2 Many DJs!

 My last festival day of the year!

My first choice All Points East show this year would have been Raye on Saturday and my second would have been The Maccabees on Sunday but through a process of extremely bad planning, I was on holiday for both of them. This involved getting up at ridiculous o'clock on Saturday morning but that didn't stop me going to the Friday session headlined by Barry Can't Swim - who is someone I am vaguely aware of and don't mind, but the real draw for me was Orbital who I've seen twice at Glastonbury and absolutely love.

And, as with my previous All Points East visit, this was a game of two halves - although, spoiler alert, neither half featured a five hour set...

What the first half did feature though is a LOT of DJ sets. My general view of DJ sets is somewhat coloured by my impressive lack of knowledge of the skills involved - it's very much a case of "I like what I like" but I'm generally unable to explain to you what it is I like about one set whilst another one leaves me cold. However, immediately contradicting myself and making an effort to do so, I must say I enjoyed the following sets 

Chloe Caillet
For me, she got the balance right between repetitive beats and quirky variety. She also benefited from our first decent sized crowd (easily ten times the size of anything previously seen), being in the big tent (open air sets don't work so well for me) and some amusing 80s style rave visuals.

Interplanetary Criminal
Also in the big tent (which he pretty much filled out), he used a combination of better-known tracks without overusing them - although I only realised afterwards that one of them was Eliza Rose's "B.O.T.A." which he wrote.

Prospa
They had a more trancey/deep house vibe which I like and it worked well with the weather (it was considerably hotter than I was expecting it to be).

SILK
I can't tell you anything about him, but he was on one of the smaller stages and stood out for using Asian music and plenty other strange (to my ears) noises.

So they were the top table DJs - who was left fighting for scraps of my attention? Quite a few actually Shee, Pretty Girl, Atrip, Leon Vynehall, True Vision, The Blessed Madonna, Sam Alfred, DJ Heartstring, Shy Girl and Marlon Hoffstadt were all perfectly fine, but rarely did anything to particularly engage me. I am going to give Zach Why? a shout-out though - it's always hard opening on the main stage and when I rocked up he was playing to a crowd of five people, but he wasn't letting that get him down.

It's not entirely accurate to say the first half was all DJ sets, but the first two thirds was very strongly biased in that direction and it just didn't quite work for me. I'm certainly not a dance music expert, but even I recognise there are multiple genres included within "dance music" and I felt there just wasn't enough variety on display. It did mean though that I was very well disposed to anything that ventured off the dance reservation - they might have been few and far between, but they were a surprisingly mixed bunch.

Stefan Mahendra 

Stefan served up some smooth cabaret jazz - he sounded a bit like Mick Hucknall. Which was oddly jarring within the context of the afternoon, but he made a oddly jarring pleasant change.

Punchbag

Whereas Punchbag provided some fine 80s punk - complete with neon arm warmers. They were having the absolute time of their lives and providing fine festival fare - what's not to love?

Wizthemc 

He was some rappy dude who I generally wouldn't spend more than five minutes on, but he did a decent enough job and threw in a cover of "Teenage Dirtbag". He drew a surprisingly large crowd to one of the minor stages - so I looked him up and Wikipedia tells me he's actually quite a big thing. He also signed off with a very heartfelt "make some noise for yourselves", which really brought home the lack of interaction with the crowd from the majority of acts up to this point.

But boy, was that about to change...

Confidence Man

What's this? An actual band on a main stage?!? It turned out to be a winning choice because the crowds flocked to see them and they were absolutely great. The provided over-the-top theatrical yet hugely danceable pop which suited the vibe (and the weather) nicely. Janet Planet, the lead singer, has a great voice and wore an amusing Madonna cone bra with LED screens on them - who says technology hasn’t advanced?!? It was easily the biggest crowd on an open air stage up to this point and everyone was just joyous - if you like Scissor Sisters then I reckon you’ll love CM and if they don't end up supporting Kylie at a festival somewhere, I'll be amazed. 

Orbital

All of which put me in the proper mood to enjoy Orbital so I scurried over to the other main stage to find remarkably few people there, so I ended up in the second row right in front of the band - things did fill up somewhat, but it seemed a relatively small and older crowd. I never know what any of their songs are called (apart from "Belfast") but they played quite a few I recognised with an excellent set of visuals to match and they were joined by Janet Planet and Sugar Bones from Confidence Man for the finale, which worked well even if the vocals were completely indecipherable.

Barry Can't Swim

And so to the headliner - who had a massive crowd, not least because there was no-one else playing at the same time. And he did a decent job - for as much as I knew about him, he could have quite easily just come on and done a one-man DJ set but he had a live band and a string quartet and they made a very fine sound indeed. It wasn't at all what I was expecting and was very refreshing after the majority of the fare throughout the day and the crowd were very much up for it. Unfortunately I had to leave relatively early because of my early morning flight but what I heard, I liked very much. I liked what I saw as well, but for some reason I took absolutely no photos of his set. 

All in all, it was a fun day, which improved as it went on with Confidence Man, Orbital and Barry Can't Swim easily being the highlights for me - along with a photo that I took to demonstrate how sunny and dusty it was (it was REALLY dusty, but apparently only got worse as the weekend progressed). And no, I've no idea who he was, but he was very pleased with the results and took a copy of the photo.