It never rains but it pours. Well, it didn’t rain at all actually. But yesterday (July 17), on the second day of Benicassim 2009, a massive fire burnt our festival walkway to a crisp. Then the wind got ridiculously chaotic, blasting sand into every conceivable orifice and making walking in a straight line so tough it looked like every festival-goer was communally failing a road-side drunken-ness test.

Pics: Andy Whitton

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Check out Notes From The Underground for more free punk rock MP3s from the best of Reading and Leeds, as well as a bunch of awesome music from the noisiest, fastest bands around.

So we've all spent the last couple of days debating just which band on the Lock Up is best, but a couple of the comments on the last blog made me realise we can all agree on one thing: A Wilhelm Scream are pretty much one of the most exciting bands of the entire festival. And there's a very rare free tune of theirs to download below...oh, and did I mention they're currently recording a brand new EP and album? Aceness.

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Yesterday me and ex-Radar Ed Alex Miller had some Mexican brunch then took a cab out of town to one of a chain of big camp, kitsch Hispanic eateries called Baby Acapulco. It felt like where Rip Taylor would go for his Burritos. It had a massive water feature in the middle of the room and gigantic shiny plastic palm trees everywhere.

Baby Acapulcos

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We love those Mongrel guys – and after last night’s scenes following their show at Eurosonic I hereby decree that Drew McConnell is the only man in rock allowed to wear sunglasses indoors.

Mongrel's Drew and Lowkey

Last night (January 16) I saw Errors, James Yuill, The Rakes and Mongrel. You can wait until a week on Wednesday for the full review, but until then here’s what we have learned during the Eurosonic experience:

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Festival season has begun! I’m hip-high in mud, making devil horn signs with cider-sheened hands and trying to forget that I just paid £40 to a man in a jester hat for ten aspirin tablets that aren’t making me want to inappropriately hug anyone. Rock’n’roll!

OK, I was getting a touch carried away there – it’s a good few months before we encounter those kind of scenes. But festival season has kicked off, in a way – I’m at Eurosonic in Groningen, north Holland: a Camden Crawl-type affair but with less Mohawks and much more continental lager. And band names like Vincent Van Go Go.

Oh, and meatballs:

With a population of just over 180,000 Groningen isn’t quite the kind of metropolis you’d expect to attract a venue-hopping music festival such as this. But with a bursting student population and, as a result, a slew of ace venues, it works as well as mayo does with chips (that’s the delicacy here).

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Greetings from French Canada. We’ve travelled here as part of a contingent of British music types for a cool event called M For Montreal, a kind of miniature South By Southwest designed to showcase the best new music from Quebec and beyond.

Over three nights, there’s a packed programme of back-to-back bands all out to impress the army of festival promoters, record labels, managers and, of course, bloggers. It’s all made possible by the quite amazing way that the Canadian government splashes out on rock’n’roll with support and grant money. And that policy looks like paying off. Crystal Castles, Fucked Up, Holy Fuck and of course Arcade Fire have all risen from the land of the maple leaf to international dominance in recent years. Last year’s big winners from M For Montreal were We Are Wolves, and over the next three nights we’ll be bringing you blow-by-blow accounts of who could be next.

We were going to do you a little video tour of the city so you can see it for yourself – except that last year we had the lovely Melissa Auf Der Maur from Hole and Smashing Pumpkins to do it for us, and as she’s much prettier, we thought we should just show you that one again. It's the same city, after all...