So, finally free from the embrace of the comforting arms of free education, one might find it appropriate to celebrate. Couple this with the excellent timing of Nottingham’s finest hour (or fifteen) in the world of entertainment, and you’ve got Dot to Dot 2010, which fell conveniently on Sunday, two days after the end of college.

I’d like to give an in depth report of the whole day, but frankly I can’t quite remember it all, neither do I have enough adjectives stored in my brain, and I’d like to do Los Campesinos! some justice, without having to compare them to some sort of train collision or something similarly silly. So, I’ll give notable mentions to the bands I saw that made it socially acceptable to be drinking at such an early point in the day: in the Basement - New Education, with their Rifles-y twang, made an entertaining start to the proceedings, followed by the rather stylish Crookes at Rock City and baritonal Chapel Club in Trent Uni’s Main Hall. After that I viewed some embarrassingly-uniformed bunch of guys from LA called Fol Chen who I somehow forgot to listen to, but seemed nice people nonetheless.

Next up were Kendal’s Wild Beasts, who had never previously impressed me until a few months ago when I heard All The King’s Men on Jools Holland and realised frontman Hayden had got rid of his turtleneck-and-peadotache combination and become awesome all of a sudden. I’d seen them supporting Jack Penate and rather strangely in a shed with about 10 other people at Underage festival in 2008, but their quasi-falsetto vocals never really washed with my young ears, so I was pretty excited to see them on the bill and at Rock City, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. With the nice warming combination of an empty stomach and a few bevvies I was limbering up nicely for a little dance and they duly stepped up to the plate for me and a couple of thousand others in a packed City main hall. I don’t want to bog this down with too much description, and I’ll try not to, so all I’ll say for now is they provided four early contenders for Song of The Day; Hooting and Howling, All The King’s Men, Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants and We Still Got The Taste Dancin’ On Our Tongues all highlighting Wild Beasts’ unbelievable talent - fuck me, can they sing. 

A tough act to follow, but followed they were, by New York duo (though threesome in live form) Beach House. I’m not such a big fan that I can recognise their songs by name - partly because many sound fairly similar - and this wasn’t aided by my mildly inebriated fixation with their rather enchanting lead singer, but they were very enjoyable, and I helped with backing vocals from the warm confines of the crowd for the superb Zebra (the one I can name).

Following this was a brief Uni express stop (one simply can’t afford £3+ pints all day!) before returning back to Trent Uni to see my favourite band of the moment (bar The National) - the wonderful Los Campesinos! For some reason or other, they keep missing Nottingham off their tours, which I have found to be very annoying, so it felt good to be finally seeing them after a fair few years of liking them, a firm choice over previous favourite band of mine, Mystery Jets who were on over at Rock City. A good choice all round it seems, as MJs failed to play a single song from their brilliant debut, and as well as this, Los Camp absolutely fucking nailed it. No signs of leaving their past behind, or not playing the fan favourites here; LC! stormed through an hour long set peppered with the best from all three albums (or both albums and a choice few from the “Extended EP”, for the LC! pedants out there). Keeping onstage banter to a minimum due to the ever-ticking second hand of the schedule clock, Gareth and his band of merry men and women treated a mixed crowd to old classics such as Death to Los Campesinos! (featuring the always enjoyable shouts of “SUGAR!” during the chorus) and My Year In Lists (featuring the always enjoyable lyric of “nothing says I miss you quite like poetry carved in your door with a stanley knife”), as well as new, er, classics, such as the delightfully lugubrious The Sea Is A Good Place To Think About The Future among a fair few more from their excellent new record. I could keep on about how marvellous each track was and how all of them could have made it on to the songs of the day list (and they really could), but I won’t. I’ll just mention a couple more. With fifteen or so minutes remaining, Gareth signaled “only hits from now on, we promise”, and out came We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed (to which I almost shredded my vocal chords screaming along to the rousing denouement of “I hope my heart goes first”) You, Me, Dancing! (to which I danced around shirtless underneath my denim jacket - fashion faux pas go out of the window for songs this good in rooms this hot) and Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks (to which Gareth jumped into the crowd and I got a jolly nice picture). Dreadfully enjoyable stuff, I think I may have muttered in a drunken stupor that it was one of the best sets I’ve ever seen, and though maybe hyperbole shouldn’t have stretched that far, it was pretty fucking good.

No rest for the wicked they say, and rest I did not - straight off to the Basement to see the rather less twee Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster power through a very loud and impressive set. The whole event seemed a bit animalistic as the shaggy haired (and yet rather dashingly handsome) frontman Guy Knight - not the most fitting name for the singer of a garage punk band, I know - prowled the stage whilst his band thrashed out 3 minute bursts of raucous energy and good looking punk girls seemed to be getting their faces sucked every few minutes amongst the melee of the mosh pit. One girl was even lowered to the floor for a spot of heavy necking - in my mind not only unhygienic but very dangerous, though in fairness she was a looker and she didn’t say no. It felt like we were minutes away from someone taking it too far and we were going to have to use the word “fingered” to recount the story to lots of people later that night. Thankfully/unfortunately, depending on your love of fingerbanging action, Eighties Matchbox finished just before we were all covered in someone else’s cum in a whirlwind of shouting and tinnitus, adding the guttural Celebrate Your Mother to the top songs list. Screaming along to a song about incest may not be particularly socially acceptable, but you’ve got to say there’s not many situations in life when you can scream “I wanna fuck your mother” at the top of your already damaged voice and no one will look at you strangely, because someone’s pretty much getting fucked on the sticky floor. Brillo pads.

A little wearier as the time moves on, I reach Stealth to see the final band of the night/morning - Scandinavian electro outfit Casiokids. At this point in the morning, after 13 hours of dancing and drinking with very little eating, it’s almost a dance-yourself-awake project, and it pretty much worked, managing to persuade myself not to get a taxi home quite yet, and see how much longer I can last. Casiokids were very entertaining, sort of like a Danish Hot Chip, and it was all worth it for their last two tracks, complete with coma-inducing synthesisers, Finn Bikkjen and Fot i Hose (just don’t ask me to pronounce them). The night was almost over - time for a bit of a dance to Doorly, but after a while the novelty of this dubstep lark (which most of the time I find sounds like a keyboard eating decent music, ‘wob wob wob’ with every gargantuan electronic chew) appears to wear off, unsurprisingly along with any intoxicating substance, and left me tired and desperately wanting my bed. A lift home from a friend’s mother at 4am may strip me of any vague notion of being rock and roll, but I couldn’t care less as it meant avoiding a freezing walk home and reaching the squishy nirvana of my bed for some very well deserved sleep.