V Festival 2008: A review of sorts.

Some of you may be surprised to find out that I spent a good chunk of the weekend at V Festival in Staffordshire. I know it's probably the last place you'd expect to find me, given its mainstream leanings, but there I was, with the missus and a couple of friends in tow, until the rain, mud and general apathy towards Sunday's line-up drew me back home yesterday afternoon.

Anyway, here's a random, Smash Hits-style list of good points and bad points of my V Festival 2008 experience...

V.V. GOOD: The old-skool Wimpy in the Sandbach services on the way down. Rather marvellously, my friend's quarter-pounder came on a wholemeal bap, even though she didn't ask for one. The fuck is that all about?!

V.V. BAD: Our complete lack of skills when it comes to putting up tents. I'm a festival veteran, but I'm clearly a bit rusty when it comes to erecting these fuckers.

V.V. GOOD: Carl from Clitheroe, who despite being clearly inebriated, was a massive help with setting up our camp.

V.V. BAD: £5 for a sausage muffin from the burger van in our campsite?! Robbing bastards!

V.V. GOOD: Remembering how good Squeeze are.

V.V. BAD: Remembering how rubbish Travis are.

V.V. GOOD: Girls A-fuckin'-loud being amazing, even if Sarah looks like Annie Lennox these days.

V.V. BAD: The twats chucking the hard plastic frisbee around during Girls Aloud that hit a female member of the crowd square in the face right near us. Not cool.

V.V. GOOD: Rum cocktails and classic jungle (as provided by the wicked Toddla T) in the Bacardi B-Live Bar. 'Incredible' even got an airing. Needless to say, it was pretty jumping.

V.V. BAD: XXXChange's poor mixing skills in the Bacardi B-Live Bar. I'm no Larry Levan either, so I shouldn't throw stones, but I thought he'd have been better than that.

V.V. GOOD: The 15 minutes or so that we caught of Robyn being typically awesome.

V.V. BAD: Robyn being on at a different time than was listed which meant we didn't catch all of her typically awesome set.

V.V. GOOD: Hot Chip. All-too-short at just over 30 minutes but great all the same. The songs from Made In The Dark are much meatier live than on record, I'm pleased to say.

V.V. BAD: The rain. Oh my god, the rain.

V.V. GOOD: The Verve coming on to 'Holy Are You' by The Electric Prunes and then tearing into a pretty darn electric 'This Is Music'.

V.V. BAD: The rest of what we saw of The Verve's set. After generating so much goodwill with the opener, they then proceeded to piss it up the wall with dull-as-ditchwater renderings of 'Space And Time' and 'Life's An Ocean'. They even managed to make 'History' dull and lifeless. Why have they even bothered?

V.V. GOOD: The common sense shown in ditching The Verve to return back to camp.

V.V. BAD: The tent collapsing fiasco that pretty much sealed our return back to civilisation the next day.

V.V. GOOD: The pretty awe-inspiring morning mist that I saw at 5am.

V.V. BAD: Being a bit of a mud-pussy.

V.V. GOOD: Getting home in time for the United-Newcastle game.

V.V. BAD: Drawing 1-1 with Newcastle.

So there you have it. The bad kind of outweighed the good in all, which was a massive downer, but hey, got to see Girls Aloud.

JMx