Belladrum Festival - Part 1

After a great weekend at the Belladrum Festival near Beauly, Inverness-shire I thought I'd give my opinion on some of the bands I saw and talk about my highlights. As always it's festivals like these where you go intent on seeing certain bands and stumble upon new favourite bands!

Friday 11th August 2006

Being a big fan of Echo and the Bunnymen to see them returning to Inverness after a long time this was always going to be the one band I would certainly be watching. Off hand I can't remember how many times I have seen them live in many guises over the years but it's well over double figures. As they coolly ambled late onto the main Garden Stage Friday night there was a feeling that this was to be a Bunnymen performance to remember. With lighting and sound problems for Mac the singer/rock god who had definitely had a few ale's he proceeded to berate his soundman throughout what was a run through the classics such as 'The Killing Moon','Bring On The Dancing Horses', 'Rescue','Lips Like Sugar' and 'The Cutter' to name a few with the odd obscure track for the die hard Bunnyman 'The Disease' from 1981 album 'Heaven Up here'.
Overall another Bunnymen classic to add to the memoirs from a band that has been on the scene for over 25 years!

The other main highlight of Friday was seeing The Mystery Jets who were a band I thought I had to see after buying their debut album 'Making Dens'. They were excellent on the Garden Stage on Friday evening and I can see them going on to make quite a big impact soon (and it's not that often a cool new band with the singers dad in it aswell comes along!).

Out of the other bands I saw on Friday the main ones to stand out were Forward Russia , from Leeds with a great live show that was loud and in your face and with the titles of their songs being numbers like 'Fourteen' and 'twelve' etc it was quite different, The Rumble Strips , from Devon a 4 piece band that uses a piano, drums, sax and a trumpet instead of the usual set up of guitars and drums were a sort of change to the norm, Culture Clash , the founding member of the Bhundhu Boys a band that was championed by John Peel and Andy Kershaw alike, I stumbled upon this Zimbabwean guitarist and his band on the Grassroots Stage and was taken aback with his 'World Crossover Music', Chris Difford former writing partner of Glen Tilbrook in Squeeze also played on the Grassroots Stage and the parts I heard from his set were very good, with The Young Knives disappointingly having to cancel due to the terrorism alerts at the airports I watched a band called Union Avenue who give you a variety of cover songs from across all genre's of music in the style of Johnny Cash which was a great opener to the festival for me.

I'll be putting Photos up on my main site www.reverberation.co.uk
shortly and Belladrum Festival - Part 2 (Saturday 12th August 2006) is also to follow here.

tags
Belladrum Festival,
Echo and the Bunnymen, The Mystery Jets,
Forward Russia, The Rumble Strips, The Young Knives,
Chris Difford, Union Avenue, John Peel, Andy Kershaw,
Steven Sidebottom, www.reverberation.co.uk,