Beautiful Days

Beautiful Days is a yearly festival conceived and organised by the Levellers and takes place every August at Ottery Saint Mary in Devon. This year was my third time and as an added bonus Lynne was able to get the time off to go with me.

We arrived at Escot Park and managed to get the tent up before the rain set in and the wind picked up on Thursday and although the sun was out by Friday lunchtime the festival site was boggin' for the rest of the weekend.



Despite a wet start though, the 10th Beautiful Days festival was as good as ever with the usual great variety of bands and entertainment that makes this one of my favourite events of the year. A wide selection of ales and potent ciders also help keep the thirst at bay.




Highlights of the weekend for me were getting to see Toots and the Maytels for the first time and a fantastic performance by Alabama 3. Also well worthy of note were Hobo Jones and the Junkyard Dogs, Richard Thompson, Dub Pistols, Dreadzone, P.I.L., New Model Army, Reel Big Fish and of course The Levellers.

http://www.beautifuldays.org/

Frodsham Frenzy

A great weekend organised by Ste of the XJROC and hosted by Paul and Cath at the Cheshire Cheese in Frodsham.

For a change this year we had some sun and good weather which meant we got to do a fantastic rideout instead of the weekend becoming one long piss up around the local pubs. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Saturday's ride took us on a marathon eight hour tour of North Wales, taking in the Horseshoe Pass, Conwy, Abergele and some awsome roads returning from Betwys-Y-Coed.

A big thanks to all involved and cheers to Ste for making it all happen.

Free Download - DieMonsterDie

  I recently got into horror punk / metal band DieMonsterDie after hearing them get lots of plays on the Diablocast podcast. To my great pleasure I found their 2010 album "Fall To Your Knees" available to to download for free from Bandcamp.

Although only fifteen tracks appear on the page, the download actually had sixteen tracks, the extra one being a great cover of "Dead Flowers".

Influences include Black Sabbath, Type O Negative, Gwar, Ramones, Misfits, GG Allin, Slayer, Alice Cooper and more.

Head on over to http://diemonsterdieslc.bandcamp.com/album/fall-to-your-knees for the free download in a choice of digital audio formats. If you like what you hear you can buy more from the back catalogue of DieMonsterDie for as little as $5, that's something like a measly three and a half quid for us here in the UK.