V Festival 2015 - Hylands Park

This may just be the best pass offer from Jukely yet! There was a pre-warning that passes would go live 2 days before, so I set myself a reminder and grabbed 2 passes for Saturday at Highlands Park in Chelmsford. After a bit of a palaver picking up our tickets, we finally made it into the site just in time for James Bay.

I’ve been a fan of James Bay since the beginning (Spotify even confirmed I was in the top 1% of users listening to him before the hype!) so it’s been great to see him grow and play to bigger audiences. After his set, that had everyone singing, we legged it to one of the tents to catch the end of Tove Lo’s set. Next, we wandered around the rest of the site, taking in the fairground rides and market stalls. We finally bought ourselves friendship bracelets, picked up some vintage accessories, and grabbed ourselves some tasty food!

Amy bought us some seafood and chicken paella, and a chorizo dish with rice. I definitely preferred the seafood to the chorizo – absolutely delicious! We sat in the shade eating and listening to The Courteeners' set from the main stage. Dessert came in the form of a Twister ice lolly from one of the many ice cream vans scattered around the site. Fed and watered, it was time to get our place for Hozier’s very much anticipated set. That man has such a beautiful voice, which was even more so in the glorious sunshine.

After Hozier’s set, we had to make a dash to the MTV stage where we managed to catch the last few songs from Chvrches. Their new stuff is sounding great! The crowds around this stage started to quickly fill up as next on was the legend that is Sir Tom Jones!! This was who me and Amy were most excited to see. His snazzy version of Sexbomb was probably my highlight of the festival, closely followed by Imelda May joining him on stage for a couple of songs. This made me exceptionally happy as we’d missed her own set earlier that day.

We joined the crowd at the main stage for a couple of Kasabian’s tunes before heading into the Arena tent for Nero’s spectacular lightshow! Their set was intensely epic, with only the 2 DJ’s silhouettes visible in front of a brightly lit perfect white triangle. Nero’s songs feature such amazing build-ups, they’re perfect for festivals with your bestest friends!

Did you go to V Festival? Who did you manage to catch?

Citadel Festival 2015

I'm going to start with a little bit of advice; don’t decide to have a house party the night before going to an all-day music festival. This is exactly what happened when Me and Amy went to Citadel Festival. Luckily, it wasn't so bad for us as Citadel isn't the type of festival for full on moshing and dancing around like a loon. This brand new one day festival is on the Sunday following 2 day festival, Lovebox. Citadel is to be treated as a calm-down after the electronic dance extravaganza the previous 2 nights. The artists signed up are mellower and perfect for easy listening in the sun.

First up was Tor Miller on the Communion Presents stage. I was quite gutted to have missed out on seeing Tor earlier this year, so was happy we had managed to drag our hungover asses to Vicky Park in time for his set. He was the perfect start to our somewhat fragile day, with his beautiful voice over sweet piano melodies.

Next up were punky babes, Honeyblood, who gave us the wake up kick we really needed before we took a wander around the rest of the festival site, picking up a cocktail ice lolly from Lickalix on the way. I was extremely glad to find some vintage stalls where I bought a new pair of sunnies, as silly me forgot mine. Dust, breeze and my big eyes do not mix well, so they were quite the life-saver!!

It was back to the Communion Presents stage where we listened to Rhodes whilst ordering some more drinks in the sun. It’s strange that I’d heard of more of the acts on the supporting stage than on the main stage. We stuck around for Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, who were a lot of fun!

After Nathaniel, it was finally time for the 2 main acts that I was there to see. First was a firm favourite of mine, Dan Croll. I was pretty excited to hear some of his new songs from his upcoming album! After Dan, we took another wander, grabbing ourselves some food (these croquets from Croquetas Vigar were delicious, especially the chicken one!). Having filled our bellies, it was back to the Communion stage for the enigmatic Leon Bridges who took us back to the 1950’s with his swinging set. We had to miss the last 2 songs to run over and catch Bombay Bicycle Club, as I’d never seen them live before so really didn't want to miss them!

BBC had everything in their set; giant colour streamers, clouds of confetti and fantastic fireworks! We only stayed for about a third of Ben Howard’s set. He sounded lovely, but it was all just a bit too mellow for us. I'm not sure Howard is really the best festival closer. I think someone a bit more lively would've fitted better. We did pretty well at sticking around for so long, seeing as we were in quite the fragile state for most of the day! So it was off home to bed, but not before getting a few snaps of the fairground as we left.

Did anyone else manage to get along to this new festival? Who did you see? Was there anyone that you didn't manage to catch but wish you had? I'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments below!

Be sure to check out my monthly gig round-up for July to see who else I caught live!

Thanks for reading :)