Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: festival

I managed to get relatively few good cameraphone shots at Fluff Fest 2015, but I had a few. This shot is of Trial, on Saturday.

I managed to get relatively few good cameraphone shots at Fluff Fest 2015, but I had a few. There were a number of old favorites at the festival, including Gattaca, but I didn't manage to get good shots with my cameraphone. This was one of my best shots from Fluff Fest 2015, with decent lighting, and a shooting location close enough so that I didn't have to use digital zoom. This set was on Saturday, soon after I arrived.

I managed to get relatively few good cameraphone shots at Fluff Fest 2015, but I had a few. This shot is of Hibakusha, on Saturday.

I got lucky on this shot, at least getting Wattie Buchan's Mohawk. To be fair, he's a 56-year-old (then 55-year-old) punk rocker so it isn't as cheesy a haircut if he has one. :-)

The Exploited were the last big name to play at the festival, and I made a point of going to bed afterward, leaving the next day. It was a great set, but very hard to get close to. The crowd was probably the largest of the festival.

In my opinion, Czech ska bands are usually better than Czech punk bands, hardcore bands excepted. This was Ska N' Dal.

Hannibal Lector were one of the heavier Czech hardcore bands at the festival, but I took this photo more to illustrate the tremendous amount of dust at the festival. This was maybe the most unpleasant thing about the festival, even if it looks cool in a photo. The food was also limited, as only one tent was serving vegetarian food, only one tent had water (if memory serves), and many of the (fake punk, BMW-driving) fans taunted anyone going to them. Of course, walking was difficult, as so many people were unconscious on the ground that I had to zig zag at all hours of the day and night.

After the Dead Kennedys set, it was after midnight (if memory serves), and I was exhausted. I assumed the festival was over for the night, or at least that the remaining bands would be the local Czech bands. I was wrong, as I walked into the Skatalites' set as I was walking to my tent.

The Dead Kennedys (minus Jello Biafra) were probably the most famous punk band at the festival, although obviously the Misfits and the Exploited are very close, so who knows, really? Punk bands are famous by accident, if they're famous at all. This was a great show, obviously, and was immediately after the Misfits. It was predictably very crowded (and dirty, as there was too little rain, too much heat, and too much dust, even at night), but worth it.

Yes, this was really a Misfits show. In spite of the boring Czech bands who made up the majority of those who played, the foreign bands were a who's-who of the most famous punk bands of all time. The Sex Pistols, the Damned, and the X weren't there, and of course the Clash and the Ramones weren't still around, but the Misfits, the Dead Kennedys, and the Exploited were all there. As a bonus, as many punk fans are also Ska fans, the Skatalites (the oldest ska band in the world) also played.

Death by Stereo were only one of the many bands at Pod Parou, but they were one of the few hardcore bands. They were also one of the American bands who made it. Most of the bands who played were unknown Czech punk bands who were barely worthy of the label.

This was the hotel I ended up at, the Hotel Excalibur. Moravska Trebova has no connection, as far as I know, to King Arthur, so the theme of the hotel is only a gimmick (as far as I know). I ended up here only after spending the night with one of the most famous punk rockers of all time. I can't prove I met him, as I have no photos, so I won't name him. Embarrassingly, I didn't recognize him, which he probably didn't like at all. However, we ended up talking for hours at one of the Herna bars in town, and playing fussball with the locals. He convinced me to come to the show anyway, and the hotel offered to provide a car in the morning.

This is the radnice in Moravska Trebova, which I got to see lit up after I got back to town. Initially, I found out that there were no more trains for the day, even though they were advertised. I then tried to get a bus, but there wasn't a direct one to Prague. Then I investigated hotels, looking for a cheap one.

The punk festival Pod Parou is officially billed as being in Moravska Trebova, but in 2012 it was actually in Svitavy. This was not only inconvenient, as most of the fans without insider information (the directions were misleading to nonexistant), but also dangerous. This was the only road to the show from the Moravska Trebova train station, and of course real punk rockers travel by train, by bike, or on foot (unless they're driving their band's van to play at the show). This meant that the decision to move to Svitavy was not only inconvenient, but dangerous. Truckers were driving at full speed (100 Km/h) on the shoulder of the road, leaving no room for pedestrians and cyclists to survive. None of them attempted to brake, and frequently another truck would be straddling the centerline, preventing the offending truck from swerving back into its lane. This meant that everyone walking to the show had to scramble up the embankment, and then back down, since it wasn't possible to walk on the embankment (at least not easily). There was at least one memorial to a dead teenager on the road, and given the way people were driving (worse than any other drivers I've seen in Europe), it's easy to see how they were killed. Eventually, I went back to town, giving up on going to the show. Then things got a bit more interesting.