The Courteeners are not, as regular readers could probably guess, the sort of band I like much, and I generally try not to let the existence of groups like them bug me. Occasionally, though, I’ll become passingly outraged by something – like, say, the constant and wildly optimistic comparison that keeps being drawn between the Courteeners and The Smiths.
OK, so now it’s 103 degrees so you’ll forgive me if I stay under canvas in VIP and neck a cool beer instead of hauling myself the quarter mile across this parched site to see Duffy.
Put on partly to raise awareness of the dangers of racist political parties in the run-up to London's elections this week and partly to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original Rock Against Racism festival, the Love Music Hate Racism Carnival has got a lot to live up to.
OK, so now it’s 101 degrees and the crowd is crawling from patch of shade to tented shelter, the mass influx of Hollywood types and music biz bigwigs (them that’s left!) arriving in limos when the sun goes down.
COACHELLA FESTIVAL – DAY ONE - The Verve, Les Savy Fav, The Raconteurs!
It’s 97 degrees, 50,000 music tattooed fans are surrounded by palm trees and padding cowboy-hatted and barefoot across the lush polo fields of Indio, California while trucks spray water ON the site to keep the swirling dust down. Read it and weep Mr Eavis! It can only be COACHELLA.
I am the proud owner of my late grandmother's radio. It's a Ferranti, bought, so my mother tells me, around 1950/1, from an electrical shop in Tattenham Corner in Surrey, where my grandparents lived at the time. Radio enthusiasts note, it's a 215 model, with a walnut-finish cabinet and, according to a quick Google, would have cost £27 back in the day, very expensive in a post war world of rationing. It carries Long, Medium and Short Wave and, sometimes, there's a rather eerie whistle running underneath the programme when it's on, like the ghost of electricity moping around in the ether.
I got an email from someone the other day about a new band helmed by Richard Fearless, the sometime leader of Death In Vegas. Of Black Acid, they said, “Half of it sounds like a Japanese sixth form band doing Mary Chain covers. Half of it sounds like Bobby Gillespie telling you about records he likes while trying to play them. The first song is ten minutes of backwards noise.”
Amidst all the presumptuous sniping at Coldplay on yesterday’s playlist blog, someone asked me whether the debut Fleet Foxes album had turned up yet. As it happened, I was just working on a review of that record for the issue of Uncut out at the end of May. It is, you’ll be relieved to hear, pretty fine.
I’ve been thinking these past couple of days about the dubious furore that has been brewing around Jay-Z’s headline slot at Glastonbury, thanks in part to Noel Gallagher weighing in on the subject last week. There are a lot of issues about non-exclusivity, festival overkill, pervading fear of mud and so on that have impacted on Glasto ticket sales this year, which I can’t really be bothered to rehash here. What does interest me, though, is the perceived unsuitability of Jay-Z as a headliner of the festival. If he isn’t right for Glastonbury, then what is?
