We caught up with a band who take us back a fair few years now, in fact straight back to Leeds 2006… it’s Panic At The Disco! See how the ‘!’ isn’t bolded too? Well, we caught up with the exclamation mark-less two-some at Leeds 2011 – to talk about what they’ve learnt since starting the band, tourbuses, £2 rain ponchos and lots more.

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

We caught up with the LA hotshots Foster The People, at Leeds festival – to see if they were suitable candidates for fostering our cuddly penguin. And to answer a few Very Serious Questions too. Here it is:

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

We caught up with the Wales’ finest in post-hardcore, The Blackout, at Leeds festival – to talk about touring with My Chemical Romance, hiring a fan as a roadie, working with Pledge Music and more.

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

We caught up with the brilliant, brilliant CocknBullKid at Latitude festival, to talk about her writing for popstars and her own album, Adulthood:

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

Words by Natalie Shaw

We went to Leeds Festival, and wrote about seven things of note. Here they are:

1) Tom Vek is the best

Tom Vek stole Leeds Festival from under the rest of the line-up’s noses. His performance was a million miles from what I’d entirely unjustifiably imagined – a shy man in the corner hiding behind a laptop. Instead, we were presented with a supremely confident performer who continually switched up his moves as bold and bright as a gawky, obnoxious Beyonce. The monotone of his vocal was the only one-dimensional element of his performance.

While the new songs aren’t as fresh, with years of amazing music having come between them and Vek’s first mini-bout of fame, they’re in perfect context here at Leeds – whose bill has essentially been nabbed from the mid-00s. He takes us back to another micro-generation where we were twattishly precious, still learning – so much so that attendance feels like an ambition fulfilled; the sighting of a rare bird.

A voice that sounds so obscure – almost flooded by oddball beats and slides on We Have Sound – feels so rich and triumphant here that it’s almost implausible to think of where he’s been during that six-year hiatus. A venture into DnB on ‘A.P.O.L.O.G.Y.’, from the new album Leisure Seizure, sounds absolutely glorious – and opener ‘CC (You Set The Fire In Me)’ leaves a packed-to-the-brim Radio 1/NME tent beaming.

2) Leeds festival is a lot of fun

While it mightn’t be the most forward-thinking of festivals, Leeds’ audience are here for the music. It’s easy to presume that this must surely be the case at a music festival, but in this day and age of easy transportation between the city and the field, festivals are often over-run with people more interested in photographing themselves with a chilled Gaymers. NB: I don’t mean to be prattish, and I’m sure Glastonbury is different.

As likely as it is that touring acts judge a festival on its catering, the younger and louder front rows will have had an impact – on both the bands, and the middling middle rows, who were essentially shoehorned into having the best time of their flipping lives.

3) The Strokes should really just stop

The Strokes emerged with ‘Is This It?’ over 10 years ago – and sitting in the comfort of Leeds’ nostalgic bill, the gap becomes even more compressed.

In 2011, The Strokes are a spectacle rather than spectacular. Watching an aloof, leather-clad Julian Casablancas still trying so hard to retail his insouciant sense of cool is painful. It gets worse still – such is the lack of gravitas and default towards cruise control that it might as well have been a karaoke night…

4) Henna dolphin tattoos are a fashion ‘must’

When attending music festivals such as Leeds, there are stalls all over the place which offer the shopping equivalent of a pub crawl – you can become a fun-times festival reveller for probably about 20 of your English pounds, in the space of about 10 minutes. Speed shopping! An attractive prospect.

And so, out of my purse falls a tenner, into the arms of a fine young gent who gives me one (of these) (below); I will give it a good life for its swift 15 days, I promise.

Addendum: the neon face-paint and flowers in my hair (out of shot) only made it to the end of the festival.

5) Drinking too much gin makes a person unwillingly go and see Beady Eye

On day two, after a night comprising about seven different spirits and a sizeable period of overheating, I found myself departing an excellent Digitalism set for ‘a wee’. Unfortunately for me, ‘a wee’ ends up comprising a 10-minute stumble around (and a wee – in a toilet – don’t worry) until I feel stable again, which just happens to be in the tent where Beady Eye are playing. Graces.

And so to Liam Gallagher’s new band, who sound – remarkably – just like anything he’s ever done before. He even somehow misplaces his one trick – the gold-medal for waffling nonsense. Surely he still needn’t eye up the microphone like it’s about to knock him out, after years of familiarisation?

The music itself is unambitious and stale, apart from a shuffling, anachronistic ‘Bring The Light’, but the ultimate badness of someone so unashamedly self-mocking doesn’t exactly instil the highest of highs. This is Liam Gallagher squeezing out the last drips of his origins, to what presumably is a similarly slow-dripping quotient of people who believe that ‘Rock & Roll’ is the only saviour for ‘broken Britain’.

6) There are some bands who just aren’t designed for their time-slots/stages…

While not wishing to harp on Beady Eye for too long, it would’ve seemed fairer for them to play a mid-afternoon set on the main stage instead of headlining one of the tents. And worse still was The Horrors’ positioning as Festival Republic tent headliners on the Saturday night of the festival – not exactly the most charismatic of bands, even after trying to recover from a mid-set power cut. While others may have become openly nervous or at least acknowledged the problem, instead they simply resumed ‘Still Life’ from where it left off – which was, loosely, pretty special, but a mood-killer to kill all mood-killers. And just another blow in a flat, lifeless set.

Elbow are another band who kill the buzz, on Friday night on the main stage before proper festival headliners (and rightfully so) Muse. Guy Garvey’s tones are bland rather than rich, and it’s not because I’m from London that I’m so cynical – they’re just not “lovely” or “beautiful” or “everyman”, they’re just reasonably good at wisecracking while their fans sway.

7) And there were some bands who were brilliant

Three Trapped Tigers’ brutal noise, Gold Panda’s deranged revamp of ‘You’ which whizzes it into infinite-time before collapse, Fixers’ bizarre mix that looks and sounds awkward and messy and deliriously falsetto – and Bombay Biycle Club’s new son, seemingly Jens Lekman inspired. These were all absolutely spectacular.

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

We caught up with Example at The Big Chill Festival backstage – he was nearly exactly midway through his run of festivals. Here’s what happened…

Here is a full review of The Big Chill , if you’re into that sort of thing.

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

We caught up with the excellent Ghostpoet at The Big Chill Festival in beautiful Eastnor Deer Park. It was momentous, and split into two momentous parts: the first comprised a Serious Interview, and the second was a quiz on Coventry (where Ghostpoet recorded his debut album). See how much he knew (and if he won the prize – yes there was a prize!) just here. Look, here:

Here is a full review of The Big Chill , if you’re into that sort of thing.

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

2011 has seen innumerable festivals fall off the edge of solvency, which has begged an overarching question: what makes a festival special? In a not-too-hippy way, it’s clearly more than the line-up – by virtue of it changing each year, and each festival’s audience not only fluctuating in number but differing in terms of attendees. Music changes with each year too, meaning – necessarily – that the popular mass’s tastes alter in a similar-looking chart.

So we land at The Big Chill Festival, set in amidst rolling hills and spotlit trees in Eastnor Castle Deer Park. Kanye West has been booked as the headliner, playing a rare UK set – sandwiched in between the incongruous-at-first-glance Chemical Brothers and Rodrigo y Gabriela. Doubters ought to take heed for just how representative this diversity is of the artists currently coming through the UK, and how they’ve shaped and changed their sound through the years. We’re no longer in that mid-’00s lull where fixating on one micro-genre is the only way to preserve our realness as music fans.

The Big Chill Festival is the most diverse of the UK’s biggest bunch. There’s never a dull moment, and there’s action from midday until 4am on the main site. Be it a security guard leading an impromptu conga line through a makeshift limbo at a Dan Beaumont DJ set at 1:30pm or the general sense of variation throughout – a festival of non-Glastonbury size booking Mulatu Astatke, Cubic Zirconia and Electrelane on the same bill ought to make no apologies.

Without exception, the weighting against guitars makes for a dramatic change in terms of performance; there’s little in the way of the nonchalant posturing seen elsewhere this summer, except for Warpaint’s very own brand. While there’s more focus than the muddiness on The Fool, the fact that bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg spends at least half of their set sat on the floor distracts from the weight of their songs. ‘Composure’ doesn’t drag like it does on record, and Emily Kokal’s harsh, porous vocal is a far greater thing. Let’s just hope their future sees more in the way of ‘Undertow’ and less in the way of the 10-minute noise jam.

The Bullitts – featuring Jay Electronica, Lucy Liu, and Idris Elba – prove a bewildering surprise. It’s a multimedia hip-hop project based on a murderous, cinematic short story series, high on concept but wrongly low on overstatement for The Big Chill’s crowd of newcomers.  I’m lost in Lucy Liu’s awkwardness, until I realise that she’s not playing herself but the role of a character within the story – which is the opposite to what can be said for Janelle Monae, whose songs stand alone. ‘Tightrope’ is blindingly bright aside from the futuristic expressionism lying just below.

Jehst’s old-school hip-hop is another of the festival’s wonderful discoveries, the MC/producer turning his weed-smoking paranoia into vivid portrayals of distorted lands – a far fling from the plastic, suspended disbelief and stage shows on the main stage. Seeing Jamie Woon’s moody, slow-motion debut Mirrorwriting live is a triumph too, unveiling the disguise – the mystery and cloudiness on the album often hide just how elastic he is as a writer and singer. ‘Street’ no longer feels chilly and mysterious but resolutely upright, and  ‘Night Air’ is irresistibly slinky, morphing into George Benson’s ‘Give Me The Night’ – its perfect foil.

Kanye West’s 26-song set is astonishing and polarising in equal measure, as per the plan. It’s a two-hour long set split awkwardly into three parts, and peppered with apology and endless self-eulogising – but when it hits its stride the songs are unmatchable. 20 ballet dancers fawn over West, characterised here – as ever – like the fallen lunatic; he’s designed to look as lonely and manic as he is shrewd especially on ‘Runaway’, and the staging is just perfect. ‘Touch The Sky’, ‘Stronger’, ‘All Falls Down’ and ‘Gold Digger’, while less obviously vulnerable, appear through gritted teeth; it’s songs like ‘Swagga Like Us’ that sound the furthest removed from the spectacle, big and brash and singular.

To the critics of West’s showboating, just examine how ‘Good Life’ is placed straight its most distant relative, the minimal and introspective ‘Love Lockdown’. The set sprawls in a way we’re not used to from a star of such stature and relative youth, but isn’t that what pop music’s all about? Give us Kanye West’s hyperreality over a stage-show cargoed endlessly around the world any day.

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

We caught up with one of our favourite popstars of recent times, one Miss Alexis Jordan. It was momentous, it happened at Wireless Festival 2011, it involves us doing a high amount of squealing at her and you can watch it here:

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views, a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.

We caught up with Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, on the remaster of Screamadelica – and Kevin Shields’ role in the process.

Muso’s Guide is working with Vodafone VIP across festival season, be it live-blogging, video-interviewing artists, Tweeting (we’re at @musosguide) or reviewing weekends in handy snapshot form.

Vodafone VIP is part of the VIP programme for customers, and Muso’s Guide is taking on official music blogger status at some of the summer’s hottest festivals. There are currently competitions running to win tickets to Latitude, T in the Park and Wireless, with more to come over the summer.

The Vodafone VIP experience extends further too – there’s a Vodafone VIP area across fashion, festivals and Formula 1 over the summer, a viewing platform giving customers shelter and brilliant views,  a recharging truck capable of charging 2,000 phones at once and selected apps allowing festival-goers to see what’s on and where, locate their tent via GPS and  plan schedules for their weekends.

Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/vip to find out more.