Gigz: High Voltage-Saturday and Primitai

Well, I did say that this is the festival season, so off to another festival we go. This time it’s High Voltage.

High Voltage is a London based(Victoria Park) Rock festival for those who don’t really do festivals. No camping, no mud, and even the toilets smell nice.

I went on Saturday as a VIP guest of Primitai, and on Sunday under my own steam.

This is the story of Saturday.

Primitai were playing at quarter past 3. so I decided to get there more or less as the festival opened at Mid-day. The journey there was a bit problematic as the Circle/District and Hammersmith and City lines were all down for maintenance, so the remaining tube lines were as bad as a Monday Morning, but a quick blast down the Bakerloo and Central lines dropped me off, a little hotter and more crushed than I would have hoped for, but hey, so what

A short walk got me to Victoria Park, where I picked up my VIP wristband from the box office. Into the site itself-quite small (Around 30,000) people and a nice atmosphere.

One of the band members Dad’s, Bob Chilcott was there and I’d got his telephone number from his son. I thought I would give him a call to see if he fancied a pre-gig beer. What happened next was pure male logic..

When I phoned him he was listening to one of the bands so couldn’t quite hear me. But he got that some random guy was asking him for a beer, to which, of course, he said “Yes”, it wasn’t until he’d walked away from the stage and could properly hear, that he found out that it was me. Male logic-always say yes to a beer, then work out who it is after!

Primitai were the first band that I went to see. I think that the sound guys really hadn’t got their act together as Primitai were doing their usual good stuff, but, the mix really wasn’t good, you could hear it was metal, but it sounded more like metal shavings being dropped on a rusty can!

Even with the sound problems they did a great job, really got the audience of around 1500 people going