Blog
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT by foals
22-06-2008
we left oxford a couple of days ago to begin what is known in the music world as "festival season". (you might be familiar with it.) we were driving to germany to play our first show at hurricane festival--one of the biggest european festivals. things were going well: it was a balmy evening, awkward hugs were shared, beers were drunk, and much guitar hero was played, before one by one we passed out in our tiny sweaty little bunks. but then, at 5 am the next morning, as we were driving off the ferry at calais, this happened:
it doesn't look too bad, does it? well, no, it wasn't. a little scratch, some bumps, and an upset spanish lorry driver. big deal! i sat up in bed briefly thinking that we had driven over some sort of farm animal, but cheerfully went back to sleep assuming because the scream of metal on metal had died down that maybe the animal had died too. jimmy woke up to see a lorry only a few inches from his head, but he went back to sleep as well, assuming with like a good abingdon boy that everything would work itself out in the end.
about an hour later, the window fell out.
if it hadn't, we would have made it to hurricane. unfortunately EU regulations being as they are (that is: excessive, unfair, undemocratic, shambolic, elitist, crypto-fascist, etc... etc....), we weren't allowed to drive anywhere with half a window. and so we had to stay sat like miserable little shits on a square mile on tarmac staring at car ferries coming and going for 14 hours waiting for someone to come and fix it.
this wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't landed in a bureaucratic vacuum. physically we were in france, but technically we were still in the uk. to find food, we had to enter france, but we couldn't do this on foot without a valid foot passenger ticket. as we'd been on a bus, we didn't have one. no-one understood this. once inside france, after much wrangling, we couldn't leave to get back into the "uk" without the same valid foot passenger ticket, and of course by then all the staff had changed, no-one knew anything about us, no-one cared, and of course, being in france, no-one spoke english. feeling like something between a squid and a whale, the word that came to mind was kafka-esque.
instead of eating, this is how some of us spent the day.
i mostly just played guitar hero.
anyway, what i'm trying to say is that we missed hurricane festival. to everyone who was hoping to see us: sorry. we made it to southside festival earlier today, finally, and it went okay. i appear to have some sort of minor heatstroke, which is usually a good sign.
and now? a 16 hour drive to sweden.
xx