What A Big Weekend

Given that I live in London and most bands that tour the UK will ultimately gig there, going to Radio One's Big Weekend  was a pretty special experience. For those that have never heard of The Big Weekend, the idea is that BBC Radio One take a weekend festival to different locations across the UK, usually to places which don't have large concert venues and are often left off the map for inter/national tours. There are only 20,000 tickets available for each day and usually over 75,000 applications are sent in. To say that I was lucky to get tickets for BOTH days is an understatement.

My friends from Fuse Fm and I got our tickets through the Radio Academy Masterclass. The Masterclass is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to get into radio as a career. Throughout the day of lectures you meet some influential people and get to pick their brains for any information that might help you break into radio. While radio is not really my passion in life it has been important to me in the last three years as it something that has allowed me to develop skills within an area that I would like to branch out into career wise - marketing. 

Anyway, it was an interesting weekend to say the least. Because of the Masterclass taking up 4 hours into festival time, we unfortunately missed the Arctic Monkeys set. However despite this we still saw the Foo Fighters headlining as well as Swedish House Mafia. Both sets were good for different reasons: Foo Fighters were good because they knew that the audience was mostly Foo Fighters illiterate and gave them the 'for dummies' set - a good mix of old and new tracks. A number people had hyped up Swedish House Mafia for me throughout the day and I was pleasantly surprised that I got quite into the set despite never really liking house music.

The odd thing was that the most fun I probably had that day, perhaps even over the weekend was during a Pete Tong set on the outdoor stage. Absolutely high on life and the atmosphere, it was just ridiculous.

Come Sunday and it was much more my scene on the In New Music We Trust Stage: Two Door Cinema Club, Noah and the Whale, and The Strokes. 

Two Door Cinema Club

Two Door Cinema Club are a band that I've known of for about a year and a bit, but only began to love quite recently. With only one album under their belt, and five singles (one released three times in 18 months), they - in my opinion - are only going to get better.

Some might argue that seeing the same band twice in two weeks is excessive. I say that it's awesome. Especially when it's my favourite band - Noah and the Whale. They played a good range of stuff across their three albums. While I can't say anything bad about these guys in regards to their music, it would be nice if they could play more stuff from First Days of Spring in their festival set.

Noah and The Whale

After side-stepping to the main stage to reclaim my youth while listening to My Chemical Romance for twenty minutes, we returned to watch a pretty decent set by The Strokes in the INMWT stage. I like the Strokes, I do, but they are a band that I often forget that I like and I usually have to be in a very 'Strokes' mood in order to sit down and listen to them. I did however really enjoy their set and since last weekend I have been making the effort to listen again. 

The Strokes

In all I think there were a couple of highlights, musically there was nothing extraordinary about Two Door Cinema Club, but with their set came the push I needed in order to get back into loving their album. Additionally the other highlight was just having one final Fuse send off before I graduate. Fuse has been a big part of my life for the last three years and I think it was good to end on a high.