draxil

Fib was daaaamn good this year. The bands, the bars, the beach all amazing.

There were far more Brits than last time (7000 in all, aparently) but this only occasionally broke the mood, and the festi organisers did make a statement at the end about how cool we all were with the locals.

Our camp however, was if anything decidedly more international than last year. Last year with so few brits there was more of a Ghetto mentality, but this year we camped along with some really cool Spaniards, who along with some mean guitar playing taught us how to mix the 50c with with coke to make insanely cheap sipping liqour...

Amusingly the guy was from the Spanish equilent of the midlands and the girl was from the north which lead to lots of amusingly familiar bickering :)

We also drew in some French guitarists as well. The trick seems to be in having some bongos, which seems to attract the guitarists a bit like flys, and since guitarists outnumber flys two to one anyway.... It's a good way of meeting people you can't really talk to (even though they could invariably talk to you. Oh. and being entertainly pissed seems to help as well.

I was there for the full 9 days this time and it was well worth it.

The music featured a nice mix of legends (the cure, the Lemonheads, Dinosaur junior), currently popular stuff (like the kaiser cheifs) and some more unfamiliar delights (mondo dao, the kings of convenience). Although FIB isn't really a fest I expect to find masses of new stuff (like I do at Reading say) it was surprisingly strong this year. I am pretty sure we managed to haul ourselves away from our fariourite bar (Bar tropical - benicassim, tel. 964 300050) to see far more bands than last year.

Probably the most unexpected delight was a DJ set (shock horror). The kings of convenience guy did a set on the beach party, and the atmosphere was just wonderful. The music he played was textured, interesting, and not your usual this-took-five-secs-and-then-I-copied-and-pasted sh**t. He added to the texture with his own personality (lots of communication with the crowd, some quirky dancing, and adding live vocals to some of the tracks) which (along with lots of red wine) make the beachparty an amazing wind down on the monday night..

Anyhoo. Apart from lots of bongo footage which I need to splice, I've stuck (most of) my humble pics in the scrapbook. I need to upload some more because the scrapbook perl script died for some reason...