V Festival Stafford - Brilliant, brilliant music - cool crowd!

Well, that's V over for another year - 2007 was the coldest and wettest festival we've ever been to - utterly miserable conditions on site - all down to that bloody wind chill factor we think. It's been wet and chilly at many other festivals this year but V really was something else altogether! Never, in all my years of festival going, have I ever had to buy a pair of gloves in august! Thank God for those wonderful army type stalls is all I can say!

The organisation at this one was par for the course really, nothing too bad (except the traffic - much more to be said about that!) just the usual get 'em in there - make sure you confiscate anything and everything so that we can make people buy at over inflated prices in the arena - rip off food and drink prices - next to no shelter and not enough toilets - it really is the festival of the queue - you queue in big long boring queues for everything at V. Fortunately the organisers put the programme on line so we were able to download it - thus saving ourselves being ripped off for the out of date programme that they sell for several million squid. So a big well done for that - it really helped - oh and a big well done for letting weekend people into the arena properly on Sunday - thank you.

Shocked and dismayed at the booze on offer - we don't normally drink but it was so awful weather wise we actually wanted alcohol - all we could find on site was crap chav drinks - really, really poor - we would have paid almost anything for a decent drink! As for the beer tokens system - what can you say? what a stupid system and what extra potential to get money for nothing - that's a worry it doesn't seem to be a fair system at all.

The food on offer is the most awful array of poor quality crap on the whole - there is the odd good food stall but everyone knows about those and if you want something decent you're gonna have to get into that huge queue - we found some great real sausages but we also found so much overpriced crap and an awful lot of service with a snarl! many stalls had failed to bring in enough provisions and were running out of basics - and as for £3 for a cup of putrid, semi warm coffee! - I suppose you get used to it but it should be legal to give these rip off merchants a quick slap in my opinion!

Why oh why did they put Frank Spencer in charge of traffic at Stafford?
All festivals seem unable to grasp the simple concept that there will be a lot of traffic attending the event - a lot of traffic needs careful planning in order for it to run relatively smoothly, clearly it would be utterly stupid to put someone in charge who knows how to do this as it would spoil the fun of many organisers who think it is a much better use of resources to let the customer suffer and thus sit back and take the piss. It is abundantly clear that piss taking is a major pastime for most event organisers, why would you put your efforts into making sure your customer can get in and out of the event when you can have so much more fun making them suffer - god they must really, really hate us! In fact there's probably a CCTV set up somewhere where they put their feet up and enjoy the spoils of the atrocious organisation they managed to cobble together probably at the very last minute. Clearly and despite knowing how many tickets were sold they were unable to work out an approximate number of vehicles arriving on site or to make an educated guess at what times people might be traveling - thus they even had to close off the motorway slip road! Once you finally get there you'd think the notorious drop off and pick up points would at least run smoothly wouldn't you? nah - don't be daft - it's all part of the fun - why would you make it possible for taxis to be able to get on and off site properly? it's a much cooler idea to make it as difficult as possible - that way you can sit back and watch while exhausted festival goers who booked a taxi for 11-30 are still desperately trying to get an overpriced car at 2am! much, much more fun!

If we were as incompetent in our business as these people are at organising the traffic we wouldn't have a business - and to think that they get paid a premium for it! It seems that event organisation is a mecca for the grossly incompetent and they all seem to gain employment there, I don't know about you but if I did my job that badly I wouldn't have one - you guys should be utterly ashamed of yourselves for the gross incompetence you displayed at the V festival - we don't suppose for one minute you will be though - always an excuse and usually a bad one. Come on here - it's not rocket science - is it???

Cool festival crowd as always at the Stafford V - isn't it great that us festival goers are so laid back and so prepared to put up with the fact that we are treated as if we don't matter - especially when we spend so much of our hard earned dosh at the event - don't really feel like a valued customer or that we matter to the event organisers in any small way at all - once they have your money they seem to be free to do whatever they chose to you - and we have to like it or lump it - we mainly put up with it because at the end of the day it's the bands and the crowd who make the festival - and most of us are well into the music - we love our bands and they are what make the festival what it is.

Still - what it's all really about is the music and we saw some awesome performances over the weekend, well done to everybody who played and to all those amazing production people who did the stages and the lighting and all those things that make a show utterly awesome - said it before and will be saying it again - there are some simply hugely, hugely talented people out there - and it's not just our favourite performers!

We loved Rebbeca - they did an awesome little set and didn't disappoint - we expected something brilliant and we got it - these guys are going to be big news very soon - whatever else you do check them out - seriously good music!

Newton Faulkner was put on in a silly little tent - too many people wanted to see him and couldn't - we certainly couldn't get into the tent and the sound didn't travel outside - got this one a bit wrong!

Kasabian stormed it and although the Killers were great we felt it was the wrong way round - Kasabian rocked and were worthy headliners!

Iggy and the Stooges were storming it and showed the others a thing or two about how to be a proper rocker!

Mumm-Ra rocked - good on you guys!

We also loved KanYe West, The Fratellis, KT Tunstall, James Morrison, The Proclaimers, Juliette and the Licks, Mika, James, Pink, Snow Patrol, Paolo Nutini, Martha Wainwright, Ghosts - Jarvis was awesome. Fab performances from everyone we saw - we just missed so much - there's only so much time to get around and there's certainly loads to see.

All in all and grumbles aside - V is a good festival and we love the Stafford V. We think it's just a gnats chuff away from being a truly great festival - sort out a few of those organisational difficulties and it would be a blinder - great acts - nice site - cool crowd - all the ingredients are there - sort it out guys because we left before the Sunday headliner purely because in that weather we just couldn't face another traffic cock up when we were facing a 3 hour drive! don't we deserve better?

We will be adding an image gallery - sadly the rain killed our camera during the Proclaimers so we haven't got much from the Sunday but we have some nice Saturday pics!