OFF: The Lizard Festival

[Chris Warburton]

This cropped up on the "Wire" mailing list, and I thought it might be of
some general interest.  Interesting statistic at the end as well.
ChrisW

>
>From: Vince Millett <vince.millett at ndirect.co.uk>
>
>Hi. I've been lurking for quite a while without saying anything on this
>list but as a few people have mentioned eclipses I thought I'd give  a
>brief report on the Lizard Festival and our gig there.
>
>Overall the festival was a shambles in terms of organisation. There were
>something like 16 stages and for the first couple of days (and all night)
>there seemed to be a diet of nothing but hard trance of the most minimalist
>type. Believe me, after about twenty hours of continuous monotonous
>kick-drum you'd kill to hear something with some melody. It seems a lot of
>bands didn't get paid but we were paid in cash before we even played.
>
>There was some good music - Femi Kuti, Juno Reactor with Amapondo
>(unbelievable!), The Drummers of Burundi, Future Loop Foundation, Amoeba
>Assasins, Alex Patterson, Bipolar and of course us , Secret Archives of the
>Vatican, among many many others. We played under the Sitarfunk banner and
>did a set that emphasised the Indian side of our music with live sitar and
>tablas, DJd backing tracks, live guitar and keys. We were pleased to see
>lots of people dancing and there were people calling for more at the end (a
>new experience for us!). It was fun.
>
>The eclipse itself was amazing. There was total cloud cover and just as the
>eclipse started a little hole appeared right in front of the sun and we saw
>the whole thing. We were directly on the line of totality so it got very
>cold and went dark for a couple of minutes. It was quite spooky actually.
>Vince Millett
>Secret Archives of the Vatican/Broken Drum Records
>vince.millett at ndirect.co.uk  or  brokendrum at ndirect.co.uk
> Website:  http://www.brokendrum.ndirect.co.uk
>
>In 1998 there were 31,800 albums released in the US. Of those, only 192
>sold in quantities of 100,000 or
>more.

"a cynic is a man who when he smells flowers looks around for a coffin" -
Bierce