Hope of the States live on hope

Hope of the States turned a disastrous show at the V Festival into a mini-triumph yesterday (August 21) by going guerrilla.

The band's show on the Music Choice stage in Chelmsford was besieged by technical difficulties to the point where their set had to be cut short.

Mortified by their big moment going wrong, singer Sam Herlihy and cellist Mike Siddell took matters into their own hands and staged a four-song acoustic show next to the site's car park.

Arriving at Staffordshire Weston Park today, Sam told NME.COM about the trauma. “Last night everything that could go wrong did go wrong and there were so many people there that we felt really guilty for letting people down, so we got a guitar and went out sort of behind the stage. There were hundreds of kids there, we did three or four songs. It's amazing, when you're onstage you can't really hear people singing, but everybody was singing ‘Nehemiah' and ‘The Red The White The Black The Blue' word for word, it blew my head off. We were really upset after the show so it made us feel a lot better about things really.”

The crowd was so big that Sam and Mike had to perform ten meters apart, with audience members hushing each other so they could hear. Then, a man in the crowd gave Sam a loud-hailer, through which he sang ‘The Red The White The Black The Blue'.

But however refreshing, the band are in no hurry for a repeat performance tonight: “I just want to play a good gig tonight,” said Sam, “it's great to play to that many people. But predictably everything that can go wrong does go wrong with us, so we're getting used to it.”

document.write(unescape("