V festival 09 - Australia, Centennial Parklands, Sydney.
I didn't make my feelings secret of how bad the last one of these was when I went 2 years ago... the lineup - so mixed up it made the UK top 40 sound like a Pink Floyd album in comparison, beer queues the worst I've ever seen and, well, that's enough.
This year... no margin for error, the lineup looked good, and I smuggled my own bottle of Vodka in to negate queueing up for beers full stop. Excellent move - cos guess what - those queues were still there... we're talking nearly an hour to get a drink - way to keep the festival vibe up V.
Anyhoo, the festival... it couldn't have been a more perfect day. The sky had zero white fluffy stuff in it, the temparature while hot, wasn't a scorcher, and friends were able to sit on lush green centenial park grass watching Duffy open the proceedings up, despite her grumblings of being first on for the first time in oh - a year or two. She was fun and sounded great. Next up was Elbow, I've been a fan of theirs since Asleep in the Back and finally got to see them live, not lively, but I didn't expect that, and again, a great way to enter the festival atmosphere as my vodka started to cement a foundation for the evening to come.
I did have to line up for some chips and a drink, which took all of 2mins, then I was back to the stage to meet up with Lauren and Oren again before heading off across the festival site to see Razorlight for the 2nd time in a couple of months - result! It was a very business like performance this time around, no frills - just fast hits with no small talk or smiles. By this point I was bellowing out every word of every song embarrassingly for the people around me I'm sure...
Time now for some dinner whilst queing up for food... again, not a great time - about 30minutes for some chips, but the Kaisers were playing about 50metres away so not the worst way to wait for food. They had the crowd, and indeed some of the queue rocking. I ate the last of my potato snacks humming "oh my god I can't believe it, I've never been this far away from home". The vodka was nearly done. Last top up was gonna need to last.Next up, ano
ther trip across the venue to see Snow Patrol, The lead singer in very high spirits, so high, he kept forgetting lyrics to his songs, a little odd I must say, but everyone lapped them up and the stage show was great too...Now for the grand finale... The Killers... Luckily we were all quite tipsy by this point, I'm pretty sure these boys were fairly average in reality, but banging out the hits from their first couple of albums was enough to get them through, even if the newer stuff was about as well recieved as a 3am wake-up call following on from a very spicy curry. I can't believe I've been going to V festivals since 1997 already, how time flies...
