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Haldern Pop 2007 Friday¶

689 words on Haldern

This is about Friday of the Haldern Pop 2007 festival. Also read about what happened on Thursday and Saturday as well as the Sum Up. Or read about previous Haldern Pop festivals.

After breakfast, a stroll around, some cake in town as well as some shopping, we managed to miss seeing Brakes because (unsurprisingly) all of that ended up taking longer than expected and we joined the music for Gabriel Rios - not my type of music - and German band Polarkreis 18 who were all right but didn’t excite me too much either.

The View (Scotland)

We saw The View who excited some of our party. They were fun but still failed to excite me too much. The fact that their sound / mixing didn’t seem to be quite right and made things mostly noise probably didn’t help either. I kept thinking that they’d really love to be like the Libertines. But that they just don’t have the genes for that. I’ll just stop here before I get the snide remarks about polo shirts out. … And Same Jeans just sounds like a Cornershop rip-off, doesn’t it?

Jamie T (England)

I wasn’t too convinced my Jamie T when first hearing his music but thought there might be hope after listening to it again. I may have been overly optimistic there. At least I wasn’t at all thrilled to see him play live. Which was a good opportunity to have a crêpe with nutella (the guy who ordered his before I did had one with cheese and nutella which sounds just gross but he insisted it’s much better as the cheese doesn’t have discernible taste of its own and it amplifies the nutella taste).

And talking about take-away food, I have to add that we got quite used to the Bratwurst, Currywurst and chips made by one of the stalls. All of which were actually quite nice. The chips (as I had to remind myself I should say when talking to English people) were nice, thin and cripsy (which perhaps makes calling them ‘chips’ wrong as authentic English chips seem to be fat and soggy, but I digress…)

The Magic Numbers (England)

The Magic Numbers keep fascinating me. Their music is a nice, friendly and hippiesque thing, which I usually consider to be a bit too nice. The band look like a bunch of overweight hippies. Yet, once they’re on stage, they are doing a great show and give their music just that extra edge which may be missing on the CD. Very enjoyable indeed.

Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines (England)

Take a Spiritualized singer, throw in a string quartet, a piano and a three person gospel choir and you get Spiritualized Acoustic Mainlines. While I’m not the biggest Spiritualized fan, I thought this combination could just create that certain magic (say, like, The Divine Comedy with orchestra in 2004) which makes music you only consider average sound great in the circumstances. But this just didn’t happen and in a way all the excitement and anticipation The Magic Numbers created was killed by a somewhat boring, and I think not well-mixed, gig.

Electric Soft Parade (England)

Our next stop was the Spiegelzelt which once more had quite a good queue but persistent joining of that queue actually brought us into the tent just as Electric Soft Parade started playing a gig which was a rather nice surprise for me. I quite like that. Just as I liked all band members standing next to one another on stage, allowing you to see all of them without the view being blocked.

Under Byen (Denmark)

The evening ended with Under Byen who join many different sounds. From singing to guitar to a cello to a saw (the first time I saw that on stage and the sound is rather cool). Unfortunately they didn’t shine light on their singer and their songs invariably seemed to be a bit too long for my taste. That, or lack a little a bit of extra drive and direction. Which made them a bit tiring after two in the morning.