katie writes stuff

I'm just going to quote the Levellers for now:

Everyday I look at you
Dressed up in your ties of blue
Saying there's not much that you can do
To help the kids on Hope Street

They don't seem to even care
That it was you that put them there
You seem to think they like it there
Hanging out on Hope Street.

I just really want to point out the awesomeness of this song today:

You're not as messed up as you think you are
You self-absorption makes you messier
Just settle down and you will feel a whole lot better
Deep down you're just like everybody else.
[...]
So why are you sat at home?
You're not designed to be alone
You just got used to saying "no"
So get up and get down and get outside
Cos it's a lovely sunny day
But you hide yourself away
You've only got yourself to blame
Get up and get down and get outside

And of course I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous, the last five verses of do the same thing, but today, I'm really just loving this one so much ♥

Yes, I can be a cynical little sod sometimes, but despite that, right now, I think life is pretty amazing, and I reckon we should be making the most of it. We only going to get one chance at it, after all.

We got back from the Seth Lakeman/Levellers gig about an hour ago. It was great, though they played a few songs I didn't recognise and only three that I was really hoping for. Seth Lakeman was also really good, and played both the songs I wanted :)

I'm not too sure on the set lists this time, as I couldn't always make out what was being said between songs. Still, if my guesses are accurate:

Seth opened with a song from his new album which I think he said was Hearts and Minds, and then Preacher's Ghost. After that, one of the ones I was hoping for, King and Country, followed by Solomon Brown, Changes and then the second of the two I was hoping for, Setting of the Sun. Finally, The Watchman, The Riflemen of War, Jar of Hearts, Ye Mariners All, Poor Man's Heaven and Kitty Jay. For his encore, he played Race to be King.

The Levellers didn't introduce any of their songs, so I'm somewhat relying on the lyrics I could make out and Google. I think they opened with No Change and I didn't recognise the next two after that, but from there we had:

1. Beautiful Day (on my list of songs they had to play!)
2. World's Gone Away
3. Too Real
4. (Another song I didn't catch.)
5. One Way (one of the ones on my wishlist)
6. Boatman (another of my favourites)
7. World Freak Show
8. Carry Me
9. Barrel of a Gun
10. The Cholera Well
11. (Encore) What You Know

The people in front of us looked round mid-way through One Way and grinned at me, presumably because I knew all the words and singing along loudly, and we started dancing together - it was awesome :)
I was really hoping that they would play some of my other favourites (Hope Street, Sell Out, Fifteen Years, Another Man's Cause and Belaruse, to name just a few...) as well, but it was a good set anyway.

Tomorrow is Cambridge and Regina Spektor, yay! <3

Photography by ses/LightCapturePaper; Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.

Wheeeee! I went to my first music festival this weekend - Latitude.

We arrived shortly after nine and pitched mattp's tent on the day camper's field, and then wandered off to the festival area itself. We explored the woods, saw the Lyric Hammersmith perform a brilliant version of Midsummer Night's Dream, and then after some wandering around and spotting things like interesting coloured sheep



and an artist painting in what looked like a toilet but he assured us wasn't



we went to lie in the sun by the Obelisk arena and half-heartedly listened to Corinne Bailey Rae's set, and then caught Frank Turner, whose music I have now gone from liking to loving, particularly Photosynthesis ("I won't sit down, I won't shut up, and most of all I will not grow up..." ♥) and then immediately afterwards, one of the highlights of the weekend, James.

I have wanted to see James live for years, and I was already tempted to go to Latitude before I found out that they would be performing as I knew that Belle & Sebastian were playing (another group I have longed to see for years) — but finding out that James were playing sealed the deal. Having slowly made our way to the front of the crowd during the soundcheck, we were only a few rows back by the time James came on stage and able to see and hear everything perfectly. It was amazing.

mattp took down the setlist, and I've located YouTube videos and put together a Spotify playlist:

1. Bubbles
2. Ring the Bells
3. Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)
4. Tomorrow
5. I Wanna Go Home
6. Out to Get You
7. Stutter
8. Sit Down
9. Sound
10. Sometimes
11. Laid

I loved hearing the new ones (to me), and they played all the ones I was really hoping for as well: Sit Down and Sometimes (who can't love those songs?!) and Ring the Bells.

We then headed off to find some food and sat around talking a while before going to watch Crystal Castles doing... I don't even know. The singer appeared to be smashed out of her face, though, so it was an amusing watch, even if the "music" was only just tolerable. Epic lulz when the audience stole her microphone and shoes when she tried crowd-surfing.

After that, Belle & Sebastian! Before they started playing, mattp pointed out a young kid standing in front of us and whispered "do you think he was even born when they formed?" - I said no, and we joked for a few minutes about it before talking about tracks we wanted to hear, at which point the little kid turned round and demonstrated a better working knowledge of the discography than Matt and I put together. Oops!
Anyway, the setlist was fab, and the performance great as ever:

1. I'm a Cuckoo
2. Step Into My Office Baby
3. The State I Am In
4. I'm Not Living In The Real World (from the forthcoming album)
5. If You're Feeling Sinister
6. Sukie in the Graveyard
7. Fox in the Snow
8. Jumping Jack Flash - this is the very performance I saw!
9. Funny Little Frog
10. Boy with the Arab Strap
11. If You Find Yourself Caught In Love
12. Judy and the Dream of Horses
13. Sleep the Clock Around
14. Encore: Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying
15. Encore: Legal Man

The set could only have been better if they'd played Piazza, New York Catcher, The Blues Are Still Blue or It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career.

Sit Down was still running through my head even after the B&S set as we were going to bed; if I absolutely had to choose between the two as the highlight of the day, I think it would be James.

We grabbed some more food after the set, then wandered off to the tent again. We both struggled to sleep, me from cold and discomfort¹ and mattp just from the hard ground, though we managed to get a few hours in the end, and I slept on the bus and train back to London in the morning. We came back to Greenwich to dump bags and play some games, and then headed off to kittystryker's housecooling party before she returns to the US.

---

1: lesson learnt for next year: a sleeping bag alone will not protect you from stoney ground. Especially not a thin one. I was so glad to make it back to bed again last night!

You purchased 5 tickets to:

The Levellers / Seth Lakeman
Old Royal Naval College, London,
Wed 21 Jul 2010, 18:00

\o/

I only took my phone, so the quality isn't great, and I got scared of losing it into the mosh pit after I took these few, but three is better than none.