Cosy Den Five Year Festival
(Click any of the pics to see a gallery of the day!)
Just over a month ago, on August 1st, I played the Cosy Den Five Year festival. It was brilliant. This is the line-up for that day:
Jap Adaptors
Tada Tata
Paddington DC
The Paper Merchants
White Town
Vit Pals
Allo Darlin’
Suburban Kids With Biblical Names
Cats On Fire
Erik De Vahl
Mats Jonsson
I recommend you check out each and every one of those bands. They’re all brilliant. I can honestly say there wasn’t a single band I disliked or didn’t enjoy on the day. And I’m quite grumpy when it comes to multi-band all-dayers so that’s not faint praise. Since coming back, I’ve made a little iTunes playlist of the bands from that day, yes, I am that silly. 🙂
I first played Cosy Den waay back in 2005. Click here to read about that.
Back? Good.
Well, everything I said in that post still holds true. Sweden still feels like my musical home. The audience at Cosy Den last month was fabulous: attentive and involved. I’ve been to too many gigs in Britain where hipsters yammer on through the whole thing. They’re there to be seen, not to see the bands. Not at Cosy Den!
It was a wonderful feeling to be sitting there, just me, my acoustic and this group of people ready to connect, willing to go where I wanted to take them. Well, I say wonderful, it’s actually the best feeling a songwriter can have. I do love getting fan mail and nice comments on videos but there’s nothing to match interacting with an audience.
Because of personal shit I’ve been going through, the gig was intense even by my standards. I had to hold myself back a couple of times as I didn’t want to go mental on stage and start sobbing. After all, the show must go on. Innit?
Mattias from Cats On Fire guested on the second verse of ‘Your Woman.’ He was great as they’ve recently been doing me the honour of covering my song live. Click here to see that. (And, in return, I completely murdered the second verse of ‘Higher Grounds.’ God, I was awful. 🙂 )
The whole day seems dreamlike to me now. That’s why I’ve waited so long to write about it, I needed to process it all in my head. It all seems too good to be true. The music, the people in bands I met, the people not in bands I met, the venue. Honestly, it was more like watching some beautiful independent film than playing a gig.
Instead of selling my records, I decided to give them away in exchange for secrets. As a result, I got to talk to loads of people and hear their secrets. None of which I’ll ever reveal, of course – a combination of trustworthiness and my terrible memory will ensure that.
I owe Cosy Den a lot. If Mattias hadn’t emailed me all those years ago and asked me to come and play, I wouldn’t have had the best gigging experiences of my life. And I wouldn’t have played with some of the best bands in the world. I find it quite amazing and a little scary how such a simple initial action (an email) can wind up affecting my life so much.
So, thank you Cosy Den! Here’s to five years of greatness and to many more too! 🙂
