Butlins, during All Tomorrow’s Parties weekend, that indiest of independent music festivals, reminds me a little of Alan Moore’s Top 10.

His brilliant comic book series follows the lives and work of the police force of Neopolis, a city in which everyone (from policemen to civilian to animal) is a super-hero. It’s a simple but excellent premise. While everybody is unique, thanks to their different weird and wonderful superhuman abilities, nobody is really special because, of course, everybody is special.

ATP is the music festival full of people in bands watching people in bands. Often the only difference between those on the stage and those off seems to be that one’s doing better than the other – be it due to talent, graft or luck. So much so that, before Mogwai went on stage to headline Friday’s lineup, their sound engineer pointed at a couple of girls and black guy standing near the front and said: ‘Would you, you and you mind moving back a bit please. The first ten rows are reserved for white boys staring at guitar pedals.’

That’s kind of true. Of course the line-up and audience was, in actuality, far more varied. It was inevitably brilliant but tiring. I enjoyed most of the things I saw, with caveats. Subtitle was eloquent but unfocused; Band of Horses were friendly but unrehearsed; Cornelius was stylish but also a bit boring; Edan and MC Dagha were exciting but unvaried; Daniel Johnston was sincere but awkward; The Go! Team were fun but also a bit like redcoats with their (gasp!) requests for audience participation. Shellac were just plain amazing.

One thing I noticed more than at other ATPs was the constant rush to document everything by the audience. This ATP was curated by the attendees (in that we all had a chance to vote for the artists we wanted to see appear – hence why our names appear on the programme in the image above), but anyone would think this was to be the last concert any of these artists played so intense was the photography and filming. Youtube and Flickr are amazing, obviously, but it’s as if many people had to record their experience in order to properly experience it after the event. It made me want to never take a camera anywhere again, a bit.

Still, thanks to all the friends who were there and made it that much more of a sweet time. There are lots of cute (and terrifying) memories (some already lost to sleep deprivation – damn, should have taken a camera) but they were, and are, probably best left unrecorded.