Hurricane Festival 08

Val, Tony and I spent a long weekend near Bremen in Germany, at Hurricane Festival. It was very cool. Three days of good weather, good music, about 70000 people, blah blah blah. These bands were there: Apoptygma Berzerk · Bakkushan · Bat For Lashes · Beatsteaks · Bell X1 · Biffy Clyro · Billy Talent · Black Rebel Motorcycle Club · Blackmail · British Sea Power · Calexico · Deichkind · Die Mannequin · Digitalism · Does It Offend You, Yeah? · Donots · Elbow · Enter Shikari · Flogging Molly · Foals · Foo Fighters · Jaguar Love · Jan Delay & Disko No 1 · Jason Mraz · Jennifer Rostock · Johnny Foreigner · Kaiser Chiefs · Kettcar · Krieger · Madsen · Maximo Park · Millencolin · Monster Magnet · Nada Surf · NoFX · Oceansize · Operator Please · Panic At The Disco · Panteón Rococó · Patrice · Paul Heaton · Radiohead · Razorlight · Rise Against · Rodrigo y Gabriela · Shantel & Bucovina Club Orkestar · Sigur Rós · Slut · Tegan and Sara · The (International) Noise Conspiracy · The Beautiful Girls · The Chemical Brothers · The Cribs · The Enemy · The Kooks · The Notwist · The Pigeon Detectives · The Subways · The Weakerthans · The Wombats · Tocotronic · Turbostaat · Xavier Rudd. As you can see there were a lot of highlights. The Chemical Bros light show was awesome, especially at the end when they played Block Rockin’ Beats. BRMC were a bit disapointing. Radiohead – who I’d been looking forward to seeing live for about 12 years – didn’t quite live up to expectation, I think in large part because the crowd wasn’t really into them, but wanted to be, and it made for a weird atmosphere, akin to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes story. They were still good though, Paranoid Android, Exit Music, Everything in its right place, and Idioteque the best songs. Rodrigo y Gabriela played ‘fucked up guitar music’ (their words), I hadn’t heard of The Beautiful Girls but they were good. By far the best for jumping around was Flogging Molly, and, well, I could go on but basically there was a lot of good music. By the end of the three days everyone was a bit unwell and smelly and the campsite was a proper mess (see some of the latter photos) but it was good times. The last photo is of the train station to go back to Bremen at 6am on Monday morning. The normal commuters on the train didn’t know what to make of it!