While the festival really gets underway on Friday every year, there’s certainly no shortage of music to get your teeth into after the gates have opened. William’s Green is always an entertaining stage to be at on the Thursday, with a selection of bands who’ll be playing sets on the larger stages later in the weekend. Before heading to William’s Green for the secret sets, however, we took to the Bandstand near Green Futures to catch Leeds based rapper Mik Artistik. Lyrically the laughs didn’t stop coming over a lengthy set, with songs about plastic foxes and £3 watches from the market. The music was typically upbeat too, with a supporting cast of a guitarist and bassist bringing the funk. The set didn’t feel like it would ever end (I mean that in a good way!), but not even the people running the stage seemed concerned; I’ve never seen such a huge crowd for The Bandstand.
Heading over to William’s Green, we were by then very aware that the bands coming up were The 1975 and Metronomy. It seemed, based on the huge crowd heading in after the entertaining Musical Bingo, that this was pretty common knowledge. William’s Green got hot. Fast. The 1975‘s set was fairly up beat and most of the crowd seemed to be really enjoying it. There was a bit of an incident with a can thrown at the frontman (seriously? Why would you do that?) but for the most part the set went off without hitch and set the atmosphere for William’s Green early on. Metronomy were on another level though! They’re a band that I do like, but have never been massively into them in the past – catching them live has certainly changed that! Live there was an amazing energy to the songs and, filling the tent with sound easily. Metronomy play the Park Stage tonight at 11pm, and come highly recommended, even if they do clash with Arcade Fire. The 1975 play the Pyramid Stage on Sunday at 2:45pm. Mik Artistik plays the Avalon Cafe today at 1:30pm, The Summer House on Saturday at 5:30pm (as part of his “Ego Trip”) and a few others dotted around. He comes highly recommended.
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