Secret Garden Party’s Lost Lovers Ball at Battersea Power Station

I love festivals. Where else can you go, act like idiot for three days, listen to your favourite music, generally act a bit silly and only surround yourself with your friends? I’ve been to a fair few and Secret Garden wins by miles. There are the most beautifully random installations that manage to live in their environment without being pretentiously placed at all but are there to be enjoyed.

I got a bit excited when I found out about The Lost Lovers Ball which the company are holding in February. They’ve managed to get hold of Battersea Power Station (my favourite building in London ever) and are making use of their time there with three nights of activity.

For £50 you choose one of these three nights (11th, 12th or 13th February) and prepare to entertained by some of Secret Garden’s most delectable entertainers including Bearded Kitten and Tax Deductible, as well as some of the best of the talking and debating stages, people like Guerilla Science and The Forum. Get tickets here.

If you know anything about SGP, then it will probably be that you will look really out of place if you aren’t dressed up. I don’t really ‘dressing up’ is really the right term for these chaps though. It’s more a sort of alternate persona that you have to adopt when you’re there. It’s the same escapism as the festival. Except this time, I can walk home.

For good measure, and because I could never get enough of them, here are some of my photos from SGP10.

Secret Garden Party 2010 - until next year

My festival season is officially over. It really is quite upsetting. Secret Garden was amazing, one of the best weekends ever. I finally got to see I Blame Coco live after all my agitation, the atmosphere and free spiritedness had me feeling like I was born 30 years too late and I have discovered (and my friends agree) that I would make the world’s best groupie.


Here are some photos…

This is was floating in the lake and they set the fireworks off in it on the last night. All the paper burnt away leaving just the frame. I think the people got off first too.

This is the view from the top of the bank looking over the lake towards the entrance on our first night.

Fancydress in its prime, me and two friends on the Saturday night.

This is Marina and her Diamonds on the Friday night.

A pretty shocking photography display of the Gorillaz.

And these are just a selection of the photos I took of I Blame Coco. They were brilliant.

Secret Garden Party!!

Ah I'm so excited! I'm off to try and find a Unicorn horn in my lunch break today. Here's Gorillaz Sound System Festival Rehearsal, its been preparing me.

Latitude Festival 2010

I got back from Latitude on Monday after a glorious, culture rich festival but a hellish journey back. Usually, I would be prime candidate for promoting public transport but a 3 hour wait, two trains, two tubes and a bus with a rucksack about three quarters of my weight has put off a little.

Not to linger on the negative though, I feel like we really took the best advantge possible of all that was on offer at Latitude. Kevin Bridges, Josie Long and Russell Kane were my top picks from the hours of time spent in the Comedy Arena, four music stages with Florence (a great set, beautiful costume and the whole crowd singing happy birthday to her little sister Grace), Vampire Weekend (I had forgotten how much I loved the first album, they were brilliant live and embarrassingly, I knew aaaall the words to every song), Rodrigo y Gabriela were absolutely captivating, I couldn’t take my eyes off them, The XX, I wasn’t really a fan of before but the performance was amazing, honestly absolutely flawless and the atmosphere was probably one of the best of the weekend. And then talking of atmosphere, my friend wanted to go see The Feeling (not top of my list, bit boring and mainstream) but they were just so happy to be there and had the whole crowd singing and dancing, it was a really happy set. Here are some photos I took, Florence and the Machine, The XX and Vampire Weekend.

The big downfall of the festival for me was the I Blame Coco set (which, if you click here, you can see I’m completely obsessed with). I arrived, after a certain amount of persuasion with a friend who hadn’t heard of her, in good time and we were busy making our way to the front just as Lissie were finishing off their set. They finished off and loads more people moved in and just as we were feeling a little smug about our front row spots, the organisers came on stage and told us to move out the tent. Not cool. So off we went and waited for 20 minutes away from the stage whilst they tried to prevent the tent from falling down. They then came to tell us that it would take up to an hour and a half before the band would come on. Reluctantly we left to go watch something in the Comedy Arena and made our way back an hour later to find out we’d missed it. I’m really quite sad that I didn’t get to see her. I did take this photo whilst she was standing outside rolling a cigarette waiting for the tent not to collapse though. Best picture of a van I've ever taken. And she is playing at Secret Garden so all is not lost just yet.

Secret Garden Party art Installations

This all sounds terribly exciting. I’ve been doing a bit of Secret Garden Party website stalking and they’ve put up some of the installations that will be at the festivalo. Here are some that I have nicked straight off their website. I hope they don’t mind.

Festivaling - Secret Garden, Latitude

So I may have touched on the festival season a couple of times before (here, here, here and here. oh and here. But just to warn any poor soul who may be sick of it, I most definitely am not. I'm planning on doing A Girl's Ultimate Guide to Festivaling. It's going to tbe great, wait and see!
I was listening to the radio this morning as is the norm, and they wouldn't stop talking about how everyone will have an incredible time at Glasto and not to worry if you're not going because you can always watch live coverage on the tellie. OR if you really feel like you're missing out and really have very little to do with your time, please do click here to watch the live web cam. I couldn't think of anything more unsettling.
So in order not to annoy, I shall post all my festival preparations as they happen in the run up to the festivals I shall be attending. This way hopefully I won't come across to smug about my Great British Summer.

Fun starts tomorow.

I Am Arrows

New favourite band alert! Hello I Am Arrows, I can't remember how I came to hear about these chaps a few weeks ago but I downloaded the free single Nun (yes please and thank you) from their homepage and had it on one of my 'preparing for festivals playlists' and it really is brilliant. So that said, it appears below.



The frontman is former Razorlight drummer Andy Burrows. The bands aren't alike at all, Burrows has written the songs and the two bands are in completely different genres. Arrows is very easy listening and nice, relaxed poppy kind of music (i don't do this for a living, excuse my pathetic attempt to describe music). It's a bit like a British version of Maroon 5 except much more talented. I'm enjoying it and i'm definitely excited about seeing them at Secret Garden.

Bindis for Festivals? or am I going a bit mad?

I quite like these. With Secret Garden Party in mind (it has the brilliant theme of 'Fact or Fiction?') and after going to the Topshop Bandstand event this weekend (forgot my camera - and don't feel it justifies a post without photos of the beautiful event) I've gotten over the initial worries of wardrobe and have firmly now moved onto pondering the extras.

The Topshop event in Regent's Park had little tent dedicated to what I'd call 'Grown Up' face painting. They used beautiful jewels and pretty designs, not full frontal, all over your face bonanzas but tasteful and very cool little ideas. I just came across these bindis on avaa.com that launched in the last couple of days. They might do the job with a bit of help.