Summer Sundae 2010

At the weekend we went to the Summer Sundae festival in Leicester. It was interesting going back there after some time away from it, having previously gone in 2003 and 2004. The festival has sprawled back into Victoria Park and gained a couple of stages -the comedy tent and the rising stage. It's also gotten the ability for stuff to go on a bit later than normal in the guise of a silent disco. Brilliant for things that have to put noise curfews in place I would've thought. In previous years we'd actually gone out to clubs in Leicester after the bands finished. In adding all the space they haven't upped the capacity massively so it is still quite small and not to squishy to get around.

Big Rich was volunteering down there so we met up with him fairly shortly after we' arrived, got the tent up and nipped back out to Tesco for a couple of bits. We had a couple of beers inside the festival, then popped to a pub on London road. A relatively early night didn't buy us much in the way of sleep because of being in the noisy camping field, but oddly the Thursday night was the only night it was actually that noisy. Certainly by the mornings on every morning other than Friday it was deathly quiet.

Unfortunately one of Richard's 8 hour shifts was Friday starting at 2, so he had to leave us relatively early. In the morning we'd popped out to Morrisons and brought back boxes of wine and a bottle of Morgan's spiced which we duly decanted into various bottles. We didn't take a massive amount of the wine out with us and managed to stay in the nice tipsy zone most of the evening only switching onto the rum really around the time Roots Manuva came on. Absolutely wicked set and the highlight of the Friday as far as I was concerned. After seeing an ace set by Teenage Fanclub I was ready to step it up a notch and managed to persuade Gemma that she'd be better off seeing Roots Manuva rather than Seasick Steve again. Other good things were the always brilliant Slow Club and the new to me, Spotlight Kid. The Orchard on the Musician stage I found utterly baffling - like three different bands playing on stage at once, and not in a good way. I could be charitable and blame it on on technical difficulties I guess. I wished I'd seen By The Rivers, who I caught the last song of and they sounded amazing.

It rained a lot on Saturday. We started off the day back in Leicester, buying more rum, breakfast and some snacks for later. Richard was not at work so we spent some time running between stages and drinking booze. This time the full boxes had come out and led to the latter part of the evening being a little more hazy. However, we did see some things throughout the day. My favourite being Caribou who were absolutely rattlingly good. Gemma ran away from Richard and I during The Go! Team as we were 'being annoyed'. We once again ended up into the silent disco, which ended rather abruptly, but that was probably a good thing.

I was nursing a pretty bad hangover on Sunday morning and it was the only morning we didn't get up early and get a decent breakfast down us. By the time a couple of Gemma's old nursing student mates met up with us I was almost out of my suffering (Pint number 3 normally does it). Because we were out chatting we didn't move as much from the field in front of the main stage, making a couple of quick diversions to see Pokey LeFarge and the South City Three and Los Campesinos! Pokey LeFarge was absolutely brilliant. The Local Natives were also very good on the main stage, and all the ladies went a bit giddy for Mumford and Sons. After we said goodbye to Gemma's student nurse mates we realised we'd run out of rum which resulting in bumping into a pair of guys who were partying off the hook. We kept bumping into them for the rest of the evening. Gemma was giving life advice to 15 year olds. I think the advice was -life sucks at 15, just ride it out, there's nothing you can do about it.