What with working, the mud and the sheer weight of numbers with nearly 30,000 extra bodies onsite, I’m afraid my usual wanderings from stage to stage were severely curtailed this year and I saw considerably less acts than I usually manage to catch. Even with the 12X optical zoom on my Lumix lens I was too far away from the stage to get any sort of reasonable shots of the likes of Bjork or Shirley Bassey. Many of those that I did get were impaired by waving flags & camera booms or the sheer distance I was from the stage, so I’m afraid that several of these photos aren’t up to the standard that I had hoped for.
The musical highlight for me was definitely Damon Albarn’s African Express collaboration on the Park Stage on Saturday night. The list of names he managed to attract to that small stage away from all of the main action of the festival was simply jaw dropping & I spent an amazing evening there with a very special new friend and probably no more than a few hundred other hardy souls who braved the conditions to get there. The photo that I got of Albarn & Norman Cook together is probably the highlight of my stage photography efforts to date but there are several others from the evening that I am also very proud of & I hope they are a fitting memento for those who were lucky enough to experience such a wonderful evening.
3 Daft Monkeys
In the Bimble Inn
Stumbled across by chance
Reverend & The Makers
Marc Vedo
Chimanimani
Seth Lakeman does a solo set
Eugene Hutz
with Gogol Bordello
I'll get closer at Beautiful Days
Bikini Beach Band
Shortly before Janet Jackson style "Wardrobe Malfunction"