O2 Wireless Festival Hyde Park
by chris cunningham
OMG! GOGOL BORDELLO JUST RULED THE DAY! They were so awesome! I loved every minute they were on stage! All I could think of is there’s no way I would want to follow that band. And everyone paled in comparison. Dirty Pretty Things, meh. The Raconteurs, meh. Belle & Sebastian, meh. The Strokes, sorta meh. GOGOL BORDELLO… AWESOME! I’m so on board with them.
After the Bodies exhibit we headed straight over to Hyde Park for O2 and had to wait in this huge line to pick up the tickets at will call. Why? Because Ticketmaster sucks! ARGH! Even over here that company blows! Two little windows open for this massive line going down the street! Um, boneheads, you know how many tickets are will call, maybe you need to staff up at these shows?! I swear, when we have passenger flights to the moon I’ll still have to go through Ticketmaster, pay its “convenience” charge AND wait in a line at will call. So thanks to that little snafu we missed the first band “The Like” who’ve I’ve been wanting to see around L.A.
Anyway, enough of the ugliness. We went in and Gogol Bordello came right on and was great. Then we walked around the grounds a bit. This place was huge, lots of food places, drinks, carnival rides, little tent stores, etc. There were 3 or 4 other stages and we saw some guy get dragged out of one of them by security, hog tied him and took him off. That was nice and clean, later dude.
It clouded over and it started getting pretty cold. Mainly because of the wind… Ok mainly because I’m a wimp, but the wind really was kicking up. And not the friendly kinda wind. Teeth chattering wind. Jill got some hot chocolate I got some water and a grilled ham and cheese sandwich which was pretty good considering it came from a trailer.
After a parade of bands The Strokes came out and were really bad at first but were able to kick it into gear about an hour into the show. The place was going kinda ape shit and we both smell like beer as the amount that was being thrown now equalled the amount people were drinking. All good though, good times. We snuck through the crowd during the encore to catch the Tube before the thousands started filing in.
Great day of dead bodies and drunken bodies.
We’re headed out to Bath and Stonehenge tomorrow. Have to pay a little Spinal Tap tribute to the almighty stones of the druids. Then of course Bath is more important to me because Peter Gabriel has his Real World studios there than anything the Romans have left behind. Long day tomorrow.
This picture is useless without video clip.
(The report, however, is cool_)
Seems to be working? Are you sure it’s not that lame-o System 3.1 Mac you’ve been running for 15 years?