Festivals

I have been feeling a bit sadface lately because it looks like I will not be going to any music festivals this year, making it two years in a row without festival fun. I'm missing All Tomorrow's Parties because I will be moving while it is on, and I am missing Glastonbury partly because the tickets went on sale and sold out way earlier than normal and partly because all my friends are now too old for Glastonbury.

Because a year without a festival is like a day without a beer, I have been trying to come up with alternative festival plans. Some people have suggested Electric Picnic, but I have always been suspicious of camping festivals in Ireland, and it does at time seem like its main appeal is that it easy to get too and from. It has nevertheless had a reputation as Ireland's mini-Glastonbury, with a somewhat more eclectic range of acts than you get at the ungodly horror that is Oxegen. That all looks set to change. Irish Times journalist Brian Boyd reported today that the MCD borg has taken over Electric Picnic. He reckons this will be a good thing, as hitherto MCD associated acts have been blocked from paying it. As if to illustrate just how great the Electric Picnic is likely to be this year, Mr Boyd predicts that Fleetwood Mac are going to be this year's headliners. I suspect that I may be washing my hair that weekend.

One other festival that has recently appeared on my radar is Indietracks, which takes place in July in the British Midlands. As the name suggests, it features indie music – proper indie music, played by people in corduroy trousers, dufflecoats, and hairslides, not your faux indie shite. Initially I found the idea of Indietracks a bit off-putting, as I am not sure I could really face a whole weekend of indie music. Then I discovered some other key details about the festival, notably that it takes place in a museum for steam engines, that it will include discos on a moving steam train, that there are llamas near by that you can make friends with, and the whole thing runs on real ale. The more I think about this, the more I think that Indietracks sounds like total win, so I may find myself buying a ticket shortly.