day one overview

Now in it’s 13th year, Scotland’s T in the Park festival continues to grow in both stature and reputation, now spanning an impressive 137 acres of land and being widely acknowledged as one of the most important events in the music calendar.

The crowd were let into the arena at the earlier time of 11 O’clock this year, which was a blessing as opening bands in previous years had been faced with the disheartening task of performing to an empty field.

To my horror some bright spark had erected a second crowd barrier, segregating the people immediately at the front of the stage and the people 20 feet behind them. Images of a trend of newly bread capitalist festivals and gold pit VIP exclusivities were running through my mind and I stood perplexed at this new metal monstrosity designed to segregate the crowd.

On closer inspection this crowd barrier was in fact just for safety purposes and a member of the security team at Rock Steady duly informed me that it was designed to prevent people from getting crushed at the front. Still, this wasn’t a widely advertised fact and after speaking to a lot of people throughout the weekend there was the general consensus that that particular area was a no-go for most of the general public. This opinion wasn’t helped by the team of security policing the bottle necked entrance into the front ‘pit’ who studiously searched through peoples bags to make sure they weren’t carrying anything that could be used as a projectile weapon.

The weather held off for a while but it wasn’t long before the God of Tennants unleashed his watery tyrant on the Balado festival-goers. Having gone the last few years doused in glorious sunshine the Scots looked a bit miffed to have to cope with a bit of rain and the atmosphere definitely suffered as a result.

It was 3 in the afternoon before I spotted the first heavily inebriated T in the Park victim, slouched between a portaloo and a recycling bin showing little signs of moving anywhere fast in the next few hours. Four hours is something of a record for me at TITP, I usually have to step over the collapsed drunks on my way through the arena gates.

I couldn’t quite work out how anyone would even bother to attempt scaling the Fort Knox fortress fence that had been placed around the perimeter of the site but several attempts had been made to gain entry to the festival that way – and had resulted in the individuals being treated for ‘minor lacerations’.

By the late afternoon the festival was buzzing and the sheer scale of TITP reflected how much there actually is to do in the arena. A staggering 11 stages played host to over 170 artists, a slight improvement from 1994’s opening event that brought just 17,500 people to the site, then held at Strathclyde Country Park.

Nowadays TITP entertains 75,000 festivals goers (6000 more than last year) and even if the music wasn’t to your taste there was plenty of fun to be had on the amusements, in the silent disco, up the big wheel or at the Bacardi Bar.

Saturday probably had the more varied line-up of the weekend, with the multi-linguistic French/Spanish Manu Chao alongside the home grown talent of Franz Ferdinand and the American superstars Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

Talent could be found on the smaller stages too, if you looked hard enough for it – The Rifles drew in a huge crowd for their opening set on the King Tut’s Wah Wah Tent while Futuro and Xavier Rudd were among the other highlights at this year’s festival. Finding the next big thing has become an obsessive scavenger hunt for a lot of the crowd, eager to stake claim to the fact they saw someone before they broke the big time.

Geoff Ellis, festival director said, “Today has been a fantastic start to the event. There have been so many incredible performances from some of the world’s best live acts, such as The Kooks, Kaiser Chiefs and Wolfmother and the audience has shown everyone why they are always voted the best in the world.”

If you ignore the weather, which wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been then the first day passed by flawlessly. The atmosphere had definitely picked up by the time the crowd left the arena and with a Sunday line-up that boasted the likes of Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, Richard Ashcroft and The Who – the festival had hardly started.

There will be band reviews and photographs all online tomorrow, once we’ve recovered from the festival.

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