ComEnts

Thanks for the Comment Mr or Miss Anonymous, I told you it'd help.

I've been moving house and completely without internet access since last Tuesday afternoon. I've just generally been very busy with boring menial labour and tedious legal and administrative tasks.

It's less than a month until the hijacked Reading Fringe Festival gets under way. I haven't seen much in the way of publicity yet, I am really hoping it's going to be a success and not embarass those of us who did it the last two years too much.

In amongst all the moving I did have one meeting to move forward my 'new project'. It's very interesting, all I can say so far is that it's to be a charitable venture and a bit of a departure from the usual 'gig' type format. Reading's very well served with gigs and venues at the moment. It really doesn't need another identikit gig night. Hopefully more details on that soon, if we can ever come up with a decent name.

As requested, more on mobile phones. The Dutch friend I was staying with in Rotterdam has the new Sony Ericsson Walkman phone the W880i. I looked at the W850i when I got my current phone and decided that if it was a choice between more music and a better camera, I'd rather have the camera. I have never really been into listening to music on the go. I did once have a CD Walkman, but I lost it and never replaced it. It just didn't seem worth it for the amount I used it. Anyway, the W880i is incredibly thin, looks great, has a reasonable 2M pixel camera and comes with a gig M2 memory card. Best of all the W880i doesn't have the silly joystick that my K800i has which apparently breaks really easily and tends to play up after 6 months. Had mine about 6 months now so fingers crossed it'll last longer than that!

Labels: Mobile Phones

So the Metropolis festival was really good. Pirates were great. On the Saturday we totally randomly met the Pirates out drinking in Rotterdam after one of my dutch friends said "Hey, I think I saw your brother at a bar..." and it turns out the Pirates had randomly chosen to drink in a bar under the apartment block where we were staying.

That evening we went to "De Parade" which is like a small festival in the center of the city. They close off an area of the town center and put up loads of tents for various acts to perform. We drank a lot of sangria and little beers without actually going to see any acts.



Sunday started off cold, wet and rainy but by the time we got to the festival it was really sunny. Totally unprepared for this I got sunburnt, or as my dutch friends called it "an English tan". The festival was really big, much bigger than I expected. The crowd was in the thousands not hundreds. I guess somewhere around 20,000?



There were 5 stages set up in 3 locations. The Pirates were on the Thinkers Stage which was twinned with the workers stage, so they'd change over and soundcheck one stage whilst the other was playing. Apparently backstage it was all really well run and everyone was really nice. The organisers put on cars for all the bands and provided all the amps the pirates had requested for use etc. The sound guys were very professional, all the bands sounded good. The principle of the festival was "the best bands you've never heard" so there were no big names, but plenty of interesting stuff. The only ones I'd heard of were Datarock, who I liked. I also really enjoyed The 1990s, who were also from the uk.


The Aftershow party was at Rotown, back in Rotterdam where we managed to catch up with the pirates again. All in all a really nice weekend and I can definitely recommend playing at Metropolis, or visiting it if you get the chance. We were staying with a friend, and the festival is free, so it was actually cheaper to go to Metropolis than to Reading festival for a day. Crazy.