Rebellion Festival Day 1

As if I’m not busy enough attending Rebellion Festival this weekend, I’ve chosen to blog about it while it’s all still fresh in my mind. Complete lunacy.

After standing in an insanely long queue outside Blackpool’s Winter Gardens for 45 minutes, we started to move slowly towards the venue. An old man innocently asked what we were queuing for and received the response “we’re going to the opera, you prick” from a guy with a huge green mohawk. I also discovered how international the festival is, talking to people from Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Macclesfield.

Once inside the venue I made my way to the New Band Stage that was already underway. I caught the last two bars of the opening act, but it sounded good. Most of my afternoon was spent in this room and a lot of the bands were surprisingly good, considering they were playing to their largest ever audience in most cases. Pick of the bunch were In Evil Hour from Darlington (the drummer is someone I know, but hadn’t seen for 12 years), Legend In Japan (it was rumoured the singer had been on Big Brother) and RSI (especially entertaining due to the bizarre dancing of a Bez-esque mentalist in front of the stage).

In between bands there, I checked out another stage where the bands were, relatively speaking, not as impressive. This was until I saw Roughneck Riot, who with members playing accordion, mandolin and banjo, sounded like a more pumped-up version of Dropkick Murphys. Imagine that. “They’re like the facking Pogues,” remarked a well-oiled savvener who was standing next to me.

As afternoon became early evening, I was able to catch some more avant garde (I hate that phrase, but used it anyway) acts. 5 Shitty Fingers played Celtic versions of well-known punk songs including Anti-Nowhere League’s So What. They also bizarrely played a very fast version of We Are The Cheeky Girls which actually wasn’t bad. The other strange band was The Pukes. This was a group of 20 people playing ukuleles and singing songs by the likes of The Ramones and Dead Kennedys. Way better than it sounds.

The two highlights of mid to late evening were On Trial and Snuff. On Trial’s singer, Jonny Wah Wah, had contacted me on Twitter a couple of weeks ago asking me to check out his band while I was there. I met him after their set and he was well chuffed that I’d bothered to turn up and watch them. I even bought a CD off him, not out of pity, but because I thought they were a really good band.

Snuff have been mentioned in a previous post on here, so I won’t bore you with too many details. They played some stuff off their new album and closed with a cover of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? The only criticism is the sound wasn’t great in the massive ballroom they played in, but that’s not their fault.

That pretty much wraps up day one. I didn’t bother staying till late to see The Buzzcocks because 1) I’m not a huge fan; 2) there was doubt over the capacity of the ballroom, meaning a lot of people might not get in; 3) the floor was a potential death trap due to massive beer spillage; and 4) I couldn’t be arsed.