Truck Festival 22/07/19-29/07/19
Aug. 4th, 2019 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
satyricaOn the Monday I finally managed to meet up with S for the first time in ages, and the first time since his mother died; we went to see Spiderman: Far From Home at the cinema locally, which was fun, then he came back for a cup of tea. Our self-appointed social secretary, L, had arranged for a post-work games session with my colleagues on Tuesday and, as it was a lovely day, we walked across to Battersea Park and chilled out there. Playing Cards Against Humanity with work colleagues didn't seem the wisest plan but we all seemed to survive and our new Service Development Manager, who had started that morning and came along, at least came back the next day. There was more work-related socialising the next night as I met up with a mix of current and former colleagues in Brixton for a drink, N came along for a bit too, although I didn't stay too late as I needed to do a pre-festival shop.
Thursday was the much-heralded HOTTEST DAY EVER!!! and I was heading up to Oxfordshire for Truck Festival, which I was checking out for the first time, although I seemed to escape the worst of it hiding at home, then my train was pretty air-conditioned; I queued for about an hour at Didcot to get on the shuttle bus, but it felt no worse than the same queue pre-Glastonbury, and once I was on site, although it was hot, there were some breezes and it never felt unbearable.
I knew Truck would be smaller but hadn't quite processed how small: they had about six stages but you could walk around the whole site in about 10 minutes. I was going with my gig-buddy Joey and his mate T, who turned up later on the Thursday, and it was nice to have people to camp with. We were all pretty relaxed about mixing meeting up for bands or wandering off to do our own things as the whim took us, so it worked really well. One side-effect of the small-scale was that it was really easy to see loads more bands than I anticipated, whereas I'd written off half-hour gaps between acts I wanted to see, when you just had to stroll for 1 minute to be at the next stage, you could fill your whole time alternating bands if you wanted to.
Apart from the smallest stage, the music was almost entirely indie-rock and one of the appeals had been that, beneath the big-name headliners I wasn't very interested in, loads of the bands that I've seen around were playing, although two of our most-anticipated acts had ended up cancelling. Fontaines DC we knew about before we got there, but Shame were only announced a couple of hours before they were due on: I'd at least seen them both at Glastonbury but it was pretty harsh on my compadres, for whom they were two out of the three bands they had most wanted to see.
The crowd were pretty young: not quite the Boomtown level of uniformity but encompassing more of a Reading-level of youth; the evening entertainments went on to about 2am in the site (it was an arena-style set up you couldn't take your own drinks into) which meant lots of people hung out back into their camps all through the night (and sometimes the day, especially the Sunday when people were perhaps running out of steam) which I wasn't as good at sleeping through as I had hoped. There was a posher (and presumably quieter) campsite you could pay extra for, which was also the only way you could get access to showers. The food wasn't a bad range, there were local charity groups as well as the usual suspects, and cheaper than I expected, although the portion sizes left you hungry to compensate.
All in all I had a really nice time: we were lucky with the weather, it rained overnight once but the days were warm with a pleasant mix of sun and clouds; it could have done with being just a little bit bigger or having something just a little bit more going on, I can't sleep past 8 so the hours between then and the music starting around 12 were fairly dead, but it was gloriously easy to get there and back from: I was in London by about 10am on Monday and had a nice long day of rest and recovery at home.
(Bands to follow!)
Thursday was the much-heralded HOTTEST DAY EVER!!! and I was heading up to Oxfordshire for Truck Festival, which I was checking out for the first time, although I seemed to escape the worst of it hiding at home, then my train was pretty air-conditioned; I queued for about an hour at Didcot to get on the shuttle bus, but it felt no worse than the same queue pre-Glastonbury, and once I was on site, although it was hot, there were some breezes and it never felt unbearable.
I knew Truck would be smaller but hadn't quite processed how small: they had about six stages but you could walk around the whole site in about 10 minutes. I was going with my gig-buddy Joey and his mate T, who turned up later on the Thursday, and it was nice to have people to camp with. We were all pretty relaxed about mixing meeting up for bands or wandering off to do our own things as the whim took us, so it worked really well. One side-effect of the small-scale was that it was really easy to see loads more bands than I anticipated, whereas I'd written off half-hour gaps between acts I wanted to see, when you just had to stroll for 1 minute to be at the next stage, you could fill your whole time alternating bands if you wanted to.
Apart from the smallest stage, the music was almost entirely indie-rock and one of the appeals had been that, beneath the big-name headliners I wasn't very interested in, loads of the bands that I've seen around were playing, although two of our most-anticipated acts had ended up cancelling. Fontaines DC we knew about before we got there, but Shame were only announced a couple of hours before they were due on: I'd at least seen them both at Glastonbury but it was pretty harsh on my compadres, for whom they were two out of the three bands they had most wanted to see.
The crowd were pretty young: not quite the Boomtown level of uniformity but encompassing more of a Reading-level of youth; the evening entertainments went on to about 2am in the site (it was an arena-style set up you couldn't take your own drinks into) which meant lots of people hung out back into their camps all through the night (and sometimes the day, especially the Sunday when people were perhaps running out of steam) which I wasn't as good at sleeping through as I had hoped. There was a posher (and presumably quieter) campsite you could pay extra for, which was also the only way you could get access to showers. The food wasn't a bad range, there were local charity groups as well as the usual suspects, and cheaper than I expected, although the portion sizes left you hungry to compensate.
All in all I had a really nice time: we were lucky with the weather, it rained overnight once but the days were warm with a pleasant mix of sun and clouds; it could have done with being just a little bit bigger or having something just a little bit more going on, I can't sleep past 8 so the hours between then and the music starting around 12 were fairly dead, but it was gloriously easy to get there and back from: I was in London by about 10am on Monday and had a nice long day of rest and recovery at home.
(Bands to follow!)
