Not so much upcoming as I just got back from it, but I had a fab weekend at
Blue Dot Festival at Jodrell Bank - lots of great bands plus oodles of sciencey stuff, all in the shadow of the mighty Lovell telesope - Big shout out to Conor & Lizzie Boyle who I ran into for the second year running.
Friday's highlight was
Leftfield performing the whole of Leftism, closely followed by a night of cosmic space insanity with
Age of Glass and
Henge.
Pixies were okay, but not really my thing - their fans seemed ecstatic though. Most ridiculous amount of stage smoke I've ever seen in my life during their encore!
On Saturday,
Shura,
Soulwax and
Goldfrapp were all pretty good but
Orbital blew the fuckin' roof off 
(or would have done if it was indoors) -they even got the Radiophonic Workshop guys up to help with the Dr Who theme.
More subdued on Sunday, didn't get quite so mashed or see so many bands - spent much of the day in vampire mode, hidng Saturday's sunburn by flitting from tent to tent.
Warpaint were intersting, and
Hawkwind could deliver a festival set in their sleep. Caught up on all the lush festival food and real ales I'd not tried yet.
Didn't see as much science stuff as I intended (again) - the talk by Dave Prowse and Brian Muir (sculptor and model maker behind much of Star Wars, Alien, Bond etc) was full of inertersting subject matter but delivered by two uncharismatic and frankly bored seeming stars. Muir's CV is astonishing but the (out of sync) slideshow playing behind him was far more interesting than his talk which was largely lists of things that he'd made in famous movies , trailing off with "
errrm ... and that's how we did that..." Dave Prowse was no more scintillating - Sample of the Q&A:
(Small child) "
Was it hard to breathe in the Darth vader mask"
(Dave Prowse) "
No. It was easy."
(another small child) "
Which was the hardest scene to film?"
(Dave Prowse) "
ummm .. none of them were hard really"
Yeah, top anecdotes there Dave.
Brilliant weekend overall but I've danced my aged spine and joints into oblivion - everything is stiff and painful today!
