You do something to me too

Published on Sun 15 Aug 2010

Again, this was written about 6 weeks ago - I've just not had time to fill in the photos. There's a lot of stuff to catch up on. I'll write one about the present day soon...

I'm in an Irish pub in Gothenburg waiting for either Chris and Janne to lose their hangovers and turn up, or some non-MLS football to start. My plane gets to Stansted at 10.50 tonight and they've helpfully changed the last train from about 11.30 to 11.02. Interesting. Maybe it'll be early? I just bought a moderately large bag of fudge from the market here, not realising either how filling or how expensive it was going to be. I ate two pieces of about 15 and could face no more. Oh well - it lasts ok right?

This weekend was the now traditional pilgrimage to Way Out West, a lovely little festival in a big park in the city. It's made all the better by me having an excuse to stay in a hotel with a sauna and hot tub. Ryanair have changed the flight times to make the early one even earlier and the late one even later. I chose the early one, which involved me getting up at 4am the morning after getting back from New York so I was pretty sleep deprived when I got here on Thursday, but after buying some swimming trunks for the sauna (I forgot them, then tried to get some at Stansted but, as with Heathrow, there's nowhere to buy anything you might possibly actually need when travelling. Unless you need obscure teas) I met up with Chris and Janne at an Irish bar and had a beer before going for a very nice meal of mincemeat, mash and rosé sauce. We went on a bit of a wild goose chase to get our wristbands, then worked our way, via a few bars, to the weekend's most important event - the minigolf.

Some of you may remember Chris's scandalous behaviour last year where he "nudged" my ball off of a plateau that I'd worked very hard to get onto, thereby spoiling my score and ruining me mentally. This year we decided that that kind of thing was not only allowed, but to be positively encouraged. Here's Janne showing how it's done.

Here's Janne showing how it's not done.

Sorry the videos are side on - I dunno how to rotate them. They're good with sound though - it's nice to hear the laughing.

It was all square between me and Chris going into the last, slightly ridiculous, hole but the onlooking crowd of disapproving Swedish people (who take it in turns to play the whole hole) after I smacked both of our balls into the water dampened our spirits a bit and we rushed the finish. I won by a stroke but it felt slightly hollow. You can probably tell from this picture.

We had a couple more beers and Janne's friend Karin who was also coming to the festival showed up. I stopped making sense at about half 9 due to tiredness so took a tram back to the hotel for a fairly spectacular night's sleep.

I woke up at a sensible time, which was surprising considering the ridiculousness of the last week or so, and went for breakfast and a go in the hotel sauna and hot tub where I got into a conversation about The Mountain Goats with a couple of Swedish guys who were also going to the festival. They knew more about them than me. Which isn't hard I guess, but I bet there aren't that many people who do.

I got to the site about 15 minutes later than I intended to due to misjudging the length of the queue outside, so went to see Jens Lekman rather than meeting up with the others. My other friend Chris (who wasn't at the festival) is a big fan, and has always told me I'd really like him, in particular because the band is made up entirely of hot Swedish women and he has hilarious inter song banter. As it was, the band was made up of not very hot Swedish women (not that I care about that), a gangly guy and a guy on keys that looked like the 65 year old server in a dirty pizza place, and he did the in-between talking in Swedish. Fair enough obviously, what with him being Swedish and in Sweden, but it meant I didn't find it all that funny. That said I really enjoyed the first few songs until everyone else showed up and started complaining about it. I made them stay until he played "Black Cab", which was awesome, and then allowed myself to be dragged off to the bar area.

Lovely as it is, there are two problems with Way Out West. The first is that you can only have beer in designated areas, from which you can only vaguely see the stages and can't really hear what is going on. It got to me more this year, especially as you couldn't see the second stage from the one by the second stage. Music is much better when you're a little tipsy. I'll go into the second problem in the next exciting installment.

All music is better when you're tipsy, but you'd have to be pretty wasted to enjoy Paul Weller. Chris got really angry - it was much more entertaining than anything coming from the stage - about half an hour after he finished it was like something flicked in his brain and he suddenly went on a big rant about how unfair it was that someone like that had managed to carve out a 30 year career in music just to being in a good band for about 10 minutes, and STILL didn't have the decency to play any of the songs that anyone could possibly like. I tend to agree. All those people that thought Stanley Road was acceptable need to take a long hard look at themselves on what they've inflicted on the rest of us.

Next up were Wu Tang Clan, who I'd been looking forward to on the grounds that I've loved every rap act that I've seen at Way Out West. In the event though we mostly stayed in the beer area not really getting into it, apart from a brief but enjoyable solo expedition to the middle of the crowd.

It was a common theme throughout the day - I think I was still over tired, and there was a weird malaise across the whole place. I'd not noticed before, but Chris pointed it out and it's definitely true, that the Swedish don't seem to have a concept of personal space. I think being stood far too close to and seemingly deliberately pushed into by drunk people for hours on end got to me a bit. Strange, because normally I'm like the porter in that scene in Scrubs that JD accidentally bumps and both of them let out a small sigh of pleasure at actually having some physical human contact.

We went across to the little stage to enjoy a bit of Local Natives, whose name I keep seeing all over the place but I'd not listened to at all, before heading to what I was hoping would be the highlight of the day, The National. I saw them at the same festival 2 years earlier, and was a bit disappointed, but I'd heard good things about their live shows recently. Unfortunately I didn't really enjoy them again (though, on the bright side, at least I'd decided not to go and see them at the Albert Hall). In a live setting it's way more obvious that 90% of their songs just consist of the same line repeated over and over (Sam from The Morning People pointed that out about Boxer, but they've taken it to new levels on the latest album) and it bothered me how much it looked like the guitar players would rather be sat in the corner cuddling their comfort blankets and sucking their thumbs. And I'm not even going to get into what the keyboard player looked like he'd rather be doing. The slightly more distorted guitar sounds they use live didn't really work either. I left about halfway through to go and sit on a hill, and enjoyed it much more from there. Not sure if it's because I couldn't see the band any more, because I was sitting down, or because they saved their better songs for then. Anyway, bit of a shame.

Iggy and the Stooges were as you would expect I guess - good dated fun, and great dated showmanship though Iggy Pop's naked sagging torso is not a pretty sight these days. It was entertaining when they got a pile of people up to dance on stage. For all the rock and roll mayhem it was meant to demonstrate, the roadies were pretty strict about keeping them in their place. I'm not sure what had happened to the guitar player's leg...

The last act I saw was LCD Soundsystem, who were comfortably the best thing of the day, despite coming on late because of all their gear getting stuck at the border. Energetic, thumping, interesting. The only problem was I was standing there thinking "this is awesome and all I can think about is how much I'd like to be asleep" so I left about half an hour in, went back to the hotel and slept like a baby.