Electric Picnic 07 overview - some stuff that rocked and some that sucked...

So I'm ages late with my rundown of Electric Picnic, but I'm sure many of you will still be suffering from EP07 withdrawal symptoms and will be glad of a latecoming reminder of the fun, the mayhem... and the crappy bits.

Before I get to my rundown of all the excellent music I witnessed, which I will get around to writing, I just want to do a quick overview including the things that pissed me off - just to get them out of the way.

Easier than last year!
The first thing to be said of EP07 is that having done my first EP (indeed my first music festival) last year, this year I found it all much easier.

Getting there and getting set up seemed a hell of a lot easier than last year.

We stayed in Portlaois on the Thursday night, saving us having to do the whole trip from Cork on the Friday morning and we packed less, making the trek from the car to the camping area much easier.

Camping area.
I had heard the camping area was to be increased, and it certainly semed more spacious to me (I notice Jim Carroll's readers don't necessarily agree) we found space no problem in the red campsite near enough to the main arena and we had space to move friends in around us during the day on Friday. I think we could even have squeezed in another two man tent we'd had to!

Toilets.
This year the toilets were less horrific than last year - I would have to say I found it easier than last year to locate a toilet quickly, and that they were generally in a usable state except very early in the mornings when they were nightmarish.

Showers
How the hell would I know? I couldn't be bothered finding them! Yes I smelled.

Drinking water.
More effort could be made to provide drinking water. There were taps next to some of the toilets - which were not clearly marked as drinking water, so for all I know it wasn't suitable for drinking, but I went with the crowd and drank it anyway. Because of my awful sense of direction I could never remember which toilets had the taps and which didn't.

Clearly marked, easy to find taps for drinking water in the main arena and the camping sites would be seriously worth addressing.

As for buying water, River Rock was the most common bottled water available - the one bottled water I routinely avoid. Not because it's a Coke product, and not because of the stories I heard about bromide and other odd things they ad to it, but because it just tastes odd. And as well as tasting odd it went for anything from €1.50 to €3 a bottle. €3 for one of those crappy tiny little bottles, the smallest water bottles you can buy!

Didn't they have standards last year about how much you could charge for stuff, including water? Surely 3 bucks for a tiny bottle of water must be outside their acceptable prices?

Great food.
The food was great, and plenty of quality stalls so that you never had to queue too long - unless you insisted on always eating at the most popular stalls! Body and Soul area had some great stalls - what's the name of the stall with the Chai tea that was there last year too? Also the West Cork Food stall was great and the Bangers and Mash stall for comfort food breakfasts!

The sound sucks.
My biggest gripe with Electric Picnic is the sound. It's pretty terrible. I had a fantastic weekend and I saw some incredible acts and I thoroughly enjoyed them... but my enjoyment would have been so much more if the sound was any good. Several of the acts seemed to be trying to compensate for the lack of sound quality with volume, which only made matters worse.

You have to be right up the front and center to get any kind of sound quality at all of the stages, from what I experienced, and even then the sound is often only alright.

But I didn't hate it!
I guess after reading this you could be forgiven for thinking I went around all weekend moaning about stuff, but in fact I had an incredible weekend, and didn't moan at all... I saved it all for this blog post

The Festival is wonderful, and I hope they keep making improvements while retaining the smaller size.

I will be buying my tickets for next year as soon as I can!