5th - 7th August 2005

The Big Chill Eastnor Festival.

The fourth year that the Big Chill have held their increasingly successful festival at this lovely location in the Malverns.

This year, the crowd numbered some 30,000 people, and the weather smiled down on everyone all weekend, apart from some pretty heavy showers on the Thursday evening.

Now let me think... I'm writing this about a month after the event, so my memory is a little hazy. We took a leisurely drive over to the Malverns from North Devon, where we'd been at the wedding of Karen and Simon. So we arrived on the Thursday late afternoon to family and friends who were already there; we'd managed to secure our usual spot in quiet camping, which was pretty cool. After we'd arrived, there seemed to be a steady flow of mates turning up, most of whom seem to have acquired campervans. so we formed a neat little community in no time at all! Keiran and Kate have kindly donated an awning to attach to the side of our campervan, so we errected that before it started pissing it down later that evening.

Again, Thursday night was my only night 'off', so I made good use of it, getting drunk me thinks.

So, the Friday. I gave an exclusive interview to Kate and Kieran at Big Chill FM in the morning, chatting about what I'd been up to over the last twelve months. This was also the day where I'd organised an afternoon and early evening in the Finlandia Cocktail bar. Basically, the coup was that all the artists signed to Big Chill Recordings were given an alloted time slot of around five hours to programme pretty much what they wanted. I decided to get my family in to play some records! First up, we had Stuart Nisbet kicking things off in style with some nice mellow disco grooves. He warmed up for my Mum and Dad, whoi bucked the usual DJing trend and announced what they were playing - in each instance giving a potted history of why they'd chosen each particular track. It was a fascinating and quite emotional set - I ended up getting a bit tearful for some reason... Anyway, after they'd finished, I played some stuff for about twenty minutes before Jake Bickerton made his DJ debut with a storming selection of tracks which quite surprised me - I was assuming that Jake would choose some acoustic 'songs', but he played upbeat and really got into the whole 'DJ performance' thing too, something which his brother Patrick is very good at!

So after Jake, my wife Nina and sisters Julie and Claire (heavily pregnant with first child) made their appearance playing an eighties soul revival set which was hugely appreciated by the crowd which had swelled to quite a large number by this point. It's fair to say that Nina assumed the role of DJ while Julie provided the 'performance' and Claire bopped around behind the decks pressing the odd button here and there. A fantastic set! It was left to Patrick (aka Peepshow Paddy) to round the evening's entertainment off, which he did in his inimitable style, playing a great D&B set with some of the smoothest mixing I've heard from him. The crowd loved it, as did he! Gotta say that for me, this day was the highlight of the entire weekend.

Considering my initial sceptisism (and a few others too) I'm convinced that it was a riproaring success!

The Saturday kicked off with Pete Lawrence and myself doing the breakfast show on Big Chill FM. After a rather slow start, we got into the swing of things with some great music, some silly things like Karaoke and a revealing interview with Jez from the Swingle Singers.

The Saturday night was when I was doing my main alucidnation gig on the Sanctuary stage; mixed feelings at the time, but looking back on it, it was a great gig. I had a full tent; about 1500 people grooving to a more upbeat selection than I'm usually known for. Ed did a great job on visuals, considering that the equipment that he'd been promised didn't turn up. Hey ho.

On the Sunday night, I was supposed to be playing my traditional slot on Big Chill FM, very late, just before Mixmaster Morris, but instead I had an early night, and failed to wake up in time to do the show...

Yeah, it was a great weekend, but all in all, a bit too big for me in order to thoroughly enjoy myself.

Click here to visit the Big Chill Eastnor 2005 site.

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