Harvest II

For some reason I wasn't able to upload posts from my phone yesterday - it created a blank post and nothing else. Still, that blank post provoked a comment which more than many of my other ones do! Cheese, bikes, beer, sharks - all pass unnoticed. Does that say something about my writing style? :)

Anyway - Harvest festival is over and it was officially a very good day. A hot one so I needed to do a fair amount of shade-lurking early on, but I braved the sunshine for Mercury Rev. They were very good, although sadly they didn't play anything from the earlier albums.

Obligatory fan-boy 'This is me & Mercury Rev!' photo (taken by an obliging gentleman behind me). Yes my cap is on backwards - the sun was behind me so I was protecting my neck.

After Mercury Rev and a couple of relaxing strawberry cider / tequila cocktails I wandered down to watch Death In Vegas

Hard edged dance music with overlaid with samples and distorted guitars. They were awesome and I danced pretty much the whole way through. Their final track morphed into a kind of goa-trance anthem and I found myself waving my hands in the air sizing fish like back in the rave days. Which probably provoked great amusement amongst the mainly non-dancing Brisbane crowds who had obviously lost their cardboard boxes. Their loss.

After Death In Vegas I shifted back to the Windmill stage for Mogwai, a bunch of Scottish post-rock ambient funsters with beautifully mellow tunes. So mellow in fact that at one point I dozed off. No pictures, but imagine some grizzled bearded Scots in flannel shirts looking at their guitars.

I grabbed a bite to eat and then somehow managed to get a stage-side position for the Flaming Lips -  not in the main body of the crowd, but peering down an access passage. The Flaming Lips are renowned for their live shows and they didn't disappoint. The lead singler initially appeared on stage in a large ball, which he then rolled around on top of the audience for a while

 Then they pushed out a whole stack of large balloons, which the crowd batted around for most of the gig

There were audience members jumping around on the edge of the stage in costume too, I'm not sure how they were selected but there seemed to be a large proportion of young women with shapely legs wearing short skirts

 As I say, my view was exceptional

 Guitars, balloons, cheerleaders, charismatic front men, great tunes - what else do you want from a gig?

Ah yes - lasers.

 and of course confetti fired from cannons

I think everybody enjoyed themselves :)

After the Flaming Lips pretty much the entire audience headed to the main Riverstage to watch Portishead. Which, from my position in the crowd (and after a few more tequilas), looked a lot like this.

I listened to a couple of tracks and whilst they were very good I wasn't getting much of the ambience from where I was, so I went for another wander and found a burlesque show with electric violins and flaming hoola-hoops

This seemed like a much better option so I stayed there for a while.

By then it was getting late (9.30!) and I was starting to crave my bed. I left about 10 minutes before close to beat the rush on the busses and was walking past the Riverstage just as Portishead finished - the cheers were huge so it sounded like a great show. But that's both the joy and the pain of festivals - there's always a few things you miss for every one that you see. That's a lesson we can learn in life. You may expect to spend quality time with sulky West country folk, but you might end up at the carnival instead.