After the fabulousless-ness (it’s a word!) of Appelpop there seemed to be something very right about closing up the festival season with The Out Of The Ordinary Festival in the beautiful South Downs. It started off great, a woman dressed as a pirate bumped us up to the front of the queue for the tiny price of a beer, nice! Tents up, gear backstage, lunch eaten, you get the picture, nice and smooth. We hooked up with Dave Cogan (wizard sound engineer) who was down for the weekend and we were off. A nice long sound check for us, with some cable problems and some backline problems, all was resolved with a bit of frantic searching from the backstage crew. The marquee was mostly empty but soon filled up, really gratifying actually, within the space of three songs we went from empty to well full, hurrah! We lined up the same set as Appelpop because there is something to be learned from being really familiar with the way a group of songs build and settle. I was really enjoying it, onstage sound was beautiful, all three of us feeling very comfortable, the audience were responding so warmly and Dave on the sound desk looked happy, so all was sweet. Then in the middle of Nobody Else with the sampler ooo-eee-oooo-ing, the chaps ba-ba-baaaa-ba-ing and me ooOOOOOOooooo-ing everything disappeared from underneath me, no bass, no guitar, no chaps, nothing but drums and my vocals. It turns out someone in the bar tent next door had plugged in a sandwich toaster and their delicious cheesy tomato-y snack had deprived the entire rest of the festival of power. My vocal mic was still up so I sang the lovely song of longing ‘The Snows They Melt The Soonest’ unaccompanied, we watched the backstage crew turn blue with frustration, I presume the sandwich was cooked and we got power back. It was pretty frustrating for all involved but we got the momentum and the crowd back and ba-da-boom we were done. Thank you all the extra-ordinary people present.