Guilfest

Me and the Missus, plus our Yorkshire Chums From St Albans and their We-Get-Him-If-They-Die-Kid, ventured over to Guilfest at the weekend. This was a largish music festival at Stoke Park in Guildford and headlining on the day we went were Ndubz and the Human League.

The Missus is an old punk and gig-goer of many years experience and when we were first going out we compared notes on the gigs we'd been to. She reeled off the Clash, the Jam and a veritable who's who of all the important punk, new wave and ska bands of the late Seventies and early Eighties... while my rather paltry offerings included the Housemartins, the Mission and the Waterboys. If our share-and-compare was a boxing match it would have been ruled a no-contest.

Rather brilliantly, though, one of her first gigs was the Human League in their Being Boiled and pre-girl backing singers days so it was quite a sweet moment when they came back on stage for one of the encores and performed... Being Boiled. She was happy.

Other highlights included Hazel O'Connor doing a version of the Snow Patrol song, Chasing Cars, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

My only concern here was that the Kid is now 60 and still allowed to be the Kid but the Coconuts are obviously not the originals and were replacement Coconuts. I imagined the Kid has to sit down with the Coconuts every so often and tell them they're going to be replaced.
Kid: 'Girls... I've got some bad news for you. I need to send you to the Coconut retirement home and get some younger models.'
Coconut 1: 'We're still good for another, Kid. Honestly...'
Coconut 2: 'We're young at heart. We're still Coconuts!'
Coconut 3: 'Come on. You're 60 and you still call yourself the Kid!'

Another highlight of the day was taking our friends' We-Get-Him-If-They-Die-Kid to his first grunge gig in the Indie tent. The band was a group called Japanese Voyeurs and they're quite rocky and they have real potential. They're very tight musicians who also manage to get that raw and growly grunge sound and they have a single out on iTunes. Four songs into their set I turn to ask the We-Get-Him-If-They-Die-Kid what he thinks.
'They're very loud, aren't they?'

Comedy moment of the day, however, was walking past the Kidszone area to hear some wag had put a Gary Glitter song on. Now that's pretty funny.

But Guilfest was great. A really friendly and fun day out.