Topshop Bandstand Picnics for The Teenage Cancer Trust

Yesterday I attended the Topshop Bandstand Picnic at Birmingham University. Playing were: Eliza Doolittle, Summer Camp (fresh from a tour with Slow Club), I Blame Coco (if you read my blog you should know a lot about her by now, I've mentioned her a lot) and Cardiff's Los Campesinos! It was a free event but the proceeds from the food, drink and competetions (raffels, sack races etc.) all went to The Teenage Cancer Trust.

It was the perfect day for it. It was hot,sunny and the end of university/school/college/exams etc... I unfortunately missed Eliza Doolittle and Summer Camp, the latter very regrettably, but I only found out about the event about 30 minutes before it started and Birmingham is an hour journey from Stoke and I then had to hop into a the first taxi I saw from the train station as well, for which I was ripped off £7 for.

T4's Mequita Oliver hosted the event and the DJ sets inbetween acoustic bandstand sets came from 'Broken Hearts' and 'Blonde Ambition,' both dj's doing an excellent job.

Coco Sumner and her band took to the bandstand at around 3 o clock. They played a beautiful acoustic set which included a divine cover of Fleetwood Mac's 'The Chain', very topical considering they're playing at Glasto next weekend. It was interesting to see what she would play, as these days, technology is involved a lot in her music, this contrasts to her earlier reggae/ska tinged sounds.

Later, came Los Campesinos! With it being an acoustic set, there was only four of them. They played even more stripped down versions of their more lo-fi songs. They played a lot of songs of their most recent album which came out at the start of this year, 'Romance is Boring' and then a couple of songs from earlier albums, including 'We are all Accelerated Readers' from their glorious début 'Hold on now, youngster!' Their set went down well, especially as there seemed to be a few young Los Campesinos! fans in the audience, rather than people that just seemed to find themselves there.

I think it's safe to say that everyone there enjoyed it, as it was the perfect thing to do on such a lovely day. I hope that The Teenage Cancer Trust host more events like this in the future.

Over and out,

Katie
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