T in the Park Diaries - AmatrArt

It might be nearly all gone and forgotten by two weekends ago over 100 artists, 80,000 people, and our good selves descent upon Strathallan Castle for Scotland's biggest music festival; T in the Park!  Once again we recruited some of the finest talent playing across the T Break stage over the weekend to keep a T in the Park Diary for Scottish Fiction.

On Saturday in the T Break stage the job of opening up fell to Glasgow five piece AmatrArt.  The band grabbed the ear of the judges with their pop laced wavey synths, and we caught up with Josh from the band for their T Diary.

Friday 10th July

Our slot was at 12:10pm on the Saturday morning so if we were leaving from Glasgow that would have meant we’d have to leave ridiculously early.  Luckily enough for us Jonathan's folks live in Comrie - about half an hour from the new site - and there was a few acts we wanted to see on the Friday including Jessie Ware, Hot Chip and The War on Drugs.  So we decided to head up on the Friday stopping off there to drop off all the gear.

We sadly missed Jessie Ware as it took some time for us to work out where we were to go to get our artists accreditation.  The rest of the night was pretty good though.  We left before the headliners to get back to Comrie at a decent time where we sat up and had some beers before heading off in the morning.

Saturday 11th July

As we were the first on, and you were to arrive a few hours before your slot, we arrived super early.  The site looks quite bizarre at this time as there’s hardly anyone about.  A few security folk and stage crew.  It also confirmed that the new site was indeed much smaller which could mostly be considered a good thing except from the occasional crush we experienced.  We had a few hours to kill before we were scheduled to play so there was quite a lot of waiting around which we mostly filled by drinking the free beer!

The stage was very impressive and was by far the biggest we’ve played on.  At a lot of the gigs we play it’s unusual to have more than one monitor mix between the band but here we had a dedicated sound guy who's job it was to control the monitor mix for us as well as the guy who did the sound out front.  That was really sweet and the gig was the best sounding for us yet.

The boys from Catholic Action informed us that a bigger stage suits our sound which was nice of them.  The gig itself was super fun, we were all pretty much smiling the whole way through it and we hope it will be the first of many festival gigs.

After our set we watched Catholic Action and then headed over to the BBC Introducing tent to catch Pinact.  Both bands were really good and it was cool to see lots of folk at each of their gigs.

By this time we were all already pretty shattered so afterwards we sat behind had the BBC Introducing tent had some beers with the bands and chilled.  The weather was still pretty decent at this point so were able to utilise the fancy beach chairs they had outside.

Later on we went to see St Vincent who was very impressive.  Probably the best guitar player in the world just now and the choreographed dance moves were pretty captivating.  The sound was quite muffled though and there was probably less people there than were at her ABC show last year which was a bit of a let down but nothing to do with her actual performance which was probably the highlight of the day (except for playing of course!)

We then went to see Alt-J who sounded great but no one could really consider it a very energetic or exciting live performance.  We finished the night catching Ded Rabbit at T Break who in contrast to Alt-J were very exciting.  It was a really nice end to the weekend.

Then began the epic that was getting out of the car park.  We left before the majority of folk but were stuck in the car park for well over three hours.  It wasn’t until half 3 in the morning that we eventually got moving.  It wasn’t all bad though, we helped push cars through the mud, told ghost stories and had dance offs with fellow festival goers.  We’re looking forward to hopefully making a return at some point in the future!