I've never reviewed a festival before because I always forget stuff and don't want to be in reviewer-mode for the whole thing so enjoy this, an account of my experience of the festival...

Friday:

Having just got back from the Ex-Models gig in Oxford the night before (put on by Ady from Vacuous Pop who I later bumped into at ATP) it could be argued that I wasn't in a fit mood to wake up at 6am the next day. I survived though, plucking the courage to face the cold morning's wind across the platform at Bedford train station.

I and 2/3rds of my chalet mates later arrive at Butlin's Minehead. The worst part was overhearing a total nerdy/indie guy try and flirt with a girl he had met on the coach to Minehead. He seemed to be incapable of having a conversation with someone he had just met and instead just fired the shittest questions ever at her. Incredibly awkward. Sample questions included:

What's your favourite Tom Hanks film?
If you could be a colour, what colour would you be?
If you could have your feet made a size bigger or a size smaller, which would you choose?
What's your favourite Jaws film?
What's your favourite shark?

And the one he introduced as "the best question in the world, ever":

Okay, so it's Boxing day and you wake up to find your family have left the house (dead give-away that he lives with his parents there....) and on the table is a box of Jacob's biscuits. Which biscuit do you eat first?

I mean, JESUS! I nearly strangled him. They both chose pink wafer, by the way. I fucking hate pink wafers.

Anyway, we go bowling, I somehow win, then we finally settle into our chalet and meet up with Tom. Chalet is complete. Next, we headed off to Tesco to quickly get some food before Mono. We end up missing Mono but catch Sunset Rubdown, which I have absolutely no memory of, sneak off to watch the end of Dinosaur Jnr but I still don't have any strong feelings for their unenergetic, loud/slow grunge with guitar solos performance... Explosions in the Sky play at the Pavilion Stage, perhaps a bit too early in the festival line-up for my liking, it's still not too dark outside despite the grey clouds and the Pavilion adds dense reverb to Explosions' sound which kind of cripples everything. Still, their performance gets pretty epic at its peaks but I feel too far away from the stage to properly appreciate it. Plus by now I'm well on my way to being terrifically wasted.

Quickly eat some pasta then meet up with more friends before I realise that I've missed almost all of the Paper Chase's set. I run off, catch 10 minutes. Someone audibly mentions My Chemical Romance and I think I've lost the Paper Chase forever... ! Go back to the chalet, wrestle with Tom, knock a white Russian over and have first argument of ATP. I leave my phone in the room, and walk out to watch Pale Gallery who are clearly shit. Not only was the music drab but I completely lost hope as the band appeared to be healthy American jocks playing Fender Stratocasters with safe skill. Not exciting. I head back to the empty chalet, no idea where friends are so I give up and decide to go to bed.

Saturday:

I wake up with a hangover. Chalet-mate and friend Jess shows me the photos her and Marcus (the other Chalet-mate/friend) had taken of my whist I was sleeping. 'Pervert' becomes Jess's weekend nickname, Marcus is christened the Molester (loosely based originally around his surname and general wordplay...) and Tom is called the Rapist. I remain un-nicknamed and Marcus is appalled "If I'm the Molester, surely you're a lot worse?" Ha. Apparently we had gone drunk-bowling the night before, which explains the bruises on my hips, legs and head... Memories of this eventually seep into my consciousness as I'm shown photos.

Molester tells me he saw Trail of Dead in the Butlin's Finnigan's chip shop last night - ooh! Manage to miss Saul Williams despite my insistence that we must seem him this weekend... We opted for watching No Country for Old Men at the ATP Cinema and Pizza Hut buffet which was fucking disgusting (way too much grease, we totally did not get our £7.99's worth of a buffet and it's cheaper back in Bedford - grr!!!). Ghostface Killah is awesome on the Centre Stage and he treats a varied group of hardcore fans to some Wu-Tang stuff before inviting girls to dance on stage. They rip into 'Greedy Bitches' and I spend my time laughing about a girl dancing on the far-left who attempted to combine a rabbit dance with a robot dance... Creating some embarrassing hybrid of awful. It's a great atmosphere and at that moment was the best performance so far (even though I couldn't really stand the overused gunshot samples in between songs).

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, however, quickly ran away with Ghostface's recently acquired title and are absolutely captivating throughout their set which essentially sees them play a set of 'Best Of...' songs from their albums. 'So Divided' is completely overlooked, thankfully, and I'm overjoyed to have an absolutely soaking Jason Reece jump to me off stage with microphone for both 'Caterwaul' and 'Mistakes and Regrets'. The sound was incredible; when the band launches into 'Relative Ways' it's at first terrifying, but then very rich sounding, selling the band's two greatest qualities: their ferocious energy and their beautiful melodies. We left awe-struck, ears suitably punished by their two drummers.

Head over to the Pavilion Stage to see The National who are again victim to a really dead impression from yours truly because of the stage. The upside of the Pavilion is that it's the centre point of the Minehead site and is dead easy to get into where unlike the other venues, no queuing is required. However, it's not a normal 'venue' and instead is like those massive stages you get at big corporate festivals... The area that it's in makes the acoustics pretty impersonal unless you're right at the front, which again, I'm not. I cut my losses and head for Adem promising myself to give The National a better chance when I can see them at a decent venue.

Adem kind of bores me... I head back to make baked beans on toast. Head out for Stars of the Lid, I'm still super-hyped from Trail of Dead so their swelling of notes leaves me pretty empty. The ambience which was at fist was appreciated eventually gets replaced by this nagging disappointment that this is really, really unengaging. My friends who were lying down during their set said it was amazing. Lying down was probably a good way to experience it.

Dave Konopka of Battles is first on the stage and last to leave, watching him slowly piece together 'Race:Out' for the set's intro is really fun to watch and unlike their set at least year's ATP (vs The Fans), no loop pedals break so it's a full unadulterated set this time. It's predictably brilliant and John Stanier cements his place as some kind of beast of a man behind his kit that takes up the front of the stage.

I head off, play an exhausting game of football for the first time in about 5 years and score a header which impresses strangers walking by. Honest.

Sunday:

Sunday starts with a taste of Butlin's Adventure Golf. Not quite crazy golf but not exactly adventurous either - 4 of the holes are exactly the same as each other but with different degrees of variation... WHY?! I manage to get my ball to leave the area and into the little stream running through the place which is all the fun you can have. Apart from collectively singing 'Atlas' whilst doing the drumming with your golf clubs on the mini-Adventure Golf bridge, of course.

Polvo are the first act I see, sometimes they hit the spot for me, other times they don't. There were some really great moments like when they had this massive drum solo in one song then went into brief finger-tapping on their guitars but they generally seem quite sheepish in front of the audience. Couple this with their general 'flat' sound and I'm not really won over.

Atlas Sound (aka Bradford Cox of Deerhunter) sets up, and barely anyone is in the Centre stage but it fills up by the time Bradford's in his second song. He's joined by half of Birmingham's Broadcast who add haunting vocals and electronics/samples to his lush, heavily reverbed set. It kind of falls on its ass a few times though and you get the feeling that they hadn't rehearsed the set as much as they should've. I still totally love Cox's voice though.

Animal Collective follow with a set of stuff I'm totally unfamiliar with, bar the two songs from 'Strawberry Jam'. 'Fireworks' leaves shivers up my spine and the band drift off into loads of different 'jams' (ho) in between the song's key movements which makes for a fun experience. The last song they played was fucking brilliant, very dancey yet very Animal Collective. An hour-long set seems a bit too short for a band on top of their game like these guys.

Chalet moment, quickly followed by an annoying game of bowling where our lane fucks up a lot. Inspired by memories of spending early teenhood watching the CBBC programme 'Short Change' (remember Otis?) I complain/argue for a refund and leave, unheroically, with nothing. I'm told I can write to their manager to get my £3.50 back... Ha.

Envy end our ATP with an amazingly powerful performance. Their guitarists are so overly energetic and animated you can't help but be stunned everytime they launch into another LOUD BUNCH OF RIFFS. Their singer smiles a lot in the set, which kind of ruins it. I always imagined the singer of Envy to be some angry Japanese man, slouching around the stage looking incredibly pained. It's quite the opposite but you can see why he's so happy as the reception Envy are given by the crowd is incredible. They do an encore and destroy the crowd.

The end.