missing dust jacket

The Go! Team blew everybody away. With two drummers, a band who seem able to play any instrument you chuck at them, and irrepressible frontwoman Ninja, The Go! Team wipe all the competition off the festival map, and were probably the best band I saw all weekend. Their explosive show is accompanied by flawless VJ editing presenting the audience with a captivating series of images reflecting youth culture, culminating with modern Britain. The Go! Team have been a slow-burning band with me; I used to think they were little more than good, clean, nostalgic party music, and yet their mixing of samples, live vocals and performance can be so potent that it triggers a rare spine-shiver. Ladyflash’s ‘We came here to rock the microphone’ section, with its combination of 80s electronica, shimmering cymbals and low-down 70s sampler, flourishing into full-blown strings and breakbeats, never fails to make me all tingly and excited. A must-see live act.

Considering I spent most of Year 8 in a Quadrophenia t-shirt, I was expecting to enjoy The Who more than I did. Sadly a combination of ceaseless drizzle and an apathetic crowd, who knew fewer Who songs than they realised, made for a rather muted end to the festival. The sound was absurdly quiet, and the exhausted and soggy audience barely mustered up a yawn for My Generation. No Substitute, no Magic Bus, no 5:15, just extended guitar solos and the typical Who technique of pretending to have finished a song before launching into histrionic drum smashes and bloated guitar thrashing. Still, nothing will eradicate the image of my sister in a fluorescent pink raincoat and Wellingtons, manically playing air guitar to Baba O’Reilly. Priceless.

And that’s about all folks. Packing up the tent at 6am was every bit as fun as you’d imagine it to be. And once again, on the way back to the coach, I fell spectacularly into a giant puddle of mud, leaving the people on the tube in no doubt what I’d been up to that weekend. Still it was, in its own filthy, exhausting way, quite wonderful.