Welcome to the second reel, glad that you could make it. With the first five songs of the track listing down, ending with the wonderfully fun trip to the Lake District for my birthday, after a brief break it is time to flip the metaphorical record and make hasty plans for the remainder. Hyperballad has been a long time coming, not only because of a mid-summer’s break, but because it is probably the hardest of all to decide what exactly we are doing. It’s not through a lack of ideas though; Bjork’s 1996 classic is descriptive of a place, on top of a cliff, of a feeling of warmth from those close to you, of wanton rebellion, and of car parts, bottles and cutlery. The problem is, there are too many ideas, so I starting wondering ... read more

Getting out of bed is the hardest part of the day, no matter what the day brings. This particular day brought, to begin with, a huge breakfast, justifying the decision to get up. Pauline was up with the lark, making good our fruit and porridge while cooking up a locally reared fried breakfast and home-made bread. She chatted away to us after fattening us up considerably, and I could see it was a struggle for the others to leave the comfort of The Craglands, but we had a mountain to climb. That was all in the afternoon, of course, so we headed down the old railway path, across the edge of town and down to the lake, via an antique record shop selling vinyl I own for much more than it was actually worth, and past ... read more

30 years. It’s a long time. Days before I was born, MTV was first broadcast. Days after, IBM released the very first personal computer. Imagine a world with no computers and no music videos. It’s almost unthinkable. That’s not to say that these monumental events have added unlimited perfection to our lives, after all would the world really miss the vision of Lady Gaga humping an inflatable dolphin? Probably not. More to the point, would anybody care about Lady Gaga’s bland generic hip-hop if it wasn’t for her controversial imagery and style that make full use of both the internet and the music video? Again, I really do wonder. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that these two events created much of the world as we know it now. In between these two massive occasions, though, was ... read more

Sleeping at a festival is a funny business. Apart from the loss of home comforts and getting used to sleeping on hard, lumpy ground, there is the strange sensation of sunrise. Not the sight of it, as you might imagine, but the sound, because at sunrise, everything changes. After the bands finish at the big festivals, the night rumbles, people stumble and the drinks keep flowing. Once you decide it’s time to leave the party and close the tent door for the night, all you can hear is a steady noise, thousands of mingling conversations all merging into one. It’s a noise that you eventually get used to, and it soon becomes a friendly lullaby that rocks you to sleep. It’s probably something I wouldn’t even have ever noticed if it wasn’t for the sunrise; for ... read more

The ghosts didn’t come to take us in the night, nor did the hotel burn down or any number of eventualities described to us the previous evening. I don’t think anything strange happened anyway, but if it had, I probably would have sleep through it. The Ben Craig Hotel served us well, comfortable beds, hot water and breakfast. Proper breakfast as well, not self served toast that had a tendency to burn if you took your eye off it for a second. We made the most of it, checked out and headed into the city for our only full day in Edinburgh, after the delayed train excitement of Friday. The only definite place to visit on our list was the Camera Obscura, mainly because, as the music was guiding us on this trip, and Camera Obscura ... read more