This day was also going to be absolute highlight of the festival. With too many rather than too few great bands playing it was impossible to actually see all of them. But an effort could be made and it was absolutely worth it with:

• The Sounds
• Skin
• The Kooks
• The Raconteurs
• Nada Surf (sort of)
• Hard-Fi
• Mando Diao
• Adam Green
• The Hives
• Element Of Crime
• The Strokes
• Sigur Rós

Holy shit! This still reads mouth-wateringly good when writing it down now…

The Sounds (12:20, Sweden)

We meant to start the day by seeing Skin on the main stage and we were a bit early for that. So we heard The Sounds play on the secondary stage and introduce us for the first bit of Swedish goodness of the day which made us stay there for a while. Enjoyable music from bands you’ve never heard of – just what you hope to find in those lunch-time festival gigs.

Skin (12:50, UK)

Next we headed on to see Skin play the main stage. After I had seen her in an interview on telly lately, I wasn’t too impressed and thought she was rather lame. But Jean wanted to go anyway. And it was worth it as she was much more powerful stage and there were many bits of Skunk Anansie goodness all over it.

The Kooks (14:00, UK)

I recently listened to The Kooks and ended up liking their album, particularly for its clear sound acoustic bits. Their live performance was disappointing in comparison as they gave up the clarity in many places for what seemed like a feeble attempt of being more noisy. Not what I was looking for.

The Raconteurs (16:30, USA)

The Raconteurs are another new band which deserves a little attention for being with Jack White and Brendan Benson alone. Which deserves a lot of playing for being kick-ass great. And which deserves being looked at for its nicely drawn letters.

And as luck has it, all of those points held for the gig they played at the festival. Their music was fantastic. Jack White – despite having a facial colour and hairstyle that makes him look like a cross-over between Michael Jackson and Robert Smith – is our guitar god. And they had that nicely drawn R put up at the back of the stage. Absolutely fantastic. More of this is needed!

Nada Surf (17:30, USA) [sort-of]

I’m not the biggest Nada Surf fan. But some of their songs are nice and I didn’t see them play last year at Haldern so this was a good opportunity to catch up. Except that it didn’t really happen as their slot happened to be right in the Germany vs. Sweden match of some football tournament. Apparently loads of people at the festival wanted to see that match and the police said that all of them hanging out at the dedicated football screen was too dangerous or so.

So the organisers decided to show the game on the screens next to the secondary stage… where Nada Surf were supposed to play. Football fans cheered. And if there were any Nada Surf fans, they weren’t too vocal. The organisers said that Nada Surf were great to see the need of the game being screened and gave up their slot for that… while the band’s singer said something along the lines of it being strange that at first they were cancelled and then they were asked to play four songs in the middle of the game. Trying to make the best of it I suppose…

While I didn’t watch the game, I still was in favour of Sweden all the time. After all they sent many of their great musicians to play for us… but it didn’t help.

Hard-Fi (18:00, UK)

While the football went on, Hard-Fi played. While I found their album quite addictive after seeing them last summer, I don’t think they’re all that great. Particularly seeing them play the main stage after The Raconteurs was a bit of a shame. As the same space that had seemed vivid and brilliant and before, suddenly looked quite empty and a bit lame – particularly when seen from a distance. At least they played their cover version of Seven Nation Army.

Mando Diao (19:30, Sweden)

With this gig Mando Diao reclaimed the ‘most seen band’ status with me because it has been the fourth time I saw them play live. I still like their music, but now I’ve seen them grow from being unknown to a headline act at a large festival. Which means that seeing them play just isn’t as much fun anymore (or that I’m old…). Still nice to see them again, just from a certain distance this time.

Adam Green (20:45, USA)

Mando Diao’s status in my list of most seen bands didn’t last long. Counting a Moldy Peaches gig back in 2002 and two others, the wonderful Adam Green now scores a count of four again. And his gig was absolutely fantastic. While he sometimes seemed a bit sleepy or neglecting his excellent old songs in former gigs, none of that happened this time.

In particular there was a lot of audience participation. I’m not entirely sure I got this right, but it sounded like the singer of The Scorpions (who are from near by) was present and Adam forced him to sing a bit of Wind of Change with him to start off the gig. Later on he had an attention-seeking guy from the audience up on stage with him and they sung and danced a song together for us.

After some more great songs, he finished with Dance With Me, having two girls wearing paper bunny ears dance with him on stage. Great entertainment, just as in his early days. The best of his solo gigs I have seen.

The Hives (21:15, Sweden)

While this would have been a good opportunity for a break, we quickly moved back to the main stage where The Hives had already started playing. We didn’t have the best viewing angle, but could see them all wear suits and pose a little too much as usual – including a really cool moment where they all just froze on stage in mid-song. I can pretty much stick with what I wrote two years ago: great music, a lot of power, too much posing. Particularly their singer looks like he’d love to be Mick Jagger. But he’s neither cool nor ugly enough for that. Talking a bit less might be a good first step, though.

Element Of Crime (22:30, Germany)

It’s only been a few weeks since I saw Element of Crime play live, but it was great to have a (short) look at them again. Their music was a soothing break – Wo die Neurosen wuchern, möcht ich Landschaftsgärtner sein… – and a short one because, knowing that I’ll see them again at Haldern in August, I gave up the end of their gig (which included an ultra-long version of Across the Universe) for the next one…

The Strokes (23:00, USA)

I just love The Strokes their newer albums may not be able to match the fantastic Is This It and they may just be a little too cool for their own good when playing live, but in total it’s still enough for some serious ass-kicking.

Their set-list was great, including my favourite song The Modern Age and many others which are frequently neglected. The lights they had on stage were strips of lights which could change colour and all and are meant to go with their current album cover I suppose. I thought their lights were a bit too bright – shining too much into audience – though, which made it a bit hard to actually see the band at numerous times. And while I’m complaining, let me mention that my camera claimed its battery was empty after I took a single, really bad photo of the band. The camera took another 50 photos with the same battery an hour later, though. Argh!

Sigur Rós (0:30, Iceland)

And sometimes, just sometimes, when you’ve got everything you would have asked for, someone will come and offer yet another thing you really like. And at this festival Sigur Rós were that thing. Finally I got an opportunity to see them. And while starting to be exhausted after a day full of gigs this was worth every minute of standing in the night.

Not only did they play their beautiful music with eight people on stage, including an electric bass, electric guitar, drums, a strings and keyboards, with all those high pitched sounds actually being sung by a guy – the music was complemented by a simple yet stunning video projection on the back of the stage which was the only ‘decoration’ they used.

Great Stuff! And I was completely knackered after that day of extreme musical goodness.

Next up: Hurricane Sunday

That song sounded quite familiar to many people in Germany. But it was hard to figure out why. The reason is that the song in many parts of its melody and structure sounds very much like the song Beinhart by the German band Torfrock. It was the title song for the German cartoon Werner – Beinhart, which came from a rather popular German cartoon. Back in the days everybody considered it pretty cool, which may explain why the single is quite popular here.

In fact, I ended up buying two tickets, so I had to sell one of those, which I advertised on the net. Luckily that worked quite well and I met the buyer in the afternoon, saving me the hassle of having to try and find a buyer in front of the venue itself. The gig I visited took place on Saturday in the Postbahnhof – which as the name suggest – used to be a railway station for the postal service. A cool old and large industrial building, which made quite a good venue for the occasion. I arrived there with Jean and Thomas a few minutes late and the gig had in fact already started. Seeing that nothing ever starts on time in music, that was quite surprising. But we only missed one or two songs that way. And perhaps the chance to stand further towards the front.

Which we wouldn’t have wanted to anyway, I suppose as there were lots of ‘little’ kids standing there. Probably as a result of Adam’s sudden popularity. The concert itself was quite nice. Adam not only seems to dress more orderly these days, his gig more orderly as well. Compared to his gig last summer, many of his moves looked less clumsy (and thus perhaps less personal) now and he performed rather well. In particular he managed to play his cover version of What a Waster correctly, which he couldn’t in summer. I also feel compelled to mention once more that he is actually good at singing.

My main criticism of the event – and my friends fully shared that – was that it was short. Just a little bit over an hour, including an encore. It’s not like Adam hasn’t made enough songs to do that – his records sum up to almost two hours, so this was disappointing. Particularly as he has done so many nice songs which we would’ve enjoyed hearing! Plus perhaps a cover of a song or three and some Moldy Peaches stuff…

Oh well, but the gig was just over. Afterwards we went to a club to end the evening in style. Living in a small town where even the large places you can go to are rather small, I found it cool to be in a ‘medium’ sized club there which was larger than anything we still have in Göttingen. On the not-so-cool side, they seemed to have a metal themed night that day which made many of the things we heard at most modestly enjoyable.

So I went to look at eBay where some tickets were for sale. And while I find it quite annoying that people buy a lot of tickets just to sell them on the web, there’s probably not a lot that can be done about it. Anyway, I managed to get a pair of tickets there, at just a Euro or so above the normal price, so that wasn’t a problem.

But they didn’t arrive… but not because the seller is a crook, rather because eBay had sent him my old address. I mean I changed my address on their site almost a year ago after we moved and people have sent stuff to my new address since but somehow eBay had stored my old address (of course I don’t remember what exactly I clicked back then, particularly with a site that’s as hard to navigate as eBay is). But they listed the old one and the new one, labeling the new one as ‘preferred shipping address’.

Yet they sent the old address to the seller. However, a short discussion with the seller resulted in us agreeing that the effort to make a company that doesn’t even list an e-mail address and is known to be unresponsive pay the extra shipping costs won’t be worth the little money we’d get. So we split up the extra costs 50-50 and that’s that. (Well, I hope it is and the tickets will arrive soon).

But I’m seriously annoyed by this. There are no proper communication channels to eBay, they’re not particularly good at what they’re doing, they’re known to be crooks, i.e. to not give a shit whether things are working well for their customers and they’re sort-of having a monopoly on what they do (because everybody goes where they have the most choice and potential buyers respectively). So, while I like the whole idea of having a huge market for second hand stuff, I’m not sure it’s worth supporting a system that works like that – a quasi-monopoly that doesn’t offer good service.

Oh, and it looks like I’m only going to need one of the tickets, so I’m having a spare ticket now. So if you’re interested to go to the gig on February 12th in Berlin, send a message.

[Please note that I have been receiving many comments on this page which come from people running their own eBay alternative sites and wanting to advertise them. As I don’t want to check how creepy those sites are, I stopped publishing such comments. So if you made bad experiences with eBay as a customer and want to share your experience, feel free to comment. If you want to advertise some other site, don’t waste your and my time.]

I’ve been an Adam Green fan for a while and a part of this site is dedicated to his music. This goes back quite a while. Probably to the autumn of 2001 when I first heard some Moldy Peaches songs and Dan copied the CD for me before I left England. I wasn’t too impressed at first but the music started growing on me and I really liked it a few months later, even going to a brilliant gig of The Moldy Peaches in the end.

Unfortunately there wasn’t too much more happening after that as far as The Moldy Peaches are concerned. Just their County Fair/ Rainbows single in the summer of 2002 and that was about it. But earlier that year, Adam Green had released his first solo record. The CD has a nice thick cardboard card instead of a booklet and interestingly the writing on the CD suggests that the copyright is owned by Adam himself rather than by Rough Trade. Also, the European version of the CD, as Rough Trade promotional material suggests, is self-titled, while the American version is named Garfield for some reason or another. The music is good as well.

The initial record went by mostly unnoticed as it seems. At least, most of my attempts to talk people about the music were futile at the time. But Adam became more mainstream with his second solo album, Friends of Mine. Where with ‘mainstream’ I mean that there were music videos which had a chance of actually being played on telly during the one hour of decent music television of the day. There was more media coverage as well and probably deservedly so as the album, while keeping its fair share of rude lyrics, just sounded much more friendly than its predecessor. In fact, I was easily tempted to hum songs at one time or another.

The more friendly sound made many (many of those who knew the first record, that is) people think that it’s a bit mellow. I mean there were strings in the support band and so on. But in the end nobody seems to have too much and the friendlier sound meant I could actually play the stuff during dinner without my flatmates getting a larger urge than usual to kill me. At the same time, Adam seems to have worked a lot, doing many tours – quite a few of which I managed to miss – particularly in Germany, which is nice.

New Album

And now, Adam has released his latest album: Gemstones. Visually it’s without doubt the most shiny of his albums as it’s printed on some kind of sparkling paper, which can’t be seen on the images you get on the web, so I put a photo of it below. The other bit of news is that the strings are gone and he’s playing with a band only, the same one he played with on tour, I guess. Yet, the sound has remained on the friendlier side with Adam singing to more or less normal piano and guitar tunes.

When people ask me why I like Adam’s music, I find that hard to answer. Particularly as I usually prefer listening to faster or at least louder music and I don’t think that Adam’s song are particularly groundbreaking music-wise. They were more experimental and creative on Garfield and with The Moldy Peaches but I find them pretty standard now. But then, of course, there are the lyrics. They’re partly nice, partly rude, partly evil, humorous and in places only loosely connected and lightly adjoined. I think that’s exactly what I like about the music. But it’s something that may not be apparent at the first sight.

But back to the new album. I think the songs are slightly less ‘nice’ than they were on Friends of Mine. They’ve all remained very short, which I like. But while I can’t put my finger on it well yet, I find that, in some songs, such as the opener Gemstones the music is varying too much for no apparent reason. The lyrics have remained mixed and partly rude and the song I find most appealing, musically, so far is Carolina (track seven, once again…)

Carolina,
she’s from Texas;
Red bricks drop from
her vagina.
Oh her lips taste
just like sunk ships;
But her breasts taste
just like breakfast.

There’s her hand now
on the cock sock
filled with white tears
from the thrift store.
She’s an eyesore
in her red dress
I’m the ghost of
her deceased
when she said:

Give us back our lives,
leave him Carolina.
Everything’s just fine
refill my prescription.
Until next time
I get so lost inside the rooms
inside my mind.

California, presidente,
Coje mucho, estoy cansado.
Dostoevski, Fab Moretti,
antiseptic, complimentary.

There’s her hand now
on the cock sock
filled with white tears
from the thrift store.
She’s an eyesore
in her red dress
I’m the ghost of
her deceased
when she said:

Give us back our lives,
leave him Carolina.
Everything’s just fine
refill my prescription.
Until next time
I get so lost inside the rooms
inside my mind.

Goodnight sweetheart,
flying high on birth control.
She knows the pregnancy will show
that she smells nice,
when you look twice.
Who’s your boyfriend?
Carolina?
And it’s goodnight sweetheart
flying high on birth control.
She knows rejections in her bones.

Carolina,
she’s from Texas;
red bricks drop from
her vagina.
Carolina.
Carolina.
Carolina.

Adam Green, Carolina

Magazine

One of the videos is the TV-shopping style video for Friends of Mine which contains a little snippet showing something called ADAM GREEN magazine. And while this looked like a joke at the time, it wasn’t. Adam has written down things, snippets as far as I understand, and for some reason they have been published now. With a little twist, even. They are only published by a German publisher in Germany with the text being there both in the original English and translated into German – at least the web sites suggest that people have to place international orders if they want to get it outside Germany.

So far so good – one theory goes that Adam isn’t all that popular in other countries, particularly the U.S. as media censorship there makes life harder for people with rude lyrics and such. So the book appears in a location where he’s at least known and it might be bought by suckers like myself. But what’s truly remarkable isn’t that it’s published but that it is published by Suhrkamp, which is probably one of the most intellectually prestigious publishers in Germany.

I didn’t manage to find the book in town last week but I’m sure I’ll get a copy next week. Needless to say that I’m enthusiastically curious.

Media

The final thing I’d like to remark on are the media. Adam’s new album seems to be out first in Germany, which is nice of course and may be due to the fact that he seems more popular here than elsewhere. But in the past week it seemed like there’s no newspaper’s arts section without Adam Green glorification. Starting from the obvious like record labels, to the expected, like radio stations, to even the weeklies. I won’t even be able to put all the links here as that would just be too many.

In addition to that there’s TV. Sure enough, Adam was to visit the wonderfully chaotic Sarah Kuttner, who may not be the most musically knowledgeable person around but at least gets the Adam Green thing right. Yet – with her energetic interview style – she managed to annoy Adam a bit, it seemed. In the end (well, actually at the beginning… or throughout) he looked a bit stoned, didn’t say too much when she charmingly suggested that his show appearances are, well, not the most sophisticated and asked what the idea behind that was and he was a bit annoyed when she told him to shout at her and be tough. All the while her directors inserted glorifying subtitles onto the screen. He didn’t look to happy with all that but he did show his little tape recorder that we could read about in exactly every single one of the ‘independent’ articles on his new album. After all that they had a little feature were he sang karaoke to some tacky 1980s song. Somehow that was strangely perfect – the absurd music with the even more absurd karaoke video and Adam singing rather well, I’d say. (They had Moneybrother do the same in autumn and it was horrible but except for the TV girls nobody seems to like Moneybrother anyway…)

Adam also appeared on Harald Schmidt’s show (kind of German Jay Leno or so) and so on and – as a consequence of all this, I assume, it is said that Gemstones is on number two of the album charts and even number one in iTMS this week. And while I appreciate this, I am as well scared (of all the teenagers who might come to see concerts) and puzzled by this. Puzzled, because I completely fail to understand how and why Gemstones should be more popular than Friends of Mine was and why people should like it more. I am tempted to believe in a media conspiracy. And I once more want to express how boring media are as they all write/tell the same stuff. (Question: How long has it been like that?)

P.S.

Just a little note that occurred to me when seeing my text with the images: All of Adam’s albums have his face as the cover art. And apart from the getting-older thing you can also see how he appears more orderly on each subsequent one. Heck, on Gemstones (and the associated TV appearances) he’s already wearing a jacket rather than just a shirt or a T-Shirt. This may also be a fashion thing, but he doesn’t seem to be too much of a fashion-victim otherwise.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The first song is the Beach Boys’ Kokomo. Not being a big Beach Boys fan myself, I had of course been aware of that melody and song so far, but didn’t pay too much attention. And now I’ve actually listened to it and quite liked it. At least it stuck in my head all day and I’ve been mumbling Key Largo, Montego, Jamaica, Kokomo all day without a single reference to my Powerbook’s intestines. (I’d love to make a map, but I don’t know of any reasonably good quality, well indexed and complete digital map to use for this. The one on the Britannica CD is crap, the travel websites are as well, and even my analogue school atlas doesn’t help with all the destinations here.)

The other song/s on that EP is/are Don’t Smoke/Bronx Zoo. Probably one of the very few songs I bought on iTMS without listening to it first. And while I appreciate all the low-fi stuff and I really love the old Moldy Peaches songs, I found this song absolutely appalling. And that’s not because it’s against smoking. So it’s one of the very few songs in my iTunes library with the questionable honour of being unchecked now.

Contents

• The Festival
• dEUS
• Starsailor
• Adam Green
• Gisli
• Patrick Wolf
• Keane
• Kings of Leon
• Paul Weller
• The Divine Comedy
• Das Pop
• Related Links

The Festival

The festival is quite special. Read the blurb on their website for the full story. Basically it's rather small (between 5000 and 10000 visitors is my guess) and less commercial than other festivals. There are a few sponsors but the commercial pitch seems a lot lower than elsewhere. Many things at the festival (like a little tunnel where water is sprinkled on you for cooling off or even a set of big ventilators to blow a little wind over the audience) look home-made. The whole effort seems to be driven mostly by the organisers' enthusiasm for music and has grown from very humble starts 20 years ago. They have a low-key motto each year. This year's being The future is small.

The local community seems to be involved and many families seem to be attending as well. The atmosphere and the people are very relaxed – less rowdy than elsewhere – making this a very pleasant experience (except for the people staying next to us on the campground who brought their own generator – I accuse them of over-sophistication and noise). There were lots of people from neighbouring Holland and Belgium as well, owing to the location at the very west of Germany.

As the festival operates on a small scale, their lineup can't be as impressive as that of larger festivals. Lesser known or upcoming bands play there. Each band gets about an hour of time on the stage, which is a bit longer than usual, and many seem to enjoy the experience. The bands playing are a bit on the slow side. When I went there with Dan two years ago we saw Belle and Sebastian, The Notwist, for example.

While there was only one band playing at a time. They had a fancy tent as well this year where bands played late at night and in the morning. It was quite pretty with lots of velvet curtains, coloured stained glass windows and mirrors. Apparently these were used for dances early last century and were operated by travelling Belgians.

The weather was fine throughout the weekend. While it was overcast on Saturday morning, the sun burned all the clouds away and it was quite hot afterwards. So we did most of our Saturday daytime listening sitting in a shady spot. There was a thunderstorm forecast – either for Friday or for Saturday, depending on whom you trusted. It did happen (on Saturday in case you care) – but south of were we were; and according to the news it was quite heave, leaving some people flooded.

dEUS (B, Friday 21:25)

As most people I only knew a single dEUS song before, Suds and Soda which is quite cool, often played at discos and starts with a screeching violin. This shouldn't be the last violin we were to see at the festival. I didn't find their other songs too inspiring. [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Starsailor (GB, 23:15)

My general opinion about Starsailor isn't too favourable. My basic take on this starts back at the Beatles. Yeah, they were great, I suppose, but I'm more of a Rolling Stones person and not a very nice one at that. I am tempted to say something along the lines of Oasis are the Beatles gone wrong, Travis are Oasis gone wrong, Coldplay are Travis gone wrong and Starsailor are Coldplay gone wrong.

After this has been sorted, I must admit that I was positively surprised. They played well, their songs are catchy and nice and they seemed to enjoy performing. I almost regretted my derogatory way of thinking about them. [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Adam Green (US, 0:50)

Given my track record, it's clear that I had to see Adam Green. Although he's been touring around here a lot, I never made it to see him on his own, so this is the first time I saw him play since I saw The Moldy Peaches in early 2002.

It's generally known that Adam can't be accused of overwhelming showmanship. So expectations weren't too high for that – and we were there for the music anyway – or so. He did try to do a few silly dances and some microphone throwing. I am not sure he's really convinced of this himself, but I'll just appreciate the effort.

Most of the songs he played with his support band were from the Friends of Mine album (without the strings, though, those extra violins promised earlier will appear later). I would have loved to hear some more songs of the Garfield album, which remains my favourite. Its rough, ultra-lo-fi sound is quite cool. It's also more in the Moldy Peaches direction than Friends of Mine. Instead of the old songs he played quite a few songs which I completely didn't know – and thus suppose to be new. That was cool. I think bands should play more of their unreleased songs at gigs.

That said, I think Adam could have played for a bit longer. He was the last one to be on stage so there wasn't a problem schedule-wise. He did play an encore, starting to play his cover version of The Libertines' What a Waster, which I love... and then he blew it, apparently not knowing how to go on. That was disappointing, which he acknowledged right away. [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Gisli (ISL/N, Saturday 13:00)

The first band to play on Saturday were Gisli. They had a bit of a hard time getting there – getting up in the middle of the night and having their instruments lost by the airline. They still played, with borrowed instruments (I've been told it's important that bands can play their own instruments... thing were so much easier if they shared). Their music was friendly and not too exciting. I liked the last song they played but that doesn't seem to be published yet.

Photos, [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Patrick Wolf (GB, 14:00)

Patrick Wolf coming on stage looked a bit unlikely: A synthesizer, a violin (or viola perhaps), an iBook and a single person. He then entertained us on his for for 45 minutes. Some of the songs were quite cool, particularly at the beginning, I was getting a bit bored towards the end though.

+1 for bravery, more Patrick Wolf stuff around here, [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

South, Embrace (UK, 15:05, 16:15)

These two bands stepped in for The Bees and The Zutons respectively. I wasn't too impressed by their performances.

Keane (GB, 19:05)

Keane seem to be quite popular already in the UK. And they may be the next hype over here as well, having a video played on telly and all. Apparently they got signed for the festival when they were still affordable enough.

I'll still have to give this a little a little thought, but they may be the next step in the regression leading to Starsailor that I mentioned above. Their music is inoffensive and bit cheesy for my taste. Their keyboarder jumped around a lot considering that he was only pressing a few keys on a keyboard (I constantly fail to see why people do this, I'm more with Kraftwerk on that one). He had something suspiciously resembling a TiBook there as well – whatever it was for.

Someone passed the word boygroup around in this context. And perhaps they are. Not in the classical 'synchronised dancing' sense but in a slightly more 'indie' sense of being a bunch of sleepy-looking young English blokes. Looking at the little girls while Keane were on stage suggested that the hypothesis isn't completely without merit.

Of course the label 'boygroup' isn't good for a band's credibility – perhaps we'll have to adjust a little bit here. Just because they make teenage girls scream doesn't mean a band needs to be bad (see The Libertines, for example). I'll have to try hard to keep that in mind.

Read a devastating review of their album.

Photos [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Kings of Leon (US, 20:35)

I was looking forward to see Kings of Leon. Their music is nice and rough. The kind of sixties and seventies stuff I like.

They played fine but were playing it a bit too cool for my taste – playing their set and not interacting with the audience. That could've been better. They should've also played my favourite, Joe's Head. [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Paul Weller (GB, 22:10)

Paul Weller has a lot of history going for him. And now he's singing, along with a guitar, a band and a grand piano on stage. This takes a long time to set up and is very elaborate. It's also a bit too sophisticated for my taste. I'm not too keen on all those ageing singer-songwriters (is that the right word? – I'm still not sure what it means...).

I also thought the grand piano sounded rather crappy (i.e. like an electric piano) through the sound system. Perhaps it wasn't up for that kind of job? [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Divine Comedy (IRL, 1:15)

I got a free single of The Divine Comedy with a Sunday newspaper a few years back. I thought their music was OK, a bit too quiet perhaps. For the festival, they were the closing act. And a glamourous one at that.

The special fairy lights that we'd seen hanging at the side of the stage were unwrapped for the occasion and the stage was filled with the band and an orchestra of around twenty. They played pieces arranged for the orchestra which was quite cool, although I again thought that the sound system wasn't quite good enough for the job – things often sounded 'blurred' and it was hard to differentiate the instruments.

Their singer and mastermind, Neil Hannon, even came in a suit and charmingly entertained us. He seemed to enjoy performing with the orchestra, looking like this is something he wanted to do for a long time. He went out of sight to the side of the stage when they were playing a solo and gave due credit to them at the end. The orchestra was a local one and he pronounced them to be rock stars at the end of the performance. To our amusement they also played a cover version of the Queens of the Stone Age's No One Knows in this setup. [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

This won't be my new favourite band but it was a cool way to end the main stage lineup. At the time it was already 2:30 due to delays in setting up the stage for the last two bands. But it wasn't going to be the last band we saw. In the additional tent there were two more bands playing. We missed the Dresden Dolls because the tent only had limited capacity and we had to queue, but then made it inside in time to see

Das Pop (B, 3:30)

I bought Das Pop's album I ♥ (released on good old PIAS in 2002 and with silly "let's do 99 tracks" hidden tracks) a while ago. I mostly bought it because I heard of the band before, it was a special edition, it was on sale and because I didn't find anything else. It was a bit of a random buy to be honest. And one I didn't regret. I listened to the CD a lot at the time. Not only does it have quite a good and stylish booklet and design, it's also full of fresh poppy goodness and the occasional electronic sound. In fact, my memory was mostly of the electronic parts which is probably owed to the clicky and bleepy The Love Program. Thus, thanks to my poor memory, I was a little surprised to see a proper drumkit and the electronic toys in a subordinate role.

Despite the late time, the tent was quite full with almost 400 people and we got to see a very good show. The singer spoke to us in very good German, which was nice and even sung a German version of the song You. The performance he put on was solid, very energetic, sometimes at the verge of looking like a maniac. I'd say they rocked the tent and the audience joined them. It was a very cool show. The songs weren't bad either. I may have to get the new album. It's been out since last year – but not in Germany. [Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

And that was the gratifying end to a relaxed weekend full of good music. We tried to get a few hours of sleep before leaving not too late on Sunday morning to get back home.

Photos

Unfortunately I didn't borrow my mum's digital camera and couldn't take any photos. Fortunately, Richard got a press ticket and was taking photos for a Dutch internet music magazine. He had a nice (and extremely heavy) analogue Nikon camera with good lenses. With the exception of the tent photo at the beginning, all the photos you see here were taken and scanned by him. He's got even more photos up on his photo page.

Other photos; reports in the media: Offical site press photos, photos by other visitors, WDR, WDR Rockpalast will broadcast footage in the night from the 4th to the 5th of September, FM4, stern; and in the blogging world: dis-connected, emptysound, dartogreen, highlights. Possibly more at Feedster.

When the world's got you down,
Rainy Sundays, sunny town,
Tropicana, canned food,
Botulism, damaged goods.

See the hipsters in the park,
Their hairs are styled, their clothes are dark.
Prefab molded hamburgers,
I don't want a bite of yours.

These burgers are crazy.
These burgers are crazy.
These burgers are crazy.
These burgers are crazy.

They don't like you, never will,
They slip you the happy pill,
Assimilation, so they think,
Send you to the naughty shrink.
You just tell them lies lies,
Paranoia. Bugs and flies.
You don't like them, never did.
You don't like them, never did.

These burgers are crazy.
These burgers are crazy.
These burgers are crazy.
These burgers are crazy.

The Moldy Peaches, These Burgers

Adam Green, Bungee

Adam Green, Secret Tongues