Parklife (Part 2)

Sunday

The second day of Parklife dawned, and I dragged myself out of bed at 9am to shower and get ready, despite an oncoming hangover. I made a cooked breakfast for those that wanted it, and we again started drinking pretty earl, this time at about 11am. Because we were all slightly flagging, we got the later train at 1.30pm instead, and stopped in the station to get some sandwiches for lunch.

We did the long walk again, although this time the queues were much worse, so despite us only setting off an hour later, we didn't get inside Heaton Park until 3.45pm, narrowly missing Clean Bandit, which we were all pretty gutted about. We stopped off at the bar for drinks (we were on Strongbow dark fruits this time) and then hung around at the main stage until Sam Smith came on. I am not a huge fan, I think he has a great voice but he's just not my thing, but live he had a great rapport with the audience and did all the well known ones, as well as a great cover of Arctic Monkeys 'Do I Wanna Know'.

Directly after him was London Grammar, whose album I have been listening to recently. Their music was top notch, but the performance was let down slightly by their lack of on stage presence, at times we ended up talking through the set as they just weren't holding our attention. Their tracks are quite chilled out and mellow, which would have been great for say early afternoon on the Saturday, but wasn't ideal for 6pm on the Sunday when everyone was starting to feel the effects of a long weekend of drinking and dancing!

Luckily it was Bastille on after them, who completely made the weekend for me. I have already seen them once before and they haven't released another album since, but it made no difference as everything about them is just awesome in my eyes - they can perform well, write unique songs, draw the crowd in, mix up the stage show, and this time they even brought Ella Eyre on to do their song 'No Scrubs' a mashup of The xx's N'o Angels' and TLC's 'Scrubs'. Ella was brilliant, her voice is just phenomenal live, and after London Grammar it got the energy levels up again.

At this point it was getting quite late and we were a bit peckish, so Laura and I went to get a pizza, which was definitely worth the extra money I spent compared to the other takeaways - it was like one from a restaurant! We took them over to the main stage again, where we watched the final act of the day, Foals. They are a little pretentious as a band (the lead singer thinks he's some kind of demi-god) but their music is a bit more like my usual taste, slightly rocky, which was refreshing to hear after a weekend of dance and pop. We caught 15 minutes of Disclosure before having to leave, which would have been good to see the full set, but as I had work the next day I just couldn't chance being ridiculously late home.

We were even earlier home that day, but this time ordered some pizzas in which took a while to arrive, so I got to bed for just after half past midnight, not too bad really. I had a fabulous weekend, much improved on last year, and hope to go again in 2015!