Aha! Festival time! The season when all publications pull out their stock book of cliches and plagiarise themselves in a transparent effort to seem at one with the zeitgeist! Huzzah! Boomshanka!
As if you weren’t sick of it already from the endless coverage in every publication other than music magazines (that shithouse NME aside), as if you hadn’t puked real tears from your colon upwards upon seeing ’style thermometers’ in the broadsheets recommending which designer wellies to shove on your pointless feet, as if you hadn’t already ticked off which hopeless, mediocre, electro-punk-fuzz rock/pop fusion supergroups you were going to lap up in lacklustre fashion like an artificial indie drone when you finally got to the hell of the desecrated countryside, they then go and put Glastonbury ON THE FUCKING TV as well.
For the purposes of this blog and in the vain hope of seeing a half decent performance (in comfort rather than from the back of an enormous marquee while trying to avoid a flag some South African twat keeps waving), I tuned in. I V plussed the whole lot and forwarded a hell of a lot of the crap.
That’s a lot of forwarding. A hell of a lot. My forward finger’s gone all bent.
Before I start, I should point out that I don’t for one moment think that watching all of the BBC’s output gives any insight into the festival itself. I’m clear that this is a BBC production and that many of those who went to Glastonbury won’t have seen any of the crap outlined below and will have had a jolly wheeze. This is really a criticism of the rubbish on BBCs 3, 4 and 2 more than Eavis’s garden fete. So if you went, don’t get all defensive.
Trying to keep a chronological list of what I viewed would’ve been logistically difficult, so I’ll highlight and lowlight what I absorbed.
Full-on, MOR bilge
Mark Ronson, step right up. Hours were dedicated to this little shyster playing his coffee-table cover versions. Except he wasn’t really playing – he was whacking a cowbell while a team of session musicians joylessly flapped about behind him. To distract the audience from this fact, special guest after special guest was invited out to ruin perfectly good songs. The best example of this was Lily Allen shitting on the already shitty Oh My God by the Kaiser Chiefs.
Flat, atonal, vocally weak, if this wasn’t an abject lesson in why famous peoples’ kids shouldn’t be indulged on the strength of their name, I don’t know what is.
In addition to this, we suffered KT Turnstile, James fucking fuck’s sake Blunt, Will Young (?!), Goldfrapp, Crowded Fucking House and yes, Vampire Weekend. Despite claims to the contrary, this band are as middle of the bloody road as a centrally plonked white line in a central motorway along the equator. So, so dull. Sting. The Police. Get lost.
Rubbish, weak, noughties indie
Pigeon Detectives. Kate Nash, Get Cape, Wear Cape, Get Lost. The Enemy. Editors. All of these were showcased on the BBC while interesting bands (interesting because I quite like them) such as Los Campesinos, Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Young Knives were all overlooked in favour of the flavour of the month, which inevitably left a bitter taste on the buds.
A handful of highlights
A song each on the main coverage from Spiritualized, Band of Horses, The Verve, MGMT, The National. Despite the fact that the latter were rather sullied when Edith Bowman made out she’d invented them. A few full sets on the red button (including some of the above groups) were alright as well, but were also non-recordable – which was handy.
Hip hop at Glastonbury
I’m a fan of a fair bit of hip hop music but as I’m middle class and from the midlands I try not to talk about it in public for fear of sounding anything like Tim Westwood. Jay Z’s set was alright, considering live hip hop usually sounds abominable. What was hard to digest was the constant adulation the BBC presenters gave businessman and occasional rapper Jigga.
He’s made a few great to excellent tunes, fair enough, and he’s sold a lot of records, but he does put out a fair bit of shite. Anything he’s done with that berk Pharrell is unlistenable. The constant ‘bringing hip hop to Glastonbury’ celebration the presenters brayed about was ludicrous – hip hop has been at the festival for years. Why don’t the likes of Roots Manuva get the honour of bringing the genre to a festival it’s already at? Nonsense.
The bloody presenters
Mark Radcliffe dithered but was amiable. Lauren Laverne was her usual geeky self – likable but irritating simultaneously. Phil Jupitus was wheeled out for nostalgic reasons. That Rufus chap with the comedy moustache had the unenviable task of showing the odd stuff that goes on away from the music at Glastonbury to entertain people on drugs and pierced bozos. All of these I could bear. Even that Grimshaw fellow was alright. The rest of them were horrible.
Jo Whiley, a woman who seems to be permanently wincing, kept trying to tell her audience that they were missing out by not being there where all other presenters were trying to convince them that they were better off at home watching footage. I’ve followed Whiley’s career from the off. I remember her first ever transmission where she kept talking over a live Teenage Fanclub set on Radio One and she’s not improved. Not one jot.
Annie Mac looked extremely vacant. She earns bonus points for having passively dissed Mark Ronson, but aside from that she was nothing more than a curly blur. Grimshaw (is that his name or have I made that up?) kept her afloat. She was clearly on hyper-intertia-drugs.
The booby prizes undoubtedly go to Edith Bowman and Zane Lowe.
It’s baffling to me why these two are in gainful employment. Edith talks so earnestly and joylessly about stuff that’s completely pointless that it makes the viewer roll their eyes frequently enough for it to resemble epilepsy.
Zane Lowe, on the other hand, sits like a twatty teenager thinking he’s above everything. His wisecracks are second-rate, his wannabe laidback style conceals panic inside and his attempts at cool come off as horribly desperate. Putting these two together was a low shot from the BBC, designed to annoy the sit-at-home festival goer so much that they got to the point of watching the stuff on the red button, just to prove that people use that neglected function.
Apart from that – nothing to report. Amy Winehouse was a coked up, furry, stick-insect arsehole again – but what’s new? I wish that fan had punched back.
CAN’T WAIT FOR NEXT YEAR!!!!!!!
*BANG*
*thud*
70 Comments
I swear that Nick Grimshaw is in fact Steve Coogan’s weird squatter character from Saxondale.
THAT’S who he reminded me of.
The Verve surprised me. Weird that the song that closed Glastonbury on such a triumphant note was a decade old. Clearly the new crop of talent wasn’t up to it so they wheeled out the forty somethings.
What song was that? I though it must be new cause I didn’t recognise it.
Well hang on there – I suppose it depends which channel you watched. One one channel they appeared to close with Bittersweet Symphony, but then on another channel they did a new one but you couldn’t tell where in the set that came.
Funny that the BBC kept playing bits of the same set on different channels, at times simultaneously. Well – actually not ‘funny’ – just irritating.
Good review! (and cheers for reminding me to get BJM tickets for tomorrow) I think a lot of the uproar about Jay-Z playing Glastonbury wasn’t the fact it was new for hip hop to appear at festivals, mainly the fact that a certain (minor) percentage of Glastonbury fans are twats (yet vocal twats, which means they get more coverage then the 100,0000 people who didn’t care).
They’re probably the same ones that read the NME and think that liking the Horrors counts as a progressive music taste. They’re the kind that wrote into the NME complaining about the decision to put him on the main stage, the type that idolise Noel Gallagher and his comments about keeping festivals ‘traditional’ (for a festival who’s first headliner was David Bowie, a man whos live shows featured him singing in full makeup and spandex, in seventies Britain, that’s a bit of a double standard).
Their ignorance explains the fact that Jay – Z could have walked on with a CD player, put on Reasonable doubt and sat down for an hour, and it would have still been better then anything Oasis have put out in the last ten years.
Whatever, festivals are for chumps anyway, the only one I’d really consider is download and quite frankly f*ck paying 120 quid to sit in a field full of Carling billboards listening to Kiss.
The Verve I watched was live I think – entire set except for about 4 songs. They ended on something called Love Is Noise, which wasn’t very good. It had that Ashcroft solo career sound to it, except a bit floatier.
what fucks me off is the way all the glasto coverage is totally oriented around the main stage and whatever mainstream personality cult rock/pop cretin happens to be playing up there. both times i went to the festival, i had a whale of a time, saw loads of music i loved, and only went to the main stage once (completely randomly saw Fun Lovin’ Criminals while tripping on LSD for no good reason). the glastonbury festival i see on tv is just not recognisable as the festival i attended….
It’s true though – love IS noise. I wonder what noise it is…
Download festival, George? I suppose that might be a bit more bearable. At least you’d be surrounded by unpretentious 15 year olds pissed on cider rather than 33 year old bankers on coke.
Jrowett… I put this disclaimer in ‘Before I start, I should point out that I don’t for one moment think that watching all of the BBC’s output gives any insight into the festival itself.’
So yes, I agree. It’s David Gray, Coldplay, James Blunt, KT Tuntstall bollocks.
Though they might have trouble replicating the intensity of your trip as you buzzed around the festival site on hallucinogens were they to try to portray it on the TV as a radical diversion from the band footage.
It would be a bit of a tough watch, now i think about it.
SH: It’s probably more to do with my age, and the fact I quite like Heavy Metal. They’ve had The Deftones, Iron Maiden, Slayer, The Stooges, Machine Head, Soulfly, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Black Sabbath, System of a Down, Motorhead, Therapy?, Metallica and about a thousand other bands I spent my teenage years getting stoned in a field to all in the last 5 years.
Beats Muse.
Oh, would the Brian Jonestown Massacre be really worth seeing? Have they gone off the boil a bit more? I’m just wondering if it’s worth going along on my todd to see them really.
I’ve only seen Dig! which makes out there’s an event every other gig. But they’ll probably be a bit of a pleasant drone and not much else. I’d still go if I were you, just for shits and giggles.
Yeah, might as well, it’s only 12 quid.
I only watched that anorexic Winehouse hag out of all the coverage of Glastonbury this year. I don’t know why I did that, to be honest. God, she’s bloody awful.
Good review, this.
Thankyou Napoleon. It’s not often you receive praise from a scoundrel.
She really is a hag. And if she ever had a singing voice, it wasn’t in evidence there, thankyou very much. She seemed to be slurring the words to completely different songs whilst chewing her bottom lip. Waste of space.
You’re welcome. Don’t let it go to your head, mind.
I’m informed she did have a decent singing voice. It’s one of those things that tends to go when you spend a few years smoking, drinking and taking loads of drugs – look at Jim Morrison and his vocally inept turn on LA Woman.
What got me was a pronouncement by some telly channel (I forget which, probably BBC3) that her set had been ‘a triumph’. Did she do another one that we weren’t privy to? I assume so, as the one I witnessed appeared to show a half-dead drunken woman with a ludicrous hairdo warbling her way through a river of shit songs that sounded like Supremes cast-offs.
It’s the crack smoke that plays havoc with the vocal cords, so I hear. You get nodes on your nodes.
It was Michael Eavis who declared Winehouse’s set ‘a triumph’. The owner of the festival was unlikely to ask ‘Christ, what fresh pile of shit was that?!’. ‘A triumph’ has to be overstatement of the year.
So you didn’t tune in for Jay Z, NC? I thought you were a big fan of the hip hop genre?
I’m afraid I didn’t catch him, no. Obviously, I’m as big a fan of a musical genre obsessed with jewelery, women’s bottoms, and BMWs as the next man … thing was, I was washing my balls when the great Jay Z landed in Somerset, so unfortunately missed him singing about how much more money he has than me.
I can imagine you decked out in Rocawear, now you mention it.
Can’t believe Leonard Cohen only played on the proviso he wasn’t filmed. Ruined the whole thing, for me.
I had no idea he played, the miserable old sod.
I also have no idea what Rocawear is, either.
I’m off to pay my fucking Council Tax.
I love paying that, then tripping over huge piles of litter on my way home.
That’s the a great description of Amy Winehouse, Napoleon, as any I’ve heard, save maybe the guy on yesterday’s Terry Wogan who said ‘I was watching what I though to be a tribute act to Lilly Savage at Glastonbury the other day…’ You seem to be confusing Jay Z and Snoop Dog though.
P.S: I am sorry for completely butchering the English language in that opening sentence, everybody.
To be fair, Jay Z does go on about women’s bottoms and jewellery quite a lot. He gets political for about 5% of his rhymes but the rest is generally bling and self-aggrandisement.
And I’m doing something with this now…
http://eeearache.wordpress.com
But it’ll probably bore most folk to tears.
Back from paying my fucking Council Tax now. What a lovely way to start the month that is. The robbing bastards, etc.
You should only pay on the proviso that the cat stops shitting in your garden.
I don’t know if that’s the council’s responsibility, Swineshead. I could always refuse to pay them until the bin men get over their unusual fear of emptying my bin when there’s a millimetre of bag poking out the lid. Not pay, then end up in court. Then prison.
Fuck it, I’ll keep paying and hope for a bloody revolution that’s solely based around ridding this country of that particular tax. The bastards.
What’ve they done to Simon Pegg’s face?!
FACE…
Photoshop is an amazing tool, isn’t it? I saw Lilly Allen on the cover of some bloody woman’s magazine t’other month, and they’d gone to town on her so much that she was pleasing to the eye.
Pegg looks like he’s had the Jude Law in A.I.* treatment.
*A film about the future I and about two hundred other people watched by accident, thinking we were going to get an extra slice of Kubrick. What we actually got was an flabby, slightly sweaty slice of Spielberg in his ‘past his sell-by-date’ phase.
An flabby? That’s right, ‘f’ is now a vowel. Didn’t you attend the meeting?
I didn’t attend the Annual Acceptable Typo Conference, no.
A.I. was visually pretty arresting but a load of guff otherwise. Much like Superman Returns which I gave up on. I was hoping Zod might turn up.
Was AI the one where Robbie Williams is a robot that learns how to have sex with old people?
I really enjoyed Superman Returns, as it ‘appens.
No, George, that’s the appalling ‘Bicentennial Man’. Just one of the many, many horrifc cinematic atrocities committed by Herr Williams.
I can’t spell toedae.
Bicentenial Man would’ve benefited from Zod’s presence, or a Carly Simon soundtrack.
Or neck-snappings on a grand scale. Segal, Lundgren, Van-Damme, Norris, Chan, Stallone and Stallone’s brother Frank Stallone taking it in turns to leather Robin Williams.
I’d pay cash-money to see that.
Or a teenage girl with teeth in her vagina. That’s a great film, by the way, that Teeth. You’ll hate it Napoleon, which is why you should download it this instant.
The fact is that the BBC are not commercial, so don’t need to deliver us 25 Tesco Classics one after the other. They COULD let Radcliffe out and about to introduce people at home to interesting new bands. They choose not to.
Anyway, shameless plug time, I knew Glasto was going to be shit. Yay me;
http://extremelisteningmode.com/2008/04/09/glastonbury-not-selling-out/
Oh, and by the way, great article Swineshead, I would have nicked it wholesale if I didn’t think you’d catch me!
I watched that Teeth thing ages ago. Bloody rubbish, and I’m sure they made something similar in the 70s, didn’t they?
That’s the one, completely hideous film. Thanks for reminding me the name, at least now I won’t start watching it on television by mistake or something and end up killing myself with the remote.
ELM – feel free to reproduce it. So long as I get a credit. Y’swine.
Glad to be of service, George. I could write a comprehensive list of the Robin Williams films you should avoid like the plague, but I fear there’s not enough room on the internet. Let’s just say most of ‘em, shall we?
I have heartily recommended it over there.
I think the film you’re thinking of is Hidden Claw (or something like that). I watched that as a student – it’s utter shit. Teeth was funny.
Very well done. Saw MGMT this weekend and was blown away, what’s your wordly opinion?
We were talking about teeth over a few beers last night. Strange. Has it become some big student cult thing?
ELM – That bloody post o’yours has sent my eyes wappy.
Swineshead – Is that what it was? Teeth wasn’t funny, it was rubbish. They should have had Van Damme in it, and Julia Roberts’s brother in it. And the rest of the cast of Best of the Best II (obviously not the dead fat one). RUBBISH!
Thanks ELM.
Dave – Haven’t seen MGMT live (though it looked like Electric Feel only lost a tiny bit of magic at Glastonbury) but four or five songs on the album are brilliant. But only four or five. The rest are a bit turgid and scattergun.
Despite what the band says, most of the work has been done in the production – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Be interesting to see what happens when they get sick of being told that and try to self-produce as a reaction.
MGMT live are irritating. Like a bunch of kids doing dress up. Shame really.
What’s MGMT when it’s at home?
MGMT: My God, Martha’s Transgendered. Brilliant band.
You’re pulling my leg, ain’t ye?
He’s going to hate this:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE
Nobody expects NP to like MGMT. His distain’s a given.
Napoleon, yes, I was. I think he means the band MGMT.
I can’t say I cared for that much. And they’ll regret those ‘live fast, die young’ lyrics, you mark my words. Roger Daltry’s spent the last twenty years walking around with egg on his face thanks to making a similar lyrical pledge.
These young ‘uns …
I’m pretty sure the lyrics are meant to be ironic…
Are they? I’m too old to detect this modern form of irony all the hep-cats you see around town in their zoot-suits are digging nowadays.
My point still stands, mind. Those wallies in that video’ll still grow up to be old farts like me, embarrassed at what twats they were in their early twenties. I’ll be dead by then, o’course.
Just going back to the whole Glastonbury thing…
Jo Whiley….
Christ on a fucking bike. Don’t want to kick that useless woman’s face off, stitch it back on upside down and then beat her with a bat. Useless bint.
To see some photoshop howlers, check out
http://www.photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/
Good Dog – I’m glad you ‘Don’t want to kick that useless woman’s face off’… I wouldn’t want to see you arrested.
Jo Wiley’s one of two celebrities on television and radio to hail from my hometown, Northampton. The other is Alan Carr. Sorry everybody.
Friend of this blog (apart from Napoleon), Andrew Collins also hails from Northampton.
That awful metro goldwyn transvestite whatever song’s on some advert isn’t it? Mobile phones or something equally irritating. I don’t like it. Not just because it’s new mind, because it’s shit.
It’s not shit, Gilbert. It’s not.
George, your fair town did done us wrong. I’m sorry but it’s true.
MGMT stands for “management”
no ifs or buts ive been told this on about several seperate occasions :/
why a band would chose to name themselves that i have no idea infact i liken it that they probably had a totally different name and were looking for management and sim ply fucked up the filling out of a gumtree add.
and im sorry but there horrendously shit,and yet another poxy band over hyped by skinny jean wearing middle class yuppies….
to hear the reviewed youd think that the music was of a devine content and angels flew from the stage and inserted there heavenly phalus into your ear all whilst stroking your hair and emparting to you the secrets of eternal life.
this is simply not the case.
all i could make out from their glastonbury performance was “my mother my sister yeah yeah yeah” then some loud repetitive drone played over.and over.and over again as the songs chorus all the while the cattle oh *ahem* “music fans” mumbled along with….
their total shit.
and dress like cunts to boot.
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