264: Rose Elinor Dougall, Southend Village Green

This event's been running a few years but it was the first time I managed to get down there - it's a free festival held in Chalkwell Park. It wasn't a full-blown music festival but Rose Elinor Dougall was playing there and after seeing and meeting her at Latitude I decided to wander down to see her again. The stage was pretty impressive - I like the way it was constructed like some piece of modern wooden furniture, with a surreal backdrop of the River Thames, about three miles wide at this point with the Isle of Grain in the background.



I saw Phill Jupitus wandering around and I bumped into Jim Bob (Carter USM) backstage, was hoping to see his set later in the day but was called away on work-related stuff.







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263: Electio Pop launch party Kingmaker MMX, Bull and Gate, Kentish Town, London

This was a launch party for the Electio Pop compilation CD put out by Helen Llewellyn Product 19, or as I like to call her, Splinx.



This was most notable as being Kingmaker's first live show for 15 years, although they were rebadged as Kingmaker MMX for the occasion. Splinx had been trying for some time to get the whole band together but the original lead singer, Loz Hardy, had gone missing and still can't be found. However the band put together for the evening contained most of the original members, I'm told - my face recognition is poor on a good day - and who cares anyway because they knocked off six Kingmaker classics perfectly, finishing off with a second rendition of Armchair Anarchist for an encore.



The whole evening was pretty high calibre too, particularly Bozwood - with Ed Borrie on vocals they could have been an up-to-date version of his old band S*M*A*S*H.

Don't want to single anyone out really as I enjoyed the other three bands too, who were:



Abdoujaparov



David Cronenberg's Wife



Paul Hawkins and the Awkward Silences

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262: Offset Festival, Hainault Forest, Hainault, Essex

Bands seen: Invasion, Bo Ningen, Egyptian Hip Hop, Male Bonding, Kap Bambino, Comanechi, Good Shoes, Bridport Dagger, Art Brut, Thomas Tantrum, Mystery Jets, Pulled Apart By Horses, Not Cool, Chrome Hoof, Connan Mockasin, Fiction, These New Puritans

Meh. This is another Offset Festival, some great bands, but full of terrible poseurs. It's like Hoxton in the countryside.

Who was great this year? Art Brut are always good. Thomas Tantrum were surprisingly great. This is the third time I've seen them and they did nothing for me previously but they were really good this year. I was drawn in by Megan Thomas's vocals which sounded surprisingly like Louise Wener to me. Kap Bambino makes up in stage performance what their music lacks. It seems like one of the best bands was one I just missed - I would have loved to have seen Oh! Gunquit and their hula-hooping singer on stage.

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