Live At Leeds 2013

I think this is my 5th Live at Leeds. For any of you not aware this is a 3-day music festival set in the city centre across 15 venues on May Bank Holiday Weekend. The main event is the Saturday with an array of over 100 different artists playing sets. It’s always a great day and a highlight of my year. The power walks across town to get to a different venue, the odd beer or two along the way.

I’m a bit of a geek so put quite a lot of time into firing up Spotify or YouTube to listen to the artists on the bill in order to select who I want to see (and who I definitely don’t!) So with my plan in hand (well on phone on the useful and well designed new app), off we went. Now don’t get me wrong, this is a great value festival at less than £25 and you will always get some bands that are more popular than others or bands like The 1975 who have got immensely popular in a short amount of time and certainly after they were booked for a pretty early slot but…there was a feel of having got “too big for your boots”. I’m pretty sure that the local news report said that they’d sold 20000 tickets. I’m not claiming this as fact and despite trawling the internet I can find no confirmation that this hasn’t been completely misheard. My issue is that, if this is true, this is surely more than the combined capacity of the venues? Two more bugbears; some pretty miserable staff in the wristband exchange, why oh why has Trinity Church ripped out the pews (there goes my traditional mid LAL sit-down opportunity!) and can the entire world lose it’s desire to talk all the way through gigs…particularly annoying in the echoeyness of the church but a general issue everywhere. The upshot was that by we couldn’t be bothered fighting to get in everywhere so we headed home after seeing nine bands and artists. Nine – for twenty quid? Despite my grumbles that’s pretty good value. Below I’ve put video links to the artists we saw. I’m not going to “review” them, you can make up your own mind but here’s my three tips (in no particular order):

1) We Were Frontiers – Leeds band, early slot, great developed sound, blew me away

2) George Ezra – could sing the Yellow Pages and it would still sound amazing

3) Luke Sital Singh – I’ve been playing “Fail For You” for months thanks to 6Music. Hearing it live in the gorgeous Holy Trinity Church was the highlight of my LAL 2013

Here’s my video playlist (in order of bands seen); Listen, enjoy, comment…

Georgia Thursting