Wow, what a busy weekend. Corina and I were pretty much go go go the whole time. The big event of the weekend was of course V-Fest on Saturday. My sister tried to scam some free tickets for me from work for Day 2, but that didn’t pan out. She works at a company that sells Virgin phones, so they apparently get all sorts of free stuff. Anyhow, she got 2 tickets to Sunday, so I’ll have to catch up with her to see what she thought of it.

The day started a little ominous, as it was a little wet to start off, so we crossed our fingers and hoped the festival that was brought “From England With Love” wouldn’t bring the weather with it as well. We hopped on the ferry and got to the festival about 1:30, so we missed a couple of the early sets. I had wanted to check out ohbijou, which unbeknownst to me was from Brantford. Guess I’ll have to check them out some other time when they’re playing Browntown. The first set we did manage to catch was the tail-end of Halifax’s Wintersleep. They weren’t too bad, but I didn’t find anything too remarkable about their set.

We stuck around the Future Shop second stage to see David Ford and definitely weren’t disappointed. He’s a singer/songwriter from England and put on a nice, intimate show. He performed without a band, using a looping microphone setup to record live bits of guitar, piano and vocals to fill out his sound. It was quite interesting to see. I did find it funny that he made a crack about the weather being similar to England during his set, only to have the sky open up periodically and the sun shine down on his performance. Cheer Up (You Miserable Fuck) and State Of The Union were both standouts to his performance.

We then made our first trek over to the Virgin Mobile main stage to see the last 4 or 5 songs from France’s Phoenix. The band, clad in a monochromatic grey/black wardrobe played through an energetic set that the crowd definitely seemed to dig. I took some photos, when decided to send some goofy french text messages, as they had a video screen that showed the action on stage and incoming text messages the whole time.

Following Phoenix was local outfit The Hidden Cameras. The band featured 10, 12 maybe 14 members, which seems to be all the rage these days among Toronto bands. They put on a subdued poppy set, at one point throwing handfuls of candy into the audience before performing Lollipop off their latest album.

At this point we headed over to the second stage to see Starsailor. They definitely put on a good show. I never realized how many Starsailor songs I knew. I can’t say I was ever a massive Starsailor follower, but all told I knew about 2/3 of their setlist. The one thing I found odd was that they played Four To The Floor, then as you thought they were winding it down they broke into what sounded like one of the remixes of the song, so it was like they kinda played it twice. I also thought Good Souls was ruined by electric guitar. Some songs are just better on acoustic guitar and that was one of them.

I made the executive decision to skip seeing Muse, as I caught them at Curiosa a couple of summers ago, so we stayed around the second stage to see The Eagles Of Death Metal. They weren’t too bad, but I guess they really weren’t what I was expecting. While I was well aware that The Eagles Of Death Metal do not in fact play death metal, I was under the false impression that Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age was the singer.

After a few songs we made our way to the first stage again to see this year’s biggest buzz band Gnarls Barkley. Hitting the stage in karate uniforms, the band sporting white while Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse sporting red outfits was cool, though slightly disappointing. After seeing the band perform in full naval uniform and at the MTV awards where the whole band sported authentic Star Wars costumes, karate outfits pale by comparison. We watched about half the set, catching Gone Daddy Gone, St Elsewhere and Crazy before legging it back to the second stage to catch Alexisonfire.

Alexisonfire had a raw energy to their performance. They were probably the most amped up act on the whole bill. After seeing them I can understand some of the fanaticism about this band. We caught about 4 or 5 songs, then decided to catch the ferry back after hearing This Could Be Anywhere In The World. Corina’s feet were dead, so I decided to pass on seeing the Flaming Lips, as much as I was interested in seeing them. Apparently this might have been a good decision, as the Lips had the plug pulled on their performance after only 4 songs. The main stage had been running behind by about a half hour all day and it caught up to them as the 11pm noise curfue kicked in. I’m sure that ruined quite a few people’s evenings.

As for the event itself it was definitely worthwhile. $50(+ $7 for the ferry) for a festival event like V-Fest seemed a pretty fair price for what was on offer. Quite a few of the reviews I’ve read about the show ragged on the lack of headliner talent on the bill, which to a point was true. On the other side of the coin I found the audience who showed up to this gig seemed to be fans of music as opposed to any single act. I found things were pretty well run. Obviously it’s the first go around for this show, so they’ll need to iron out some of the kinks in the formula, but I think it’s definitely a workable concept that is sorely lacking in TO.

If you would like to see all the photos I took, I uploaded them to flickr.

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