Saturday overview

I approached the V festival with trepidation. I had always given it a wide berth as I considered it a bastion of rampant commercialism, where you have to pay for everything but the air that you breathe (although I had wanted to cover V05, so I could do a bad shampoo joke). I am pleased to say that these suspicions proved to be unfounded, although there was actually a stall selling oxygen. I managed to spend less than £30 on the site, and that included £8 for parking and getting slightly squiffy on on the Saturday night. You just have to be a bit organised, take your breakfast /lunches / beers with you… that sort of thing.


It hadn’t started that promisingly though when on Saturday morning as I pulled into the car park at 9am and saw some numpty chasing a terrified rabbit across the grass, beer leaping from the can in his hand. If this was to be the clientele for the weekend, that trepidation was well-founded.

There is also a pretty poor lack of information. Once parked up, there are signs saying ‘Arena this way’ in large lettering, so you assume that is the way to go, but a sign in the vein of ‘camping over here too by the way’ would be useful. You reach the campsites before you reach the wristband exchange, so you can walk past your ideal spot lumping your stuff, before having to lump it back again, the way you came in. And of course, stage times, apparently a closely guarded secret except for those willing to fork out for the programme. Indeed, the only public place I saw the line up for stages written down was outside the Christian tent. Thank God for them eh?

However, it was not the Christian’s screaming ‘For Christ’s sake’ at 11:30, it was me, as once again this patience testing summer did it’s worst – the heavens opening once again - just as the arena was scheduled to let us in and therefore the fun due to start. It would continue to test all weekend.

But your eFestivals correspondents are nothing if not hardy, and with raincoat and Wellingtons donned, I charge into that arena…and go straight undercover! For good reason though, as the site’s favourite, Seth Lakeman is opening up.

The tent is rammed, partly because of the weather I surmised at the time, but the evidence of later on suggest that the throng had specifically turned up for Lakeman...and for good reason. He has some magical songs that encompass the folk world he half represents (double bass, fiddles, acoustic guitars, but no fingers in ears) but ever so slightly ventures in rock. For his final song, he dispenses with the band and becomes a one man band, fiddle and bass drum, and it is absolutely mesmerising. That’s the weekend off to a good start.

The site is quite compact, so although there are only few signs pointing you toward stages, it matters not because you find them fairly quickly anyway. I’ve gone to the Channel 4 stage to watch Captain, and cannot help but snigger a little when I see the sign next to the stage...’Crowd Surfers Will be Ejected’, because Captain are the most genteel AOR you could possibly imagine. I still like ‘em though, the songs are well structured and the male/female voices of Rick Flynn and Clare Szembek, which individually would be unappealing flat/helium pitched, complement each other.

It’s still raining, so their plea for a punter on fancy dress to come and dance on stage with them, which they say is a tradition, nearly fails until one man steps forward. In truth, this ‘fancy dress’ is only a sailor’s hat and an all-in-one rainsuit but times are desperate. Having invited ‘Lee’ onstage Flynn & Szembek look upon him with mounting suspicion that he may do something unpredictable, but by then, like in the movie The Lost Boys, the vampire had been invited into the house, so there was nothing they could do about it. The rest of the band, perhaps a bit more rock and roll, found his gyrating hilarious though.

Same stage, but much more tightly packed, it’s time for the surliest men in music, The Cribs, except they seen quite chipper today. Is it the rain? It soon becomes clear..."we’ve just spent 5 weeks in America. Boiling hot, would swap it all for a rainy day in England". And you can tell they are Northern English too, because those low cut v neck t-shirt proudly show off chest hair that would have been shaved off in that there London.

Their disdain for the South may mean that tomorrow in Chelmsford they will be back to their grumpy selves, but today, North of Watford, the set is great. Shouted vocals, guitars trashed manically and drums pounded whilst standing on the stool all combine to give a collective ‘V’ sign to the v.bland James Morrison on the main stage.

Wind has now combined with the rain, to make life more difficult, and this is now the only festival I’ve ever been too where I could see my breath at 3 in the afternoon. But that is steam coming from the packed JJB tent because it seems like the entire festival has gone there.

On my arrival, I feel like David Byrne in ‘Once In A Lifetime’, imagining him singing ”And you may find yourself, watching on a Saturday afternoon...and you might asked yourself, how did I get here?”.



I’m glad I did though, and not because McFly were a revelation. They weren’t, they were crap. But at least now when those daft people tell me how brilliant they are I can now refute this having actually seen them. Fair play to them that they play their own instruments, but it’s indie-lite, taking the softer bits from the likes of Oasis, and packaging them up so teenagers will love it – there are huge screams and blown up condoms float past the front of the stage. The best bit though, was when they announced that they were going to play a new one for the first time, and the crowd booed. Quite right too, in a six song festival set you play the crowd-pleasers or you can sod off. At least they closed with ‘5 Colours in her Hair’, which I suppose is a little bit of a guilty pleasure.

Bar a couple of hundred people, the arena empties on the last note, but I stick around as I’m curious about Rilo Kiley, and more so when Jenny Lewis walks out in silver vest and hot pants combo. This appears to be some sort of attempt to ‘break’ the band, by focussing on Lewis’s charms, but they should start with the songs, because the set, despite being short, sounds like Fleetwood Mac for 5 tunes until redemption arrives in the shape of beautiful ballad ‘Does He Love You?’. For the first time you sense that the band feels what they are playing, Lewis finally giving it 100% after looking so dis-interested previously.

The first festival I ever reviewed was way back in 1991, when James topped the bill at Reading. They weren’t very good, and I wasn’t very kind. The problem was, I think, that James are very much a singles band, and back then they didn’t have the material, coming shortly after the release of ‘Gold Mother.’ Then, the albums were full of filler like ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Government Walls’, neither worthy of you re-visiting the record to check them out. There was much more quality to follow in subsequent years.



Today, after being introduced by Peter Kay playing it straight, they open with ‘Born of Frustration’, ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Sit Down’, singles all and all sounding quite fresh. I am unforgiving though, and set off to watch an artist who, despite initial misgivings, I have a soft spot for.

The festival party is now well under way, and litter is strewn all over, with bins thin on the ground. There’s not much of a nod toward recycling either, with only one recycling point, outside the arena, which serves about as much use as the free sun cream one company is giving away. So unlike Glastonbury of course, where the Green police would be down on you before you can drop that carton, or indeed unzip that fly. And on the way to the C4 stage, there are a lot of people relieving themselves against the perimeter fence, but there is a new phenomenon, on me anyway, and that is the number of ladies lined up against the boundary wall, shielded only by a mate holding up a cagoule. Dignity, it seems, is now only a song by Deacon Blue, but unless this is an endemic of incontinence (and there are enough drunken people here to think that possible) organisers ought to think about whether their toilet facilities are adequate. More urinals are clearly needed, with a campaign discouraging public weeing, and she-pee should be invited too.


Lily Allen is alright though, as she’s got a potty mouth (boom boom!). She bounds onto stage with a raincoat covering the usual dress, but that is dispensed with by the middle of ‘LDN’, which despite being a blatant rip off of a Calypso classic and having some pretty ropey lyrics is still glorious.

One thing about Lily is that she likes talking, and today she’s doing a lot of it. She’s a likeable character, and the chat is entertaining enough, even though there is a touch of déjà vu to it, as it is pretty much the same as that at Glastonbury, references to American Immigration Officials excepted. I’m quite a naive young man really, but when someone suggests to me that she may have taken something backstage that makes her so motor-mouthed you have to admit they could have a point. But maybe that’s just how she is?



Towards the end it is pointed out to her that time is short, so ‘Friday Night’, ‘Knock em Out’ and ‘Smile’ are done almost as a medley, with Lily only having time to swig her wine in between, the big screen capturing one lovely spit and dribble.

‘Smile’, in a clichéd manner, makes you do just that. There is a group of 6 dosy doe-ing with each other in front of me; young ladies are singing along behind and, ow, a Frisbee landing on me from above.

Out of time, Allen refuses to leave the stage “just so the Manic Street Preachers can come on and do their boring shit” and finishes off with ‘Alfie’, which she performs sporadically in fits of laughter. She’s definitely intoxicated with something, which my lawyer would point out could just be the sheer joy of performing. Cough.

Thinking back to Reading 1991 again, I recall reviewing a comedian because “Iggy Pop was doing his tired old thing on the main stage”. Irony then that I am picking the dawg over Kasabian and MSP. Of course, this time it’s Iggy and The Stooges, but it’s not the addition of his former colleagues that makes the difference, it’s that I’ve got a bit further with my musical education since then. The venue, the JJB tent again, suggests that there are plenty of people at V who have yet to learn, because there’s not that many here.

A topless Pop bounds onto the stage with more energy than anyone you’ll see all weekend, and through out the set he’s on the move, jumping, climbing, twisting, posturing and gyrating; more shapes than a Covent Garden mime and not bad for a man of 60.

Starting with the first note of ‘Loose’, the guitars are relentless, assaulting your ear’s erogenous zones through ‘1969’ and the seminal ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’. It occurs to me that this material is about 40 years old…imagine what this must have sounded like in the late sixties. Whilst indie today has the relatively derivative acts showcased at this festival – The Killers, Kasabian, The Kooks et al - this will have been revolutionary, totally new and life changing. You rarely come across such a movement – I was around for ‘Madchester’, debatably the last one, but it was nothing compared to Iggy’s “The Fu*cking Stooges”. Just to get a little taste of how that era felt and sounded is the festival highlight by a long chalk. ROCK, with a capital r, o, c & k.

By the time it’s over I am breathless, and I’ve barely moved from where I stood initially. The final frantic moments included Iggy pouring copious amounts of water over himself and the audience, bassist Mike Watt humping his amp and the crowd shouting Pop’s name in astounded reverence. It was simply stunning, and how apt that the song on the p.a. afterwards was ‘Everything is Average Nowadays’.

After that, everything, anything was going to be an anti-climax, but the three songs I caught of Candy Payne laid back jazzy set were actually a relaxing comedown. The Motown tinged ‘One More Chance’ in particular has hit potential after its 3rd September release.

With a deliberate policy of avoiding the ubiquitous Killers, I search for a headliner and plump for Basement Jaxx. I’ll be honest, I don’t get it. I stick around for 5 tunes I think, but there is so little structure and so many excerpts of things like ‘One Nation Under a Groove’ and ‘It Takes Two’ that I don’t know where we are up to with the actual songs, ‘Oh My Gosh’ and ‘Jump N Shout’ among them. It’s purely a taste thing, and whilst I’m sure those that like this sort of thing were delighted, the lack of boundaries is not for me, so I head elsewhere – to Graham Coxon.

Manic indie punk, now this is more like it I think. It matters not that initially it sounds like the Buzzcocks in 1978, before in the middle it’s ‘Coffee and TV’ Blur. But eventually, ‘Freakin’ Out’ aside, it melds into one, and I realise that nothing will sound right tonight any more, The Stooges have blown it all away. So I head back to the tent, where the lack of after hours activity on site matters not when I fall into a deep lengthy sleep.

review by: Jonathan Haggart

photos by: Kirsty Umback

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