C in the Park

Everyone loves a music festival, right?

Yes, if by music festival you mean an actual, proper, well-organised event with quality acts on multiple stages with other entertainment thrown in, and with gourmet food and a selection of ales.

Yesterday, I went to something that was nothing like this in the village of Kilnwick.

You'll only find Kilnwick on a map if you zoom in to the point where it's the size of the actual village. Also, don't pronounce either the n or the w for some reason. Don't ask me.

The people of Kilnwick have got themselves a park which is quite amazing considering it was a community initiative and happened thanks to volunteers and donations. Now the youth of Kilnwick have someone nice to pass out when they've injected overdose-inducing quantities of heroin into their sphincters.

The opening of the park was an excuse for a drunken musical event and that's normally right up my street.

This really wasn't though.

As we arrived and paid a fiver to get into a public park there was the sound of blues coming from a tent. It was like BB King, if BB King had been involved in some sort of horrific accident that left him with severe memory loss and unable to play the guitar properly.

Well, at least there was beer.

Sadly it was in the form of Worthington's Smooth, a liquid oxymoron handily served in the kind of flimsy plastic receptacle that sees you lose 10% of the contents as soon as you pick it up.

Never mind, there were people there who I knew that I could talk to. Sadly someone I know, but wish I didn't, spotted us and came over. He's the kind of arsehole that slaps you on the back when he sees you, but does so with the force of someone trying trying to smack the last bit of ketchup out of a stubborn bottle. I made no attempt to make an excuse to walk away from him and just fucked off.

Food would be nice, I thought.

I ordered something called a chicken tortilla. Strange that there wasn't a tortilla in sight and that it was in fact rice and chicken in a presumably supermarket Tex Mex sauce served in a taco bowl. It was tasty though, and helped absorb a few pints of awful beer.

The afternoon had been a lot more kid-friendly (lucky we didn't get there earlier then) and as the sun began to set there were more than a few half-cut fathers wearing dubious facepaint and sporting bejewelled beards.

There were still a few kids milling about, or rather running about unsupervised as is de rigueur these days and one singer had a bit of a quandary over whether or not it was ok to use the word “crap” in a song because of the presence of kids. For fuck's sake.

There was a raffle which I thought was the highlight of the event. I hadn't bought a ticket, but those who had had to be present when the draw was made or they wouldn't be able to claim their prize. Everything was made incredibly difficult by the fact that there were light yellow and dark yellow tickets with the same numbers on them. For those of you watching in black and wait...

The words piss-up and brewery came to mind.

It started to rain which meant watching music from the relative safety of outdoors where I could run back to the car with relative ease and screech away from the park was no longer possible.

A band full of former music students from Hull University rattled out some indie covers and an odd version of Baker Street. I hope the saxophonist can actually play another instrument better than the saxophone otherwise I suspect he gained his degree under false pretences. They were an odd bunch. The drummer seemed to be losing clothes as their set progressed; the lead guitarist looked apologetic, probably because all of his solos consisted of no more than five different notes; the bass player had 70s hair; and the singer/guitarist seemed to be wearing oversized jockey's silks, which presumably made him about three feet tall. There's only so much Oasis and Arctic Monkey circle jerking it's possible to stomach and they went well past the limit.

There was a thankfully early curfew and then for added fun we had to push the car to get it out of the soft ground where we told by a scouser in a hi-vis vest to park earlier.

I suppose we were lucky he didn't nick the wheels.