Benicassim: Strong winds, fires and blagging...

Myself and three friends had the idiotic plan of driving to Benicassim festival in Valencia. This would have been a 3000 mile round trip. Someone clever person was quick to mention that our plan was stupid and as such we got last minute flights.

We slept on the beach on the Sunday night because the campsite didn't open until the monday morning. After weeks of discussing which albums to burn and take with us we got sand in the cd player before we even got our tents pitched...bugger. Luckily i took the shit guitar which i'd bought there the year before, and a ukulele...lots of Beatles, Oasis etc...

The 3 days leading up to the music was a standard gin fest and first night (Thursday) was Oasis. The sound was fairly wank (not enough volume) and cut out during Champagne Supernova, the crowd sang perfectly in time with Oasis (who didnt even know what had happened because the monitors were still working) and when the sound came back we were both singing the chorus at the same time. Perfect! Earlier in the set Liam said about the sound - "You can send a man to the fucking moon but you can't sort this shit out!?" I laughed. Can't remember the rest of that night.

The next day i was promised a VIP pass for Paul Weller as i'm now doing some work with Ocean Colour Scene (Steve Cradock plays with Weller), this wasn't the case but in the very long process of finding out i wasn't on the guestlist me and my friend Ben managed to blag into the VIP area and then backstage just by saying "I'm on Weller's guestlist". Finally when I asked for a pass from a very nice young Spanish man he said "I take you to Mr. Weller's dressing room.", at which point me and Ben looked at each other in horror. There was no way in a million years that i was going to walk in to Paul Weller's dressing room and go "Errr excuse me Mr. Weller could I have a guestlist pass please?" No fucking way! So me and Ben swiftly walked back to the arena to get a cold pint and laugh at how stupid Spanish security is! (I then found a pair of raybans, great day so far). When it came to watching Weller there was a massive fire on the other side of the road and then half way through his set they went off and the whole night was cancelled because of strong winds (apparently KOL had already left after hearing the weather report)Needless to say there were a load of pissed off scallies...i just went to bed!

Saturday there was a very good DJ called Justus Kohnke totally wrecked off his head pretending to be Four Tet and then we got to watch the entire Aeroplane set which was a total highlight.

Sunday Lykke Li was absolutely wonderous as ever and did Millionaire by Lil Wayne which was mint and then we watched Laurent Garnier do both a live and a DJ set and strolled back to the campsite in the belting morning heat.

Top time had by all, the only blip was Ben lost his train ticket so had to get some other flights, different crowd to last couple of years due to the nature of the headliners but the company was mint. Won't be going again but i hold fond memories for the place. Mud and Snow next year please!!!