute playing at the same time. Truly nuts), interviews with Bestival FM, the Hidden Disco, Ramases the parrot, Nachos , Liquorice, bumping into old old friends, giant pandas dancing and shagging to Phil Nichol and Ed Byrne singing old Corky and the Juice Pigs songs, my pirate costume and people dressed as bananas.
By the way. The advert from previous blogs is now out and can be seen here - www.carlsbergkaraoke.co.uk
I think its quite good if I do say so myself, not least because of the Bryan Ferry 'support act' moment. If I ever get a big theatre tour I'll book him in to open I think.
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