Another great weekend with family and friends.  We spend most of our time between Obelisk, and second stage due to having young children.  Overpass, Florence Road, Nathan Evans, David Byrne and Alex James were the highlights for me.  Quite enjoyed a dance to Gok Wan on the Saturday too.   Certainly feeling the Latitude blues this week and looking forward to next year.   Also looking forward to all the predictions for next year in the 2027 chat.   Hope everyone had a great festival.    

How much is Burnham's success down to Manchester getting a shitton of investment for public transport infrastructure?   There's no doubt he did the work, but the money dumped into Manchester for him to achieve that was huge - the most of any infrastructure project outside London ever. Did that need a mayor, or just the money?

Sounds good tbh. 

Bristol was the only city in 2012 that voted for a mayor. We had a local independent who was popular, then Marvin Rees won and was so corrupt that Bristol voted to get rid of the position - having just had the WECA mayor position put in place as well.

They built a watering system and have been watering the island for the past few weeks to reduce dust, but given the current drought, there will still be dust. They will cover twice as much ground around the main stage with those plastic panels as they did before. They couldn't book Gogol Bordello because the singer was afraid the government would allow Russian security services to capture him if he entered the country. They didn't have much room to be selective about artists. They booked whoever they could get. This year's Sziget will be only about 50% of his original vision. He wanted a dedicated rock stage. They are preparing for a loss of 1.5 billion HUF this year. For some reason, student tickets are not selling in the numbers they had expected. He said that when he talks about the lineup being less important, he doesn't mean Sziget should have a weaker lineup than Primavera. Rather, it should have a similarly strong lineup combined with much more non-musical programming, so people from abroad come here to see the same artists but have a completely different overall experience. He didn't miss Sziget and originally wanted to spend no more than two days a week dealing with it, but now he's working on it full-time and has handed over control of the rest of his businesses.