The Leeds Festival Diary - 25th to 28th August 05 (1/8) By Andy Knudsen Photographs Em Alexander, Steve Clappison and Sam Saunders Thursday25th August 05

(1/8), (2/8), (3/8), (4/8), (5/8), (6/8), (7/8), (8/8).

In the same inexplicable way that you sometimes wake up a second or two before the alarm goes off, I wake up just before the door to the room I'm sleeping in opens. Dave bends his blonde head round the door. "Helloo" he sings and advances into the room wearing a face like the Cheshire Cat. I muster some kind of greeting and check my watch for the time. It's an ungodly 10 o'clock and it smells earlier. Somehow, Dave is already dressed and has paid a visit to a newsagent. He drops a copy of the Yorkshire Post on the bed.

"Page 9 makes good reading" he says and shuffles back out of the room. I lurch my body to a vertical position and manoeuvre my clumsy hands through the fragile pages. Page 9 does indeed make interesting reading. There's a double page spread on the Yorkshire bands headed to the unsigned stage at Leeds Festival this weekend and the first half of the article is dedicated to The Favours.

The biggest picture on the page is also of The Favours, with me in the background staring into the sky like a space cadet.

Maybe I should set the scene a little better. My name's Andy and I play guitar in The Favours. I'm staying at Dave's parents' house. Dave plays drums in The Favours and this weekend we are one of a number of Hull bands playing the new Lee Sounds Unsigned Stage at Leeds Festival. The Festival kicks off tomorrow and tonight, The Adelphi is playing host to all of the bands - Turismo, Last People On Earth (although they don't make it due to gigging commitments elsewhere), Mr. Mojo, 59 Violets and ourselves - as a kind of celebration of the achievements of the Hull music scene as a whole.

Last night we played a gig in Leicester at a little venue called The Attik. When I say little, I feel I may be overstating the size of the joint. You'd have to see it to believe it. In front of a sell out crowd of eight, we rocked out and had a really good time. It's all fun and a good warm up for the gigs to come.

Anyway, I leaf through the newspaper and reads well. There's a quote from Martin, bassist in The Favours, that says something like "there are five bands from Hull playing the festival, and a couple of years ago there weren't even five bands in Hull!" I find out a later that Martin is very pleased with this quote. I can tell that he is pleased because he insists on reciting it to me in proudly astonished tones. I grab a quick shower and then Dave and I head into town to buy a few essentials for the gigs ahead, stopping off for a quick sandwich on Holderness Road. There is a black cloud over Hull.

That isn't some kind of metaphor; the weather is simply bad and it begins to rain steadily. Dave buys some new drum sticks, I buy a couple of plectrums and at long last I buy a stage tuner of my own so that Martin can have back the one I half borrowed half stole from him some months ago.

At Martin and Sara's house (Sara is the singer in The Favours) on Thoresby Street, we run through a much edited acoustic version of one of our songs called Say Something. We're due at the BBC building in Queens Gardens at four to play a song for tonight's edition of Look North. We try to condense the song as much as possible so that the BBC don't cut it to shreds when editing the news. Inside the BBC building we're marched through the bustle and hubbub of a big open plan office. We prime our guitars and wait to be called into the studio. When the time comes, we set ourselves down in tight formation where the production crew want us and run through the song a few times.

It's most surreal, three cameras on the three of us and I must admit feeling like a bit of a tit. Halfway through one take the guy in charge gets a message through his headset.

Continued... next page

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Photographs courtesy and Copyright © Em Alexander 2005 Em's Gallery 1, Em's Gallery 2.

Photographs courtesy and Copyright © Steve Clappison 2005 at (www.tallorders.org)

Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Adventures of Loki,	65 Days of Static,	Bam Bam Franks,
Cardboard Radio,	Ali Whitton,	Harrisons,
Circlesound,	Cardboard Cowboy ,	Lyca Sleep,
Deserves to Die.	Censored.	Sunday People.
Future Ex Wife,	Chicken Legs Weaver,	Mr Mojo.
Last Days of Vengeance.	Fifty-Nine Violets.	Mr Shiraz.
Friday People.	I Like Trains.	New Minds Eye.
Oh Farcas.	Saturday People.	Sunshine Underground.
Paris Man.	The Kiks.	The Favours.
Pilla.	Western Suburbs.	The Last People On Earth.
This Et Al.	Your Vegas.	Turismo.
Xenith Sound.		Voltage Union.

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