Month: June 2004

As you may have noticed from the previous picture, I’ve just returned from a deeply muddy, but fantastic, Glastonbury weekend (well, Mr Eavis said it was the best ever, and it’s not like he says that every year or anything).

This year, for the first time, I arrived on site on the Wednesday morning, barely a few hours after it had opened to the soon to be unwashed masses. Once I had located our regular camping spot just above the Pyramid stage, I spent around 30 fun minutes struggling to erect two tents as the rain lashed down on top of me, and the gusting wind tried its best to force the tent out of my hands. And once they were finally up, I got to sit and shelter from the rain watching other newly arrived festival goers struggling to put their tents up, and the soft ground and gusting wind conspiring to send a selection of recently-erected gazebos up into the air, flying off not very safely towards the overhead electricity pylons. The people camped behind me set up their tent and gazebo combo, then left for their cars to retrieve the rest of their gear only to return shouting “someone’s nicked our gazebo”. It was left to their neighbours behind me to explain how it had shot up into the air and floated off into the distance, unsavable, and could now be found scattered in pieces over by the long drop toilets.

One order for wellies promptly placed with Sally back in London, I settled in for the weekend. Thursday brought moderately better weather, those wellies I was almost thinking I wouldn’t need (fool), and a crushingly predictable England defeat shown on the Pyramid Stage video screens.

By Friday the sun was beaming down, and, my face a cancer-inducing shade of pink, we even had to seek refuge in the shade by the Other Stage’s mixing desk during the surprisingly good I Am Kloot. Thankfully, things had cooled down a bit in time for the excellent Snow Patrol and Franz Ferdinand later on. We polished off Friday by watching the Kings Of Leon, and then this lot, on the main stage.

In the end, Friday’s weather turned out to be the best of the weekend, and we awoke on Saturday morning to the not so sweet sound of rain dripping down onto the roof of the tent, something that it essentially continued to do for the rest of the festival, casting something of a shadow over proceedings, but not enough of a downer to stop us from enjoying the Scissor Sisters on the main stage, followed by the second half of Keane on the Other Stage, in the pouring rain. After that, I headed off to try to see Stewart Lee in the Cabaret tent, but ended up catching Lamb playing an unexpected stand-in set on the Jazz World stage, which was particularly great for me, given that I’d had to miss them on the Friday night so that I could catch Oasis. It also looks likely to have been one of their last ever gigs.

Later, the rain held off for most of Macca’s set, so we were able to watch without getting too wet as he played a whole pile of Beatles songs, and thankfully not too many of his shabby solo ones (although a “we’ve just been joined by the BBC” (so let’s let off all the expensive synchronised fireworks) Live and Let Die was obviously great).

On Sunday it continued to rain for most of the time, but that didn’t prevent us from enjoying one of the highlights of the weekend (immediately after one of the low points–a torrential downpour that saw us ducking into a strange cowboy themed dance tent for shelter), watching this bunch of scally reprobates play a strikingly similar set to the one we saw at the Apollo the other week (although I had to resist the urge to pogo in the mud when they finished with Whippin’ Picadilly, but then you just can’t dance in wellies anyway).

And I almost forgot to mention a trio of “celebrity” sightings: Howard Marks pushing past us as we left the Other Stage, Eastender (and friend of the Libertines) Dot Cotton being interviewed next to the New Bands tent between the Raveonettes and The Delays, and the bloke off BBC3’s Glastonbury preview show doing a piece to camera next to our tent on the Thursday afternoon…

Same time next year then? See you by the mixing desk for U2.

Glastonbury was great, and I’ll write a full report a bit later (and hopefully post some of my photos, although perhaps not all of them, given that I managed to fill an entire memory card with 100+ pictures of muddy tents). In the mean time, I’ve just been given a whole pile new Gmail invites (I now have another 7), so if anyone would like one, let me know…

For the next last few days, I have been doing this:

One of the attractions of moving to Islington at the start of the year, (apart from its proximity to transport connections for my soon to be ex-work, and its at the time unknown potential for pub-related Google glory–doh! broken my own rule already), was the fact that there’d be a live music venue just down the road, in the shape of the Islington Academy. Despite being inside a shopping centre (Rock n’ Roll!), and having been subsumed, like all music venues, everywhere, apparently, within the ubiquitous Carling branding, I imagined we’d be popping down there once a week to catch some up and coming band, enjoying the security of being able to walk home/not having to rush for that last tube.

Six months on, and we still haven’t even graced its sweaty insides (although we will break this duck in a few week’s time when Sydney’s Alex Lloyd comes to town in a vain attempt to plug Distant Light over here by playing to a bunch of expat travellers pleased to be catching him in such a small venue, and me). The fact that we haven’t been inside is not for the want of trying, though: there have been plenty of XFM-sponsored events there, showcasing the likes of Snow Patrol or Jet, but they’ve all been on-air radio giveaways, “not available through ticketweb“, and, as such, out of my reach. The gigs that you can buy tickets for, however, with Lloyd being a notable exception, have all been, erm, a bit crap–a curious mix of obscure, upcoming bands, and faded former Britpoppers. Still, every now and again I scour the upcoming listings in the hope of discovering a hidden gem. For some reason, I’ve not been tempted by the prospect of the band playing on August 14th “featuring Bonehead (ex-Oasis)”, or previous gigs involving half of Carter USM, or even, playing on August 11th at the 250 capacity Bar Academy (the adjoining small club/room), former indie favourites Echobelly. How the mighty have fallen–I guess Everybody hasn’t Got One anymore.

I still haven’t been doing anything even remotely interesting recently (it rained a bit, we stayed in, we went to the pub, watched some football, you know the sort of predictably boring stuff), so in the absence of anything more interesting to talk about, just one last post on that whole googlebombing nonsense. I was just wondering if anybody can explain this: www.google.com/search?q=related:www.thebarnsbury.co.uk (Google’s results for a search on websites related to our favourite pub website–the results you get when you click on the “similar pages” link underneath a search result).

It’s a very odd list that seems to consist entirely of sites that are also linked from the sites that contained the original googlebomb. For example, I presume the “Kabalarian Philosophy” website appears in the related list because Angel linked to it close to the original entry containing her part of the bomb, but I don’t understand why. What’s the logic here, and how did it determine that only these links were related to the pub’s website, and not the others on the original pages containing the bomb? There’s clearly some kind of bizarre Googlebomb-related overspill effect going on here.

I think that’s all the mileage I’m going to get out of that one, though. Time for something new… In the meantime, later this week I will finally be off to spend some time in a field with some fine music (mudbath? At the time of writing BBC Weather says probably not, although let’s hope Tuesday isn’t as bad as it looks). Expect much excited bloggage on my return.

Something of a mid-festival lull at the moment, so I don’t have anything exciting to write about (well, there is that one thing that’s going to affect my everyday life in quite a significant way–and, perhaps, my ability to blog with impunity between the hours of 9 and 5–but I’m not sure I should announce it to the world before certain other people know about it, and if you know me, you’ll know what I’m talking about anyway…)

So, in the absence of any of that, here’s some links:

– Using their own highly-scientific research method, here’s proof from Google that the fair and balanced Fox news lies (there’s a good breakdown of the OfCom ruling here).

– This music quiz might be a shameless plug for the Observer Music Magazine, but it’s a nice use of all those mini band posters they had all over the underground recently.

– I meant to blog this on Bloomsday itself, but here it is anyway: the BBC’s handy guide to Joyce’s Ulysses. Now I never need to bother reading it. In fact, I might just burn all my books for good measure.

Cory Doctorow has some excellent things to say about Digital Rights Management and copyright issues in this article: Why Microsoft should get out of DRM. Well worth reading, if you have even the slightest interest in music, films and what their associated businesses would like to stop you doing with them.

Apologies for the non-post, but this made me laugh.

The other week, the rudest pub in islington was no more, but somehow it’s back now. Even better, I spotted this today. I can’t guarantee that it’s going to hang around, so I took a screengrab for posterity.

A mere dress rehearsal for the bigger and better festival happenings to come the weekend after next it may have been, but this weekend’s Isle of Wight festival was still great. I wasn’t overly impressed with the two old blokes pretending to be The Who, and found everything post-Word Gets Around that the Stereophonics played to be, well, a touch on the dull side, but aside from that it was a really good weekend. The Manics were on top form, and I even enjoyed the two new songs they played (Empty Souls and Solitude Sometimes Is), sounding as they did like an improvement on the lyrical failings of recent new material like Forever Delayed. I was also suitably embarrassed to discover during No Surface, All Feeling that the two blokes next to me had suddenly started straining to hear me singing along (I have a tendency to sing along mindlessly at gigs without thinking that the people in my immediate vicinty might be able to hear). They didn’t seem to mind, though, describing it as being “like subtitles, only better”.

Earlier, we’d enjoyed seeing Jet play a truncated version of the set we saw at Brixton the other week. It’s definitely a shame that they’re not going to be at Glasto, but one other band that I’ll definitely be trying to see again is Snow Patrol, who played a cracking set on the Sunday (they seemed genuinely, but endearingly, overwhelmed by the [positive crowd response as well).

The only downside to something like IoW is that you have to suffer the usual it’s-not-glasto festival issues, like not being able to take your own beer in and having to queue twice to buy hideously overpriced alcohol inside the venue (whose daft money extorting idea was beer tokens anyway?), but one unusual aspect was that the crowd seemed to be one of the friendliest I’ve encountered at a festival (set against Reading 2001’s bottle throwing Sunday afternoon teenagers as probably the worst). Even when they were being wankers, and there was plently of that going on, especially around the showing of the England match on the Sunday, they were still being quite nice about it. The locals (past whose houses hordes of festival goers trudged twice daily on their way from the campsite to the arena) even seemed to be surprisingly friendly and understanding. Maybe it’s something in the island air. Then again, when David Bowie introduced All The Young Dudes during his excellent–but not quite as good as at Glastonbury 2000–headlining set, he suggested we shouldn’t sing along during the chorus “because of all the local farmers who go to bed early”. I couldn’t help thinking he’d got a bit confused about the whole thing. Perhaps he thought he was somewhere else.