Let’s face it, we’re all lazy people, and when you’re living and working in London it can often mean walking around with tunnel vision. But with festival season ramping up (Glasto is only a few days away!), we decided to set our sights on venturing out of the big smoke to check out Parklife in Manchester. Parklife is a quirky little day festival offering some of the best in dub, drum & bass and electro with Annie Mac, Sub Focus, DJ Shadow, Nero and randomly, Kelis all scheduled to perform this year.

Bunking off work early with two rucksacks full to the brim with the very finest in eBay sourced vintage Adidas tracksuits, and a whole wad of Cloak & Swagger stickers, we headed down to Victoria to hop on the Megabus. What lay ahead of us was a delightful little four and a half hours in a coach -- Parklife had better be worth it! But we weren’t gambling blindly; we had heard whispers of magic from previous Parklifers. They’d all been giving the festival major props, chatting about the great atmosphere, awesome after-parties and sterling performances by the headliners. However, they had said that if it had been raining then things might have been different. And guess what? Rain was forecast for our weekend ahead! Time to pack those umbrellas and ditch the Supras in favour of the slightly less chic, classic green wellies.

We’re not going to lie to you, those four and a half hours sitting at the back in row 28 on the Megabus didn’t exactly fly by, but having paid less than a tenner for our tickets, we couldn’t complain. Packed full of young trendies, with the same thing on their minds, we almost had ourselves a little Megabus pre-Parklife warm-up party.

Dumped into the rain at Manchester’s glorious bus exchange terminus we looked like a couple of newbs at their first chat-roulette party – speechless. Did I mention that we are a couple of London heads through and through, only usually ever venturing as far as Zone 4 on the tube. Manchester is like going to Russia for us, mentally, it is that far. To our surprise, Manchester is a gorgeous city and so technologically advanced, they’ve even got a tram network! Plus most of the girls look at least a a point or two hotter than your average London chick. Maybe it’s the fake-tan but you can genuinely see that these girls have put in the effort, and you’ve gotta rate them for that.

 The early bird catches the worm, so we strolled into Platt’s Field where Parklife is held just after opening at 12pm. Running around like a couple of giddy schoolkids, we got loaded up on some drinks and waited for the festivities to begin. There were more tents that we expected, we had had it in our narrow little minds that all Parklife was going to be a stage and a tent in a muddy field, but we were completely wrong. Throughout the day there was always something to do: a DJ to hear, a show to see and an adventure to be had. Thankfully for us, on Saturday we were kept pretty much dry with hardly any rain, and once the night fell, we were all having too good of a time to care about anything as trivial as a downpour. By far, the standout moment of Parklife was one of the last acts on Saturday, Sub Focus, who in true style absolutely tore it up.

Did you meet us at Parklife? Tag yourself in our Facebook Gallery.

By Karel Kumar Cloak & Swagger