Yup yup, Bebo and Zazzle have teamed up in 'a design a back to school bebo t-shirt competition'!

Here's how it works

• You must have a bebo account.
• Using one of the bebo logos provided (on the competition page), design a back to school t-shirt.
• Upload the design on Zazzle (registering as a member to do so)
• When you upload you make a t-shirt with your design and tag it 'bebocontest01'
• One entry per person allowed only.
• Registered Zazzle users can vote on the entries, but the judges decide who wins on a range of criteria including, but not exclusively, the voting.
• Full rules here.

You can check out the other entries, and vote on them here.

My entry is pictured above, and I beg of you to go and vote on it! It seems you must have a Zazzle account to vote, but sure you may as well sign up and enter the competition while your at it

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!

Yes I know I promised my rundown of Electric Picnic 07, and I will write it up I promise, but I didn't get time after the Picnic before I had to rush off to London for my cousin's wedding. I headed to London a little early too, in order to catch Prince play at the O2 arena in London.

I've wanted to see Prince since I was about 13 or so... then when I was 14 he played Cork and I was all set to go. Until my mother found out it was called the Nude tour. It was called the Nude tour because it was a stripped down set with the focus being put back on the music, no fancy gimmicks etc, but I think my mother imagined all kinds of naked shenanigans on stage... I suppose you can hardly blame her when you listen to some of his music, but there you go.

Ever since then I've wanted to see him live. In fact, last year I originally got interested in Electric Picnic because there was a rumour Prince would play - which turned out to be complete bullshit.

Aaaaannnyway, I went to see Prince at the O2 Arena in London and it was incredible. He has been doing 21 gigs there over the last month, and I had heard they were hit and miss - but we obviously caught him in a good mood. The set was fantastic. I was way up the back, sitting on what felt like a cliff face which looked down over the stage which was shaped like the Prince symbol.

Despite being way up the back, we had a great view, and the sound... the sound was INCREDIBLE. Having just come from EP07, I think I had forgotten how good concert sound could be. Don't get me wrong - I'm the biggest EP fan you could meet, but let's face it the sound sucks pretty bad at a lot of the gigs...

Anyway, I'm being sidetracked, and I'm in an internet cafe in London and I only have a few minutes left, so let's wrap this up.

• Prince did an INCREDIBLE version of Purple Rain.
• Prince sang 'Sometimes it Snows in April' - which for no apparent reason is one of my favourite songs of his and it sent shivers up my spine.
• Prince is an incredibly talented fucker.

I will leave you with Prince playing 'Sometimes it Snows in April' less well than he did in the O2, and I promise I will tell you about my EP07 experience soon:

It was good to wake up in a bed with access to a kettle, a toaster, food and a couch & tv. But I'd trade it all to be back in a hot tent in a mucky field with a vague smell of sewerage and the prospect of endless amazing music gigs ahead...

My rundown of my weekend to come, possibly tomorrow, I have to make an attempt to work for now...

I was interested to see Nialler9's Ruff Guide to EP, it's always interesting to see what others are rating highly in the line up.

So here is my current timetable, based on the leaked schedule because the up to dat official schedule has not appeared yet... ffs.

Anyway - red and blue items are what I definitely want to make it along to. Red is my top riority, and blue is my second priority. Grey items are items that were part of my priorities but had to be relegated due to timetable clashes. Some of the clashes I'm still torn about, but this is my hypothetical list anyway. I may be swayed by my mood or by who is going to various gigs.

But this gives you an idea of who I am recommending for the Festival anyway.

There's a table for each day, ordered by time, from early in the day (top) to late at night (bottom).

Hey, if you're really indecisive and don't know what to see at Electric Picnic, print this out and I'll see you at the gigs!

Well, we're still waiting for the official schedule, but an artist booklet for EP07 fell into my hands and the schedule tallies with Nialler9's - but there are rumours of changes since the artists booklet would have been released a while back.

While we're waiting why not check out Nialler9's quick guide to the Electric Picnic.

The official Schedule is due out today, so I am waiting with bated breath hoping that some of the tough decisions will be alleviated by it...

In the meantime, Colin, a commenter at Nialler9.com, left a link to a PDF download of a lovely visual schedule which allows you to easily see clashes in your preferred acts.

1. Daft Punk's movie Electroma is playing in the cinema there on Sunday morning at 10.45 until noon. See trailer below.
2. Tim Biskup will be giving a talk on Sunday night as part of the Sweetnness and Light talks. Tim Biscup is a guy who draws cool stuff. I have a little monster of his sitting on my computer. he did the painting above.

Nialler9 provides us with an EP07 unofficial schedule that 'fell off a lorry! Nice.

With thanks to Nialler9, check out the schedule for:

Electric Picnic Schedule: Friday
Electric Picnic Schedule: Saturday
Electric Picnic Schedule: Sunday

Please visit the above links for the schedule, in the meantime, here are my first (red) and second (normal) priorities with time and stage... I can see I have some revising of my schedule to do, some conflicts in there that will mean some tough decisions. Well, that was bound to happen.

plus, as the Picnic draws near I keep discovering more bands I want to see. My head is going to explode!!!

Thought I had posted this already, but it deosn't look like I did. Hot Chip. Electric Picnic, Friday.