First held in 2009, Tramlines festival has continued to grow bigger and bigger each year. Taking place around Sheffield, a city renowned for it’s exciting music scene, the festival is a brilliant place to be if you’re just starting out with large music events, or simply have a shitload of free time to fill since finishing high school or college. The event has a modest ticket price of only £30, as well as hosting a ton of free shows that made the festival so popular in the first place. Super early bird tickets are already available for next year’s festival, and if you like what you hear you can buy them here.
Friday
Despite the rainy weather, Slaves came out and performed to a moderately sized crowd on the Friday evening of the festival (although the majority were waiting for headliners The Charlatans – a sea of middle-aged Liam Gallagher lookalikes dressed in Pretty Green paisley seemed to make up the majority of the crowd.) Disappointingly, Slaves’ performance fell flat. The simple guitar/drums combo wasn’t enough to fill out the large 15,000 capacity of Ponderosa. Nevertheless, you can see that Slaves are well practiced and confident in what they’re doing.
Highlights from their set included ‘Cheer Up London’ and set closer ‘Hey’ – which was jolted by a crazed fan stealing frontman Isaac Holman’s beloved hat after his stage dive, to which he amusingly exclaimed “I’m not finishing the fucking song if you don’t give me my fucking hat back”. Eventually his hat returned and they finished the song that was so rudely interrupted. No signs of the manta ray this evening, though.
The Charlatans were, to put it bluntly, bland and a little tedious. The guy stood at the side of me was, rather questionably, eating a pack of KP Nuts, which I’m certain held more flavour than the whole of The Charlatans’ set. Tim Burgess was an entertaining live presence, but the dad dancing and his longer overdue haircut just didn’t do the band justice.