Anonymous Festival

I am rubbish at updating this. I intended on writing a blog for every festival we played at to chronicle all the HILARIOUS hi-jinks we get up to. I obviously forgot though. So you will never know about all the other festivals that we taught how to 'Buffalo' or how we played at another festival called Lakeside that was a lot of fun and ended up with me smoking pot with a load of 'Hip Hop Dudes' in a sausage factory. Or how we supported a circus in Germany and spent all day complaining about all the 'fucking clowns'. To be fair none of it was that funny anyway.

Now that all the outdoor festivals are done though. I feel I should write about my favourite. My favourite festival we played this year was the Anonymous Festival in Dorchester.

The Anonymous festival was held at an old Roman Amphitheater in Dorchester and was organised by Dorchester Youth Extra. They are kids improving the area they live in. They got a skate park built recently too. It was a pretty surreal thing to play. All the other bands were from the local area. I was impressed with the quality of them. Local bands in Poole, which is where I grew up and just down the road, were all terrible when I lived there. Apparently the high quality now is due to a local studio all the kids get to use for free (or cheap) in Bridport. Of all the acts I saw the person I was most impressed with was a guy in the acoustic tent called Aiden Smith. He had loads of songs about stealing cars, drinking and all the women he has loved. Pretty impressive for a 15 year old boy.

The festival was pretty strange. Everybody seemed to have fun though despite the rain and the consequent closure of the climbing wall. My favourite part of the whole event is when they got the Dorset Youth Extra people to go up and say thank you to everybody for coming and for helping them put the festival together. The music took a bit longer than expected to come back on and they ended up ribbing each other, saying good bye to one of their best friends who was moving away and thanking almost everybody they knew for about 15 minutes, whilst the crowd just watched on confused. I think it was a very sweet moment and that it should be compulsury at all festivals.

Onstage at Anonymous I joked that as a child I had a dream, an ambition, to sing very personal songs in a roman amphitheater, reasonably near to where I was born, in the rain, in front of both my parents. As I was saying it though I realised it was actually a pretty amazing thing I was getting to do and got shivers up my spine.

So no jokes this time. Or mass 'Buffalo-ing' just a surreal but very warm experience in a roman amphitheater in the rain.

In my eagerness to big up the 'Kids' who put the festival on I forgot to thank Emma and her husband who both worked really hard for weeks probably months to put the festival on and let us hide in their house when it rained.

It was only the first Anonymous Festival but I hope it carries on for decades to come.