Journal #7908

The wickerman festival is actually so good.

Something I don't usually do are blog-like journals, so I might as well go into some detail about it

The whole event is situated around the Wicker man - yeah, the old (and terrible new one with Nicolas Cage in) film of the crazy pagans. And being crazy pagans, the festival has a lovely alternative touch to it. The place has got a couple of tents; the Reggae tent ( with sound provided by Axis sound systems- the bass there was a LOT louder than the actual dance tents, and was a pain in the fucking ass trying to sleep with that reggae thumping in the background ), the acoustic village, the Solus tent for newer bands, Go North tent for smaller bands, the Scooter tent for the intermediate level bands ( Bad Manners were playing; they are a Ska band and they are bloody good) and there's the main stage for the headliners to play at. Relatively lesser known bands such as Xavia were playing in the Go North, whilst some bands like the Leve11ers ( who in my opinion sucked arse, I hate music that combines traditional and modern.) played the main stage throughout.

Highlights had to be The View and Newton Faulkner playing on the main stage. Newton was good for me as I pretty much used to religiously listen to his stuff and was great to sing along with him, and see his eyes light up when a tonne of people were just shouting along with him. Also he's a fucking badass for stopping halfway through a song to get a kid who'd lost his parents to come up onto the stage, as well as having a 5-minute timeout after a song to make a cup of tea on stage. Bad ass.
The only song I know that the view have done is Same Jeans, so I sung along to that as much as I could. That is, when I wasn't being crushed to fuck by the INSANE moshpit that took up pretty much half of crowd, and led to one of my best mates having a panic attack. Grand.
Texas was the band to play when the wickerman was set alight, but I had no interest in that so instead I decided to go dance in the dance tent along with all the junkies wrecked off of eccies and getting off with everything with a heartbeat. Apart from me. Heh.

Apart from the music side, it was fucking amazing. I'm usually not that sociable; I'm not great speaking to new people. However once i'd had a couple beers down me, I'd pretty much introduced myself to the whole of kirkcudbright, and I'd somehow managed to create a massive drinking game of about 30 people at our tents, most of which we had no recollection of even inviting. We'd also managed to pick a great place to camp; our group's tents were pretty close to a relatively large and illuminated medical tent - it was in the perfect spot between the arena entrance, exit , and the disgustingly filthy portaloos. At one point we'd managed to have someone come into our tents to attempt to steal something but we gave them a good speaking to (aka. told them to fuck off or we'd beat the shit out of them). Again, we'd had someone elses' tent collapse onto ours and I managed to fall asleep standing up.All in all, it's really damn good. Sure, it's no T in the park, but Wickerman is definitely more about having a good time and social than T as it's a lot more lenient (I was wearing an under 18's wristband, was almost paraletic one night and the warden let me through into the arena fine, yet someone, again under 18, a lot more sober than me had been pulled to the side to be questioned for drinking - but the warden just went "well don't cause trouble, k?" and let him though ) and T is more about the musicians and bands.

Also for any UK TWHLers, I've managed to get myself on Don't tell the bride, as one of the participants of it decided to propose and get married at the event, and came onto the stage just after Newton with a massive camera crew following him. As I was right in the centre , at the front, practically staring into the camera, i'd like it if you could tune into the next episode

Archie & Urby, you'd better be coming in 2013

*fixing grammar, I realise that half of my sentences don't actually make sense.