Month: June 2005

Much of the music that I wanted to see having already taken place (and much of that at the same time), Glastonbury Sunday, as usual, was a day of loitering in the more unusual areas of the festival site. As Rob has already reported, we whiled away the morning by watching a mock wedding in the Chapel of Love and Loathing (free divorce with every wedding, apparently), drinking more of the sweet pear cider, and watching a silver-painted naked man torment Robert with his flaccid penis.

We returned to the main stage in time to watch a confused Brian Wilson play some old Beach Boys songs (“he doesn’t know where he is, does he?” said a chap I overheard in the toilets after the show) with all the charisma of a man who has lost his mind to hallucinogenic drugs. After that, unbelievably, it was time for Sal to leave. Despite my suggestions that she should stay and attempt to get home in time for work the next morning, we both knew that there was little to no chance of that happening, so off she went to catch her train, and off Rob and I went to watch Rufus Wainwright. Although Rufus’s indie singer-songwriter shtick contains all the ingredients of the type of thing I’d normally like, I was deeply bored by his performance. That said, I’ve just found my comments from last year when I first saw one of my current favourite bands: “…and showcasing a band called The Kaiser Chiefs, who were, well, alright, I guess. Maybe I’m getting old.“. You never know: maybe in 6 months time I’ll be a huge fan of Rufus as well.

And then, for the second time in the weekend, I joined Rob in an obscure tent in the green fields to watch an hour of Louise Rhodes being set up (she’s a solo singer: how long can it possibly take?) Again, I left before a note had been played. This time it was because I wanted to round off my festival experience watching Conor Oberst, aka Bright Eyes, in the John Peel tent. When I arrived at the tent, still smarting from having dropped my digital camera in the mud trying to take a picture of The La’s on the Other Stage, there was a palpable sense of anticipation (people were cheering the arrival onstage of the roadies, for goodness sake). I’m only familiar with one of the Bright Eyes albums (I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning), and so I was expecting to hear some of the pleasant acoustic ballads it contains. Inevitably he didn’t play a single song I know, but I wasn’t quite expecting what turned out to be one of the oddest gig experiences I have ever had.

The John Peel tent was already too busy for me to reach the front by this point, so I settled in with a good view just by one of the supports in front of the mixing desk. What followed turned into one of the strangest gigs I have ever been to. A song or two in, it became evident that Conor was not having a good gig. I’m not sure why. His between song banter began at mildly sarcastic (“Hey everybody, isn’t it great to be here: sixteen pounds for a plate of broccoli, and we’re all making poverty history”), but quickly descended into confrontational (“Normally I’d feel terrible about a gig going like this, but it’s ok because I’m making poverty history. I’m just doing my bit”, and “If you think this is bad, just leave now. It’s not going to get better; if anything, it’s going to get worse.”), all of which seemed rather odd given that the crowd was mostly appreciative of his performance. Perhaps we didn’t cheer quite loud enough for Mr Oberst. At one point I’m sure he even dedicated a song to John Peel, describing him as “a massive coke head”. Apparently he subsequently apologised for this, and other comments (“It’s great. We’re all here. We’re all making poverty history and John Peel. John Peel’s dead. It’s all great…”), but I’d be interested to know exactly what his problem was: as far as I could tell the only really angry person in the tent to begin with was Conor himself (although I did think his generic rock and roll posturing seemed somewhat less forceful by the fact that every time he threw an item of musical equipment down onto the stage in disgust, a small team of harassed roadies would have to scurry on after him to pick them up and reset them). Funnily enough, though, if you essentially tell your audience to f*** off, after a while they start to listen to you: there was markedly more space in the tent by the end.

Then again, perhaps I missed something: at one point I think I heard someone heckle asking for “Summer of 69”, a comment that perhaps has more resonance if you’re watching Ryan Adams, the billed headliner, who had had to pull out at the last minute. Later on someone asked for (Adams’s) “New York, New York”, but I think they were joking.

Finally, this strangest of strange shows ended when a streaker outwitted the Glastonbury security, disrobed on stage, and kissed Conor for as long as she could before a couple of said outwitted security men dragged her away off stage. “Well that was kind of nice,” he said. And suddenly he seemed a lot happier. Perhaps all he needed was a bit of TLC.

Saturday morning brought Hayseed Dixie to the Pyramid stage with their unique brand of hillbilly rock covers. My initial enthusiasm started to wane after a while, in the face of what was, essentially, the same joke repeated for the best part of an hour, but there’s still some degree of amusement to be had as they start to play each song, and it slowly dawns on you what they are actually playing. (Er, yes, it’s an AC-DC song. Again.) Towards the end of their set we wandered off in search of breakfast, and shortly afterwards, our first hot and spicy ciders of the weekend.

Rohan was interested in seeing a debate in the Leftfield tent, so we made that our next destination. Unfortunately not only was the debate we’d come to see not happening, but it had been replaced by a series of excruciatingly bad protest singers. Having seen one comedy band already that day, we didn’t really need to see any more.

One chap introduced a song by explaining in some detail how it was about a good guy who gave the destitute soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars some dignity by employing them to dig tunnels in Liverpool. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but if I remember correctly, I think the start of the song then went something like this: “You were a great man/who employed soldiers/returning from the Napoleonic wars/to dig tunnels/in Liverpool/for some dignity…”

When we finally left the area he appeared to be singing a song that consisted entirely of the repeated lyric “this is a bad song”.

After a short detour through the market stalls (what are all these people queueing for? Have they finally introduced the much anticipated Glastonbury queueing field? Oh, no, I see, they’re waiting for “Wellies. Saturday. 9AM”), it was back to the main stage, to see the Kaiser Chiefs, in fine form, play their shouty, (Brit)pop-y anthems.

Definite kudos to lead singer Ricky Wilson, who repeatedly dived into the audience with only a dedicated team of beefy security guards to protect him. At one point, the band asked for the huge inflatable diplodocus that had been bouncing around the crowd for most of their set to be brought up on stage (is it just me, or do crowd props seem to be getting ever more elaborate–did someone actually blow this thing up?) where it sat for the rest of their set (playing bass guitar, I presume).

As 4pm approached, the time when the whole of the festival was due to join hands and contact Arthur Scargill and make poverty history, in a moment “carefully coordinated across the whole site”, we found ourselves in the tiny Guardian lounge tent, waiting for the Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini to play some of her Sundays-esque guitary tunes (and indulge us in some of her endearingly quirky between song banter). Sadly, despite what the following day’s Q daily paper would say, no one in the Guardian tent paid any attention to the 4pm “moment”, and I was thus deprived of my chance to make poverty history or hold anyone’s hand. Presumably the Grauniad doesn’t care about world poverty, and if the G8 summit goes awry next week, and poverty survives the month, it will be all our fault.

Eschewing the delights of The Coral (well, if you’ve seen The Zutons, why bother?) we returned to the tents to listen to Keane play their song, followed by half of New Order’s set, before squeezing into the back of a packed John Peel Tent to see what was probably everyone’s band of the weekend, The Magic Numbers (and no, they are not, apparently, led by Justin Lee Collins after all; I won’t believe it until I see them both in the same room at the same time, though).

Razorlight, our choice of headliner, were quite good. Although, if Jonny Borrell is reading (as I’m sure he is), would he mind awfully not wearing that white suit next time. With all the lights reflecting, it does make it rather tricky to get a decent photograph.

Afterwards, we went up to the Green Fields to sit and watch the lovely twinkling lights all over the site, as drunken, drugged people played with flares and set off fireworks all around us (at one point I watched three people who didn’t seem to be quite sure where they were walk through a small fire), and people everywhere tried to sell us drugs. One lady had brought her small daughter along to help out, and another person who approached us was perhaps the politest drug dealer I’ve ever met: “excuse me, could I interest you in…” was as far as he got before I sent him away.

There was a point, some time on Friday morning, around the time I had finally stopped bailing out our non-waterproof borrowed tent, decamped to the spare (thanks Rob…) and begun hoping my soggy jeans would dry while wiping away the mud that had encrusted on my feet after wading through a pool of indeterminately composed filth on an abortive flip-flopped journey down to the Guardian lounge (Sally, still warm, non-smelly and untouched by mud, had both pairs of wellies with her in London at this point, and the stalls on the site had all sold out), when I considered–gasp–leaving the Glastonbury site before I’d even seen a band. Of course I would never have actually done something so recklessly stupid, but the thought crossed my mind, just for a second.

It had all been so different when I headed to the site on a pleasantly summery Wednesday afternoon and evening, watching the green rolling countryside outside the train window and chatting to the man sitting opposite to me who–last of a dying breed–was planning to walk the 6 miles from Castle Cary station to the site and attempt to get in by jumping the fence. “Nice night for it, I suppose,” I suggested.

When I finally reached Rob and Claire and the tents in our usual prime sub-pylon spot on the hill by the Pyramid stage, the sunshine had already made me sweatier than I’d hoped to be, given that I wasn’t planning to wash until the following Monday, but I tried to put this small matter out of my mind, and we spent the sunny evening and the following sunny day lounging around the site, trying not to burn and drinking rather a lot of pleasant pear cider (a welcome new addition this year). I think at one point I called Sal to say that, no, actually, things were glorious here and she really didn’t need to bring the wellies along after all (that weather chap on the BBC website who said that wellies would be “a bit OTT” was obviously right all along).

Things started to go wrong at around 4am on Friday morning, when I was woken by our loud Scottish neighbours, who as far as I could tell appeared to be camped in my head, when they returned to their tents, turned their radio on to some awful station playing S Club 7 records, and began having a loud party. Somehow I managed to resist the urge to tell them to shut up, and instead I meekly attempted to get myself back to sleep while cursing myself for not taking Rob up on his offer of earplugs after I’d mentioned something about being kept awake the previous night by a Jeanette Crankie soundalike who seemed to have talked continually for most of the night, but never actually formed words or sentences, just unintelligible grunts. I finally dropped back to sleep sometime between 5 and 6, as an eerie silence, and some unusually strong winds, descended on the site… When I woke again I could feel a strange dampness at the bottom of my sleeping bag, and it was shortly after this that I looked around the tent in horror to see water dripping in everywhere. As I later discovered, seeing the rivers of mud and the lakes that had formed elsewhere on the site, it could have been much worse, but that was little consolation to me at the time as I sat huddled in the middle of the most ridiculously designed non-waterproof tent I have ever encountered, listening to the storms pass overhead, counting the gaps–or lack of them–between the thunder and lightning, and wondering if it was safe to trek up towards the toilets any time soon.

But then, of course, as then always do, things got better. I was forced to sit in the tent listening to the woeful noodling of the John Butler Trio, while the last significant rain of the weekend landed on the site, but after that I was able to venture out–cautiously, still lacking wellingtons–to watch The Thrills play their cheery west coast sub-Beach Boys anthems, and then The Zutons play their scally sub-The Coral anthems. Anticipating the imminent arrival of Ms Hislop and the gang, I stayed back on one of the few remaining grassy bits of the field for this, so I was unable to share my amusement with Rob and Claire, who were much closer to the front, at the fact that not once but twice the lead singer of The Zutons urged the crowd to sing along only to be met with complete silence from a set of festival goers who might well have been enjoying the performance, but not nearly well enough to actually know any of the words. A slight overestimation of their popularity, perhaps.

Shortly after that, as Elvis Costello turned up, so did my wellies my beautiful girlfriend, who just happened to have some wellies with her, along with the rest of the gang. Suddenly liberated, it was time to start wading through lakes of effluent, buy some overpriced food, and start drinking cider. Yay!

Suitably sated, we watched The Doves for the second time in the space of a week, shared most of a bottle of vodka and ploughed into our first box of wine, which we somehow polished off just in time for The Killers to take to the stage for a set of their big crowd-pleasing songs. Indie Rock and Roll for me, indeed. Sadly, The White Stripes provided a rather poor end to the first day proper. Don’t get me wrong, I like The White Stripes and I have a lot of their records, and I really enjoyed seeing them the last time they were at Glasto back in 2002, but this time it all just seemed a bit rubbish (Blue Orchid, and Jolene excepted), so it was something of a relief that we had other plans, and we all trekked up to The Tadpole Stage way up in the Green Fields to indulge Rob in his obsession with Lou Rhodes, who was launching her solo career with a few small-scale performances. Such a shame then that all we got to see before all of us bar Rob and Claire departed, exhausted, to our tents was an hour of hot roadie action. Curse the small stages and their inaccurate running times, I thought, as we headed for bed, the first day over.

In the end, on our London Eye thing, we were joined not by Martin White and his stupid accordion playing face, which I briefly glimpsed disappearing into the London skyline with Robin Ince a couple of pods ahead of us, but by everyone’s favourite posh guitar duo, teh Turin Brakes, along with a gang of African drummers.

The nature of the event was that you didn’t know quite who you were going to get, so we spent most of our time in the queue opening up the “passport” containing a full list of acts that had been handed to us, and trying to guess. As we approached the gantry, I spotted a couple of comedians at the top of the stairs. “That’s Marcus Brigstock”, I said to Sal. “He went to Bristol uni a couple of years before us–he’s always on the telly now”, I noted (although apparently he does take the occasional break in order to appear at London tourist attraction-based charity events). He did make me laugh, though, when he responded to the comment by the other (not quite so ubiquitous so I didn’t recognise him) comedian with him, who had suggested that the organisers were letting a few empty pods go by because “they’re full of sick”. “It’s ok”, said Marcus, “it’s Fair Trade sick.”

Ah, but it was not to be my erstwhile almost contemporary accompanying us in the pod, and nor was it Jo Brand who passed us a we got nearer the front of the queue (“I recognise her off that Trinny and Susannah episode”, said Sal), but indeed teh Brakes. They were quite good–there was lots of drumming from the drummer people, a chap from MTV filming everything, and, oh, the London skyline, in all its glory, as the hazy sun dropped down behind the hills in the distance. There are, predictably, half a memory card full of photos, some of which I may upload when I return from my weekend at Glasto with the other full…

We’re off to a thing on the London Eye tonight (see! What with this and U2 if poverty and trade aren’t history and fair by 9pm tonight, I will be very cross*), so as a result I “packed” for Glasto last night. Consequently I’ve spent most of the day remembering things that I probably should have put in my bag.

For example, it’s slightly possible that my festival experience this weekend will be improved somewhat by taking my sleeping bag. No doubt I will remember other equally unimportant items during the course of the day (and surely also tomorrow, when it will be too late for me to take them, unless I ask Sally nicely).

Like Rob, I’ve been perusing this year’s clash finder. It’s not looking good: Chas n’ Dave or The Futureheads? (Ok, probably the Futureheads, but I’m only half joking.) The Killers or Willy Mason? Bright Eyes, The La’s, or Primal Scream? Kasabian or the Magic Numbers (or New Order)? (Or should I just go and see The Proclaimers–for a laugh–instead?)

Oh, decisions, decisions…

[* Respectively, obviously. I wouldn’t want to “make trade history”, or “make poverty fair”, no matter how many sweatshop-produced wristbands I happen to be wearing. That would be terrible, clearly.]

As a small postscript to my U2 review, I’ve just remembered that at one point Mr Bongo asked us all to kindly get out our telephones and Make Poverty History. I’m not sure if we made poverty history, but if not, I think I know why: it’s nothing to do with the reluctance of the G8 leaders to cooperate, but rather because of Mr Ox’s appalling grammar. Our specific instructions, displayed on the video screens to the side of the stage were as follows:

Text ‘africa’ followed by ‘your name’ to 80205

Why, why, why, are there quotation marks around “your name”? Do they actually want to receive millions of messages that read “africa your name”? Or did they mean “text ‘africa’, followed by your name, to 80205”?

Say what you like about Irish megastars U2–and you might indeed think them to be slightly pretentious, self righteous middle aged rock stars (hey, you might even want to pick yourself up a “MAKEBONOHISTORY” T-shirt and wander around with it on, I think I might when we see them in Barcelona later this year, you know, just to test the Spanish sense of irony)–they certainly know how to put on a good show. Several songs into Saturday’s Twickenham concert, Mr Vox, their diminutive lead singer, spotted a girl in the crowd with a silver helium balloon in the shape of a heart, which he proceeded to take off her and release towards the heavens while throwing his hands to the sky. Now, if you or I stole someone’s balloon and let it go, we’d probably get slapped, or worse, but when Bono does it he has 80,000 people enthralled. There’s just no justice.

We’d arrived at Twickenham much earlier, and spent our first couple of hours there in the pleasantly shaded beer garden of The Cabbage Patch, a pub I used to frequent rather too frequently back when I lived in the area. And we made the right decision, as well, because even though we spent our first few hours in the area sitting comfortably outside the pub, and not sitting in the full sun outside the stadium with the other overly keen standing ticket holders, we still managed to arrive there in time to bag ourselves the hallowed green wristbands that allowed easy entry to and exit from the enclosed standing section right at the front, where the stage juts out into the crowd. We had plenty of room to move around, as well, although perhaps this goes some way to explaining the slightly confusing conversation I had with a chap standing near us while we watched the second support band, Athlete: he’d moved in front of us, so Sal and I stepped around him to the side to get a better view of the four skinny indie kids onstage playing their lightweight rock songs.

“Excuse me, do you mind telling me what you’re doing, standing beside me?” he asked. Now, I know I’m tall, and I could understand “What are you doing standing in front of me?”, but beside me? That’s a new one on me: perhaps he was expecting to have Twickenham to himself and was working his way around the crowd one by one asking everyone.

U2, of course, were a lot of fun. Pretty much what you would expect: lots of wandering out into the crowd on their protruding stage bit (although sadly despite our being only a few feet away, at no point was Bono quite close enough for us to tell if, as we suspected from a TV interview last week, he does indeed dye his hair, and cover up his impending baldness with a weave…), the obligatory hauling up onto the stage of at least one member of the audience (who was handed a camera with which to film Mr Edge and yer man Bono–who my spell checker keeps wanting to call “Bongo Ox”–and then failed to notice for the whole length of Mysterious Ways that she was holding it upside down, as 79,999 people simultaneously turned their heads to the side), and lots of impressive flashing lights once the sun had gone down. And much jumping up and down from our section of the crowd.

They closed with a second run through Vertigo, in a slightly endearing, “it’s as if we’re a new band and we’ve only got one album” sort of way. The cheeky scamps.

In the end, I survived my displacement from our flat on Saturday with little more than a sore head the next day, but this was after an unexpectedly drunken evening at Claire’s birthday on Friday night, which ended with Sally waking me from my drunken slumber and forcibly dragging me out of the venue to catch the bus–ah, my ability to fall into an alcohol-induced sleep at the slightest provocation knows no bounds. I was particularly pleased with my Zane Lowe celebrity spot, though, which took place towards the end of Saturday evening, because, as my haiku suggests, no one believed me at first. One of our group, who spends her working days in the meeja, and is thus exposed to celebrities on a regular basis, told me that the chap over the other side of the pub was categorically not him, because “the real Zane Lowe is much better looking”, at which another member of our group pointed out the balding chap that notLowe was talking to and suggested it might be Moby. When, later in the evening, we took the radical step of asking him if he was indeed the kiwi DJ, I got to feel mightily pleased with myself when it turned out that I was right all along. Well, it’s so rare an occurrence that I have to make the most of it when I can. [Case in point: the weekend’s second celebrity spot involved my sister pointing out that her off of that dodgy BBC sitcom had just walked right past me “looking a bit rough” on her way out of the Screen on the Green].

The night ended with me struggling to stay awake for the second day in a row, so it is perhaps fitting that I nearly didn’t get my last pint at all: I asked the barman for a pint of bitter, he repeated the order back to me (“pint of young’s bitter, yes”), and promptly made me an espresso. “Er, I asked for a pint of bitter?” I said, having presumed he was making that for someone else, and not thinking that espresso could ever be misheard for bitter. Then again, perhaps he knew what I really needed better than I know myself.

On Sunday, prior to my brush with celebrity, we popped over to Upper Street to grab something to eat. Sal and I had been to a French restaurant (Le Mercury) with really good, reasonably priced food a couple of times before. I’d even taken my parents there, so we thought we’d give it another go.

Unfortunately, things appear to have changed recently: this time the food was truly terrible. Top of our list of complaints was the completely burnt Yorkshire pudding that arrived with Sal’s roast. Her request for a replacement was met with bemusement and then the arrival of a second, equally burnt, one. When we pointed out that this one was just as black as the first, the waiter switched to the hairy butter school of defensive customer service, by trying to pretend that this one wasn’t mostly carcinogens.

Oh dear. That’s another one on the list, I suppose.

Did you see that? What?
Zoe Wannamaker! No!
Yes! She walked past you.

Zane Lowe. Local pub.
Though they said it wasn’t him.
I was right, it was.