Interdependent - Breakout 2001 - april02

BREAKOUT

This article was accidentally missed out of the last issue, but here it is in all its former glory.

You can tell no one really knows me (the "newbie") yet in AIF. Otherwise they'd have known better than to ask me to write a report about our weekend at Breakout 2000. Well, a week later and I just remembered that I was supposed to be doing this so I'd better get on with it before it all fades into a blur of London trains and lack of sleep.

Laura (Finch) and I were extremely grateful to Sarah and Helena (Mayles's) parents for offering us a lift down. Navigating the London underground on a Friday night on our own probably wouldn't have been the best of ideas. It was about 11pm by the time we were driving through the Capital to our accommodation in Croydon, not knowing what to expect. Evidently David (Smith) was the only one grown up enough to manage the trains, and we met up with him there. Our home for the weekend was a medium-sized Church youth centre, perfectly adequate - you'd think. However there were also a few million 12-14 year old girls and a handful of lads with whom we had to share the centre, and that was not so much fun. We four girls (all sharing one double inflatable mattress!) were kept awake by the constant lavatorial noises, which are apparently hysterical to twelve-year-old girls. Poor David was kept awake by the soundtrack to Mission Impossible 2 being played at full volume at around 4am in the boys' room (although at least he got Metallica rather than S Club 7).

We awoke reluctantly on Saturday morning at around 7am. Ugh. The five of us were eager to depart from our lovely roommates as soon as possible, so we decided to make our way by train to Leicester Square

for the first "event". There we met up with Mel (Lander), sang songs, watched clowns, made fools of ourselves singing "Father Abraham" and covered ourselves in green and yellow face paint. The morning was good fun, and we had quite a few people on the trains asking us what "AIF" was (we had that painted on our faces) so we got to spread the word a bit!

After Leicester Square we made our way to London Arena by train, with Sarah the Underground Expert leading! The whole area was green and yellow crazy, which was quite scary. In the arena the Methodist Youth League (or something like that) netball and football finals were held, before Breakout officially started. There was lots of music and craziness but we were obviously too old and mature (!) for it all and decided to escape after an hour or so. We took the train into somewhere in London to find something to eat and perhaps some more energy, in order to be ready for Delirious? in the evening. We did find some food (and coffee!) and managed to wind down a bit.
Next it was back on the train to the Arena for the Alliance Music Festival. Now, I may be a completely crazy mad Delirious? fan but I think everyone would agree that it was a brilliant concert. I promised Sarah I wouldn't spend half this report talking about Delirious? so I'll try my best to be brief.


The other two bands, Kindle and Global Zamar, weren't too bad, but it wasn't until Delirious? came on that everyone went really mad. We were really disappointed that we couldn't go down onto the mosh pit because we were wearing the wrong colour wristbands. However, we managed to get some excellent seats right next to the stage with no one in front of us so could freely pogo to the music as we held on to the rail.