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An excellent festival. More completely organised than I expected. This came to prominence straight away, when a rather spacey lady handling our tickets failed to give us one of the essential ID cards that pair up with the wristband to allow entry and re-entry. A security guard stopped us from heading back in to point out the error. Anticipating anguish at the gate, and hoping that a single card and a friendly attitude might get us through, we were met by a super-friendly chap, speaking perfect English, who whisked us back to the check-in, where we waited for the woman to confirm that her stack of cards and tickets were out by one, and furnished us with the missing card. And then we were in. Things do not run that smoothly at Glastonbury when your credentials go awry!

The venue is good, purpose built, although admittedly it does have a slight air of NCP car park to it. There are three amphitheatres with banked steps of seating set facing out to sea. These make up the RockDelux, ATP and the VICE stages. The other two stages, namely the CD Drome, and the Estrella Damm stage are set up on the main paved area that links the first three, with the food market between them. There are two gigantic arrays of solar cells, apparently the largest in Europe, which at least made a handy shelter during the couple of light rain showers, even if they sadly aren't used to directly power the festival itself. There is also an indoor concert hall, the Auditori, which I didn't manage to set foot inside once, a combination of not being nearby when anything compelling was happening there, plus not quite being able to figure out where the entrance actually was!

The festival runs over several days, Thursday to Saturday, and keeps to a gruelling schedule, starting at four or five p.m., and running through till four or five a.m the next morning. It's really all about the music, as there is little else to do onsite, other than browse a few T-shirt and record label stalls, eat functional outdoor food, or drink expensive sponsor beer from plastic cups.

It's far less wear upon the legs and feet than the typical British festival, the proximity of the stages, along with the near-universal seating, and paved footpaths rather than clogging mud fields thankfully mean that it's just the marathon running time contributing to your fatigue, not trudging miles around countryside inbetween sets. The climate was pleasantly appropriate, a few spots of light rain but it was mild enough to be comfortable in light clothing all the way through the evening, so you could just stick to the basic set of clothes you came in wearing, not wrestle with lugging around cumbersome outfit changes to cater to changes in the weather.

It may be just a result of the lack of crowding, but the toilet facilites were fine, little queuing, and freshly clean each day. I recommend taking a little dispenser of handwash gel, you can pick these up in the chemists nowadays.

Another benefit of the close site is the number of acts you can practically watch. As the stages are just separated by a minute or two's easy stroll you can mix and match to take in as much, or as little of a set as you fancy. It's quite possible to watch the start of one artist's set for a couple of songs, and then wander around another three stages watching a couple of numbers at each, and still return to the start to catch the final few of the original. This all makes it incredibly easy to sample new or interesting acts on spec without having to miss out on much if any of your must-see sets. Over the three days we easily managed to see dozens of acts, with comparatively little effort.

It would take too long to run through them all in detail, so I'll just group the highlights into some buckets.

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We arrived in Barcelona a few days ahead of Primavera, to give us a chance to see the sights and relax a little. It's a compact city, although larger than I thought it would be, with a wide variety of flavours to the various districts. The weather has been variable, but never unpleasant.

It is a very clean city, they seem to constantly empty the bins on a daily cycle, and there are recycling stations everywhere. The architecture is wonderful. Not just the Gaudi, which is as astonishing as you'd expect, but there's an adventurous sense to public space everywhere, interesting modern building nestling up against 14th century alleyways, and giant lumps of sculpture sprouting everywhere, in a manner you only rarely see in conservative old Britain.

We've mostly been rehearsing our body clocks for the ever so slightly mental 5pm-5am Primavera schedule, and so we've not done so much cultural sightseeing, or eating out. I figured it can wait until the now inevitable follow-up visit.

It's been a few years now since I last went to Glastonbury, and the last few summers have been festival-free for me, save for local city-wide affairs like Venn. I came very close to attending the 'End of the Road' festival last September, tempted by a very me-friendly line up, but it wasn't very compatible with school term dates, and last summer's terrible run of weather just left me procrastinating about it until it was far too late to bother.

In the U.K. there's almost too many to choose from now, spread right across the summer, with something happening seemingly every single weekend from May to September. This means that it's now becoming something of a stadium tour circuit, and with a depressingly production-line feel to the majority, it's increasingly hard to differentiate them.

End of the Road didn't seem to have as many must-see bands this year, and so my attention wandered a little further afield. A couple of years ago, I noticed the Primavera Sound festival, in Barcelona had a line up of acts very much in tune with my way of thinking. I've wistfully looked at it every year since then, and this time around I've actually decided to go.

It seems to be built around the music, with a thoughtful and genuinely alternative line up, very much my sort of thing. There's a great mix; bands I currently like very much and would *really* like to see (Boris, Animal Collective, Okkervil River, Prinzhorn Dance School, Six Organs of Admittance, Om), significant 'legacy' acts ( Devo, Public Enemy, Dinosaur Jr., Shellac ), critically favoured 'name' acts ( Portishead, Cat Power, Rufus Wainwright), favourite acts I've seen before ( De La Soul, Tindersticks, British Sea Power, Explosions in the Sky ), and, perhaps a new trend, bands with amusingly rude names ( Holy Fuck!, local outfit Fuck Buttons, and the charmlessly named Pissed Jeans ). My single line up complaint is that it's a European festival, and there's no dEUS, even though they have a new album out to promote.

Like every festival, it's sure to be pointless attempting to programme any kind of strict itinerary. Events will indubitably conspire to wreck it. Given my estimate of at least 70% of the acts being the sort of thing I'd go and check out if they were playing locally, I think the best policy is to be mostly be guided by serendipity. Suggestions for things to check out are welcome!

The festival site is next to the sea, and just a couple of km out of Barcelona itself. We're going for the whole week, flying out on the 24th and returning on the 1st of June. I've rented an apartment, right on the waterfront in Barcelonetta , which looks like it ought to be within fair walking distance of the site. This gives us a few days preceding to acclimatise, relax and see the sights before the festival properly starts.

In case anyone was wondering, I'm in Crewe. I'm doing some short term consultancy work, on contract, and I'm based on-site during the week. Until recently, bandwidth was rather limited, and that's why I've been keeping such a low profile online. I've arranged for better connectivity now, and normal online presence should slowly resume from here on. 

If you'd noticed my limited visibility during recent weeks and wondered where I was, then wonder no more. We've just returned from a rather extensive holiday roaming around in the New World. We were away for around three weeks, which broke down into several contiguous mini-holidays based around different exciting locations.

I will probably write up these stops individually , and I have hundereds of photos to sort through and post, but here's the five-minute overview.

We kicked off in Toronto, with the wedding of Mr and Mrs Lyle, the original impetus for the whole trip. We then travelled by rail to Niagara falls, spending a couple of nights there with a rather classy view of the falls. From there we continued by rail to New York city, spending the best part of a week staying just off Times Square, and doing our best to participate in the Manhattan skyline with a vertigo-bothering 50th floor room.

   

As our time in NYC grew to a close we picked up some wedding rings, at Tiffany & Co. on 5th Ave. and flew to Vegas, where we were married ourselves, in the famous Little White Chapel, in the truest Las-Vegas walk-in style. After a couple more days 'relaxing' in the lysergic shopping-mall-in-the-middle-of-a-freaking-desert that is Vegas we jumped on a plane back to Toronto, for an evening of joint congratulations with the newly-married Lyles, and then flew back to the U.K.

Married. In Vegas. This is how you holiday with style.