Beni ‘06

I'd never been to a music festival before last
summer. Yeah sure I'd been to the odd free festival or party in the
park, and hey even a day at Reading Festival in 2004, but last summer
was the start - the biggie.  I guess I'd always been a bit scared of
mud, and of camping. Never having camped as a kid, I didn't understand
how you fit in a tent never mind sleep in one.

Summer 2005 was
to change it all, as we booked tickets for Glastonbury, Reading and
Exit (Serbia), and even toyed with the idea of Bestival. The camping
issue had to be sorted though, and a trip to Argos saw us buying a
moderately expensive (but well worth it) comfy airbed duvet combo bed to go inside our tent. I still scowled mind.

Glastonbury
was incredibly muddy, Reading scary, but Exit? Well Exit was the dream.
Held at the top of a fortress overlooking the Danube, we spent 5 days
in Novi-Sad listening to music, eating meat and drinking very cheap vodka, but admittedly mainly eating meat.  This
year with no Glastonbury, we pondered a return to Exit (if only to eat
at the incredibly good restaurant we ate at on our final night), and
even attempted to figure out if we could afford a trip to America to
Coachella. One year, but not this one.

Instead we, like many other
Brits, plumped for Benicassim a Spanish festival held in Benicassim town, near Valencia.  In past years line-ups have sounded great and this year was to be no exception. Plane tickets were booked many moons ago but we refrained from buying tickets hoping that we might be able to acquire them via a different method. Then, normal tickets sold out, and we were left quite frankly shitting ourselves. Then like a shining beacon from above Melodytrip appeared and asked if we'd like to cover the festival for them. Via complicated accreditation systems, our tickets only got confirmed last week and now we look forward to an early wake-up tomorrow and a lovely flight from Gatwick to Barcelona before checking out whether Spanish trains are any better than their English counterparts.

No worries about camping this year, as we've got a room in a swanky air conditioned bungalow on one of the campsites. Yup we're going to be one of those jammy gits who rock up into a little house, instead of sleeping on the floor. Hooray! Other than camping, I was somewhat afriad of the heat out there but it seems that the UK is going to be even hotter than Spain this week meaning we can't rub it in the
faces of our non-Benicassim-going friends - bah! It doesn't help that
we're writing this in an air conditioned basement in London with no
concept of the weather outside either. I get the feeling I really shouldn't be looking forward to the tube journey home though.

We'll be bringing you all the gossip and news from the festival as well as telling you which bands sucked, which set our little hearts on fire, and how many rock stars we manage to convince Kim to introduce us too. Catch our coverage over here.