I was lucky enough to get a free ticket to Leeds Fest for this Saturday, Saturday 27th August 2011. Not only was it free, it was also a VIP ticket, meaning I had access to a priority bar along with nice seating areas and toilet facilities. And by nice.. I wouldn’t say the toilets were fantastic, but they were a damn site better than throughout the rest of the site (based on the parts of the site I saw).

I was very happy that this was the day I was able to go, as the bands on the main stage were bands I’ve loved for years and I’ve always wanted to see. The main ones I wanted to see were, “The Offspring”, “Rise Against”, “New Found Glory”, and “Thirty Seconds to Mars”. I was hoping to see “My Chemical Romance” but we left before this and I wasn’t overly bothered about missing them.

After getting up bright and early on a Saturday morning (5am), then failing to work my friends shower and having a cold one for about 10 minutes before figuring out I had the tap the wrong way for hot (it was early, ok!) – we set off on a taxi journey to a friends house to meet him and his friends to go to Leeds Fest. Once we set off from his house, we had a 50 minute walk to Seacroft where we had a quick poke around Tesco then took the shuttle bus to the venue.

Upon arriving at the venue, my excitement began to build further. I have never been to a venue like this before and being able to see so many bands at one time coupled with the diverse amount of people there / activities was very exciting to be part of. We went to the guest window to use our free tickets, with the only catch being a £15 donation to charity, which I was fully aware of and absolutely more than happy to pay. Considering the usual Saturday ticket runs into the hundreds for any other person and that’s not for the VIP section, I counted myself very lucky. Once getting my wristband sealed around my wrist (which by the way, as sad is this sounds is -awesome-) we made our way into the guest camp site. I always had my preconceptions about how the campsite would look and had always seen it on T.V. – however, seeing it for myself in person was very cool, especially to see so many people chilling out and really enjoying themselves. We continued to make our way through to the Guest area where we were greeted with a bar without a queue, and various benches to sit on. So far so good! – At this point it was around 10am and we had roughly an hour to wait to go through to the main arena area where all the various tents are along with the main stage. I was quite surprised to see various different shops, take-away places and even a pharmacy. That place is literally a town within a town. During this entire process I was becoming very familiar with the classic muddy festival ground, which made me feel very happy for buying wellies just the night before.

After a brief look around we grabbed ourselves some programmes which were £10 a pop (quite surprising to say the price people pay to get in there in the first place) but suffice to say, I purchased a programme anyhow, as it was my first visit to Leeds Fest, and I felt that I should make it a memorable one. We continued walking around to found ourselves hearing some intriguing sounds coming out of the ‘Festival Republic stage’ tent, so naturally we moved in for a closer look. Looking at our programmes we found that the band we were watching was called, ‘Cherri Bomb’ and I have to say I was quite blown away by the raw talent that these girls had. The guitaring for one thing was simply astonishing, and I really was very impressed. They have a very grungy punky sound which I instantly fell in love with. We watched this band through to the end and then moved towards the main stage where, ‘Architects’ were playing. This was my first taste of a performance on the main stage and it sounded pretty good and looked like a very professional setup. Unfortunately I didn’t take too much of a liking to their music, but they were certainly a musically talented bunch with a nice tight sound.

After watching ‘Architects’ we went back to the guest area where we relaxed for a while and picked up some beers. Much to my surprise I saw ‘Cherri Bomb’ walking through the area sort of hanging around and checking out the place. I have to admit I was a little bit excited, as they were a band I’d developed respect for very quickly and I was tempted to walk up to them and just have a general chat. However they walked off out of the area before I could put my thoughts into action. After further walking around, the next band we went to see was ‘New Found Glory’. This is where I began to get even more excited. They performed a brilliant set despite rather amusing technical difficulties. It would appear that one of Chad’s amps was having some issues and the band quickly sprung into action to keep the crowd amused. They started talking about ‘Come as you are’ being the first song that everyone learnt on guitar, then incidentally began to play it, to which Jordan began singing in a rather low grungy Kurt Cobain esk voice, by which time the technical difficulties had been resolved and they resumed with their set. I always love how bands can deal with problems like that so professionally and keep the crowd entertained at the same time, it can’t be an easy thing to do. Suffice to say every song was thoroughly enjoyable and I even managed to get some recordings (the video quality is excellent however the high volume sadly made the audio clip so it’s quite distorted, however if you keep the volume low you can hear the audio relatively well.) We once again went on a lengthy walk around the place, getting wet in the process as it decided to start absolutely pissing it down. Luckily my friend had a mac packed for me which I found very considerate. After trekking through the mud for a considerably lengthy time which was quite a grueling workout we found ourselves in the ‘Festival Republic Stage’ tent again, watching ‘Cerebral Ballzy’. I have to admit, they weren’t one of my favourite acts to see, the music was OK but the front man seemed a little bit too out of it to form proper coherent words. After sticking around there for no more than about 15 minutes, we went over to the main stage again to see ‘Rise Against’ playing. As we got closer, I could hear the trademark vocals of Tim McIlrath and was so excited to be there seeing ‘Rise Against’ play after really enjoying their music for so long. I didn’t know all the songs, but I enjoyed them nevertheless. I really thought ‘Rise Against’ performed very well, in other words they sound very close to the studio sound that is on their albums, and to my mind that’s a fantastic thing. Moving on after this, we once again grabbed a few beers, hung around, then went back to the main stage to see ‘The Offspring’. This was the band that I was most looking forward to seeing, as they are one that I’ve never seen before and I love their music. Once again, the trademark sound of the vocals was there as we approached and the song instantly recognisable. I stood there mesmerized watching them play, noting that they looked considerably older on stage than in their videos of the era of the songs they were singing (well duh, it was from years ago), I guess I never accounted for that! Once again I thoroughly enjoyed watching ‘The Offspring’ and even managed to grab some video of their performance as well. Finally after some food and more beer, we found ourselves watching ’30 Seconds to Mars’ on the main stage. Jared Leto really knows how to get the crowd going. His singing in a ‘live performance’ is certainly not as good on a studio album but it didn’t detract from the overall performance whatsoever. Once again, I enjoyed the performance. I also liked the way he got people from the audience up on stage with him and put his arm around them as he sang. I find this engagement with the crowd to be very entertaining, and the audience certainly felt the same thing. He had the crowd going wild, more so than the other bands I had seen on this day.

There is so much more to say about these fantastic bands, but I could go on forever and I’m already over 1500 words on this post! I don’t want to bore anyone. Another final things I want to add before closing have come to mind. One being how the singer of ‘Rise Against’ seemed to have a bit of a political agenda (what band doesn’t) – he mentioned the London riots and how they were provoked by taking away people’s futures. Or words to these effect. I felt this was maybe a bit of a generalisation on the matter and not really accurate. It’d be nice to hear other people’s thoughts. And the second thing was how one of the ‘New Found Glory’ band members mentioned how they have a t-shirt which has ‘Pop Punk’s Not Dead’ on the back of it and how they felt this was particularly important to them and not something that was ‘just cool’ to put on. They mentioned that because of today’s mainstream music largely taking over, a lot of other music has since been forgotten or put down, but because of their fans, they have been able to continue producing the fantastic music that they do. And it was a big ‘Fuck you’ to those who didn’t like it and thought that mainstream music is somehow better or should be the norm. I really liked this and it made me smile. I hope it makes you smile.

Please enjoy my videos (despite the poor audio quality, I am sorry) – and let me know what you think. The video are embedded into this post. Please also see the Leeds Festival site for more information on the 2011 Festival: http://www.leedsfestival.com/2011/lineup/

Videos below:

New Found Glory # 1

New Found Glory – My Friends Over You

The Offspring – Want You Bad

30 Seconds to Mars # 1

30 Seconds to Mars # 2

30 Seconds to Mars # 3