My Bloody Weekend
Sep 2nd, 2008 by Jim Kennedy
It doesn’t look like there was a Dublin Opinion presence at the Electric Picnic this year, so some secondhand news will have to suffice. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I wasn’t blown away by the line-up and decided to give it a skip this year. My only lingering doubt was that My Bloody Valentine would be absolutely fantastic and I would be sitting home having made the wrong decision. In my stead I sent a friend along with a ‘recommended listening’ list. Over the weekend he updated me with how he hated most of my choices, particularly Sigur Ros, and was lukewarm on the rest of them. This abuse I had to accept from a guy who only last week outside Bruxelles asked ‘who’s the guy with the bass guitar?’
So I sent this Irish-music virgin off to Stradbally with the admonishment that under no circumstances was he to miss My Bloody Valentine. He’d never heard of them; the Greatest Irish Album Of All Time clearly hadn’t been that well-known in Austin, Texas. I skipped the history lesson and sent him on his way.
Then I pretty much put Electric Picnic 2008 out of my mind until Sunday evening when I received this text:
“Fuck me!!! The last song was the most amazing thing I have ever experienced at a concert!! Well worth permanently damaging my eardrums.”
He also sent this photo:
Thanks Razz, thanks for proving me wrong about staying home this past weekend…
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Jim, would it help your mood if I told you all the bad stuff? The sound for Tindersticks was rubbish. Michael Franti played the same set as 2006. It wasn’t sunny enough. I went to see Underworld and missed Crystal Castles. The toilets were the usual.
Feeling better yet?
And I should own up to missing MBV. But I’ll play my 10 month old get-out-of-jail-free-card on that one, and casually mention that I saw them play the SFX back in the day…
Oh Damo, that’s a small comfort. I heard that Crystal Castles were rubbish at EP. The clips I saw of Underworld looked like they picked up were they left off years ago. No bad thing.
Your 10-month-old missed out by all accounts. He could have wailed along. I match your casual mention, by mentioning that I was there in the SFX too.
I don’t do outdoor festivals any more, but I would have been tempted to break that rule for MBV if I hadn’t got to London for one of their gigs in June. Which was predictably amazing. Oh and I saw them for the first time in 1989
Love MBV, love their studio albums - but saw them in McGonagles way back (time of ‘Loveless’) and they were a shambles live…
Would find it hard to believe they manage anything more coherent even indoors - never mind at a poxy outdoor venue..
Obviously, I was better off badly playing ballads in a rugby field in the South of France to marketstall holders than at bloody Stradbally… :->
Hairlosing Bowsie
I saw MBV both in SFX and McGonagles and agree it wasn’t great musically, but that I think was due to enormous volumes going through shitty PAs which couldn’t cope. The result was both gigs pretty much sounded like a 60 minute Holocaust.
The EP gig was a relevation - still an enormous, physical noise, but there was clarity in the PA so that vocals and riffs shone through. The vocals (integral to the MBV experience - they provide the sweetness of melody counterbalancing the noise) were perfectly mixed - hovering just above the maelstrom of chords swirling below.
The result? MBV were fucking stunning. Literally. One of the best gigs I’ve ever seen.
At McGonagles - the shitty PA had nothing to do with half the show being awkward silences when the sequencers wouldn’t work properly, or their software crashed..
good ole technology
I saw them at McGonacles as well. But don’t you have a rock story to tell there Sean? Weren’t you working at that gig as well?
Can’t remember if I was or not - I suspect Fiachra was (which was where we used to get the nixers as pispoor roadies from). I do remember ‘the parents’ (of Shields and O Ciosaig (sic)) looking distincltly out of place at the back of the hall - which might be another explanation for the gig not being all that hot….
If that’s what ye class a ‘rock story’ Conor :->