Rule breakin’

I know, I know, I’ve broken one of the rules of blogging – Thou Shall Update Regularly. But I’ve got a good excuse, insofar that in the last two weeks I’ve spent more time living in tents than in a house. The tail end of the festival season crept up on me, and I found myself at Bloodstock and Leeds Festival on consecutive weekends, for ThrashHits and MusicTowers respectively.

I’ve only just got in from Leeds, so I think I ought to quickly first whoop on about Bloodstock while some memory of the utter depravity it descended into is fresh in my mind. First off, there’s my review over on ThrashHits, which covers most of the musical highlights. There’s also a laptop full of videos that I shot with my compadré, Tom Gibbons, who used to be a produce the rock show on the sadly now-defunct MusFlash TV. We just haven’t had time to edit them yet, as almost as soon as the dust had settled from Bloodstock we were getting ready to truck up to Leeds.

Bloodstock feels far more like a European festival than a British one, where even the so-called “boutique” festivals suffer from an overdose of branding and bills leaning towards bands that have the most media bluster over actual talent. One of the band’s that was booked for this year was The Defiled, one of the best unsigned metal bands in the UK today (expect to see a Future Hits piece on them on ThrashHits soon). I’ve known their bass player, Drex Exel, for the best part of seven years now, so after seeing them blow the Scuzz stage to pieces on Saturday, we spent a good deal of the festival getting seven shades of shitfaced.

Some clips of The Defiled’s Bloodstock performance – sadly the shit sound quality doesn’t do them justice

Sadly the best stories from Bloodstock need to remain untold, if only to protect the sanity, sexual health and status of the people involved. Needless to say, they involve a porn star in the back of a band’s van, more Bon Jovi karoke than is ever really necessary, a band ketamine’d out of their tree, Suicide Girls and their worst experiences with rock star infamy, a dressing room being trashed, and the instigation of a drinking competition that escalated into a brawl that closed the entire VIP bar down.

The A.V.D from The Defiled finds a new use for the Scuzz promo condoms

More (proper) videos to come once the edits are complete…