As sorry as you seemed to be...

A few words of explanation about Andrew Weatherall's and myself set at T in the Park, Glasgow on Sunday.

I think the ones who were there kind of got what happened (I even took the mike to apologize) but I'll make it clear. Basically, Tricky was playing after us and his band went for a bit more than the usual 'line check'. the bass/guitar/synth was a bit annoying, but 30 minutes of drumming (so loud that the first few rows could actually hear it) made mixing impossible. The final straw being their sound engineer's instructions being suddenly heard by everybody and ending, after an hour of hell, by 'well, shall we do a line check then ?'...
Andrew and I got so furious (we were playing in front of 7000 people) that it became kind of funny/surreal. The crowd was getting so pissed off that extra-security had to be brought in resulting in the incident being 'logged in' and the stage manager getting a slap on the hands. To his credit (if you take things the right way), it is the first time in my career that a festival stage manager actually apologized to (a very very angry) me and agreed that he had no excuse for what happened (those in the trade will agree that you do not see this every Sunday). Credit also to Tricky's drummer (and the rest of his band) who came up to us afterward truly sorry for what had happened. Headphones on his head, focused on his click, he had no clue of the whole mess.

All in all, a very strange afternoon, but Glaswegians being the nicest people on the planet, anywhere else, it would have really turned sour.
This whole thing of course deflated in smiles, Crookers (booked by Dave 'Soma' clarke for his teenage daughter) started their set and real hell broke loose. Time to go. That's what we did.