 |
cds of earnest hopefuls collected from the post office so far: 572 i am sat on the floor in my room with a cardboard box full of entries on my right and my laptop, means of both listening to them and writing to you, at my stern. there twenty three cds, biogs, and entry forms, all neatly transferred to their own poly-pockets, in the box, but I already listened to a few and sixteen remain for me to pass judgement on and let you know about. of those I already decided what to do with, one’s made the acoustic stage longlist, one the john peel stage longlist, two i’m passing to croissant neuf (one of the bigger “smaller” venues at the festival), and three i’ve said a flat no to. let’s talk about what’s left in the box one by one. first to come out of the random music chest are a band called shakespeare volume one. like almost everybody else (and who can blame them), they’ve ticked the john peel stage on their form. shakespeare volume one represent a typical listening dilemma, in that they are very very good at what they do, but i’m not completely sure that what they do excites me. that they use the word “stadium” in their description of their music should tell you everything you need to know. right when i’m about to send them to a non-prize venue to make the decision for me, though, track four comes on all interesting and dramatic with a totally unexpected dr.dre-style looped synth background. let’s be positive, as it’s the very first diary entry, and put them through. cd 2 is from man-eaters. they entered last year too. unlike lots of entrants who did that they are brave enough to admit they’ve returned for another bout - most of them leave the “did you enter for 2004” bit blank. but we still know. we remember. it’s a bit scary how we do that. on the evidence of the first track man-eaters are not bad but certainly a long way short of being finalists. i take its fade-out ending as my cue to go and watch spinal tap, which with uncanny aptness is just about to start on the telly. 12.20am come to think of it spinal tap doesn’t finish til ten to one, let’s do more entries tomorrow instead, eh? |
cds of earnest hopefuls now collected: 614 i spent all day putting more bands details on the competition database (i'll try and get you some interesting stats and comment on said data at a later date) and now i'm back at the earphones to actually hear some of them. man-eaters didn't get much of a look in being cut short by spinal tap, so i start track one again. they've only sent two tracks (we guarantee to listen to three) so it seems fair to have listened to one of them twice anyway. my first impressions are reinforced. quite good fun and a notch above many but they wouldn't make it through tomorrow's longlist session. oh well, sorry man-eaters. i'll try and think of a venue who might like you. on to... marvel monster masterworks. best pretend name so far. another repeat entrant and i remember not being a fan last time, although a number of other listeners were. so what do i do here? it's difficult. and actually listening doesn't make it any easier because i can still hear everything i wasn't impressed by and everything my esteemed colleagues were - except louder. what they sound like is a wild west pub band. i don't see them as deserving competition winners, but on the other hand am i obliged to put them through knowing the other listener's thoughts? realistically, my options are:
one. longlist them anyway, and hope for the next two months that they don't win their stage, denying any of my personal favourites and better bands the opportunity, and leave me cursing that decision for ever more, or at least until another competition comes along to take my mind off it... frankly every option has its own share of associated guilt. i'm not going to tell you which i did. you'll just have to wonder. *raises eyebrow* you cheese!! - ruth moog each entry form has a space on it asking bands to "describe their music in five words". despite the huge variety of words that appear in this box (and there are only more than four and less than six words in there about half the time), a huge number of entrants would be more accurately described by the five words "indie, jolly good, so what?". so many bands can be summed up by this phrase that it will henceforth be known in this diary as jigsaw. jolly indie, good - so and what? the thief of always are just such a jigsaw band. you can see exactly why they think they're in with a shot of winning, because they are, indeed, jolly good. i mean, they're good enough that they're probably the best thing to have come out of their hometown in decades. no kidding. but unless you're from there, it's still impossible to get excited about the idea of them winning the competition. and that's what we're about. excitement. we hope. we want to make you wet your pants. kingdom come. now here's a strange thing. their delightful - genuinely - handwritten letter states "even though the demo i have included is one of covers, should we be lucky enough to get the gig, it shall be our own songs we will be presenting". what kind of a demo is that? you might as well say "even though the demo i have included is a breakbeat mashup, if we actually play we'll get out violins and play an acoustic set". "even though the demo is made by five women, we are three blokes". "even though the demo is one thing, we will do something completely different when we turn up". gosh, they really are charming though. later on they say, "as you will not have heard our own songs i understand if we can't be chosen this time". if you are the person who wrote this, i am truly charmed! but i'm glad you understand. good golly, i'm getting a lot of repeat entries in this box. mad love are another one, but problematic for a different reason to the first two - i loved them last year. now their demo sounds less original, less fresh and less likely to make you wet your pants. until, that is, the third track comes in, which is so exciting with its fingerclicks and rolling piano noises it makes me want to weep. it just sounds like an instant hit. but it clearly isn't, because it was on last year's demo too. in honour of the joy they gave me last year, i'm going send it to another venue. with listen to track three in big letters across the top. you're probably getting tired of me being so noncommittal and neither hating nor adoring any of the cds (it will come, trust me), so we'll finish up with understanding comics tonight, hopefully a group of either truly outstanding or truly abysmal performers so that i can wrap this up with an nice rhetorical bang. prospects, however, are jigsaw-shaped, as i've been passed this cd by another listener who couldn't make their mind up. here goes. hmm, they're intriguing, they are, this understanding comics lot. i can see the difficulty there. they are either outstanding or abysmal, but which of the two is less clear. what's certainly true is that they are very, very slow. so slow you wonder how they keep it up. hmm. hmmmm. let's longlist them and see how they do tomorrow, shall we? why not. why not indeed. because tomorrow, my friends, is the first longlist-listening session of the diary, where all of us get together with the chosen contents of our allocated random music chests and get to hear what each other thought was good enough. and i just know you're going to enjoy reading about that. |
cds of earnest hopefuls now collected: about 1500 looooord in heaven was it really over a week ago that i swore i'd update this "tomorrow"? where did all that time go? primarily, i think, into putting more band details onto the competition database. the moment after i left you, bellyachers, the padded envelopes began arriving at the post office hundreds at a time. i have typed the word "melodic" more times than i care to mention into the "describe your music" box on that database. so many postcodes, so many mobile numbers... and there are still hundreds to go on there. there are a couple of hundred left to go on. i've taken a break from doing that to actually listen to some again. anyway i'm sure you're all dying to know, with that cliffhanger i left you with last time, how understanding comics got on in the group listening session. if you recall, they were either outstanding or abysmal, but i wasn't sure which. so did they meet triumph or disaster? eleven out of ten, or minus two? are they destined to save modern rock, or will they be bottled off their next gig by their own mothers in the backroom of a pub? well the panel has voted, their verdict is in, and understanding comics scored (slow drumroll please...) six and a third out of ten. which is neither abysmal nor outstanding, but merely "pretty good". so there goes that theory. i know i promised i'd tell you about a group listening session, but due to the dozens of demo's i've personally got backed up to listen to (an entire bookshelf's worth, probably), and the fact we've got another group session tomorrow night, i'm going to tell you about that one then and go through as much as i can of this box today. i'll just give you a bit of information about each one and then say "yes" or "no" for "it made the longlist" or "it didn't". you can assume most of the "no"s have been passed on, either to non-prize venues or another listener. but if there are any "yes"s they should be featured in tomorrow's group session. still with me? good. stay here.
literature and western man: gorgeously packaged, very proficient, but four minutes in i'm quite bored. eight minutes, i'm very bored. by the third trazzzzzzzzzzzzzz. no. i am starting to lose all faith.
the dice man: no. i know what you're thinking. you're thinking, "these are all such evocative names, he's passing over loads of brilliant acts, i want to hear them!" just remember two things: they are not their real names, and if you could hear them, you'd take that back.
the woman warrior: appropriately, a female soloist. she sings with a very clear high voice. and... either my critical faculties have entirely deserted me (not inconceivable at this point) or this'll be worth putting on the acoustic stage longlist. finally... a yes. i'm about to give up for the night and focus on having some other aspect to my life than listening to musicians no-one wants to give a record contract to, when i notice the next band has a rather curious, cute name, and describe their music in a curious way too, and decide to give one more a spin. obviously i can't tell you what that name is unless they make the final (see "the rules"), but for now we'll call them zoom. turns out they're a bit like muse, but they're all peruvian! so that'll be a yes then. let's all hope they do well tomorrow. ps i changed my mind about the moor's last sigh. let's hope they do well tomorrow too. |
entry 4: january 23rd 2005
cds remaining to be entered on competition database, and therefore not yet listened to at all by anyone: about 150 right then. i left you last time, didn't i bellyachers, with the promise of a description of one of the longlist listening sessions i keep teasing you with. so here it is. what is a longlist listening session? a longlist listening session is a session in which we listen to the longlist. the "longlist" being those cds picked from boxes of entrants as better than everything else in their company (about 10% of everything we get makes the longlist - we used to call it a shortlist but at this stage it's still quite long)... and "we" being a panel of six listeners good and true trusted with the task of finding the six finalists for each stage from among them. the sessions take place in a living room in a secret location on the outskirts of glastonbury. there's a table in the middle of the secret living room with four piles of cds, entry forms and band biographies on it, all neatly slid into polypockets which slip over each other at every opportunity making keeping them in order a strangely messy-feeling task. the piles correspond to the four prize stages; dance, acoustic, jazzworld and the john peel stage. at present dance and jazzworld are more pressing because their finals are being held two weeks before those for acoustic and john peel, but the acoustic pile looks biggest, so we decide to listen to that. the thing about the group listening sessions are, when you're there, it doesn't actually feel as if the quality of what you're listening to has improved. it has - when you return to the "raw" boxes no-one's heard yet, you remember the acts whose third track you don't feel you can bear to listen to but know you're obligated to, and the gaps between the gems is achingly wide - but something about all the "best" ones being put together just raises the bar again, and suddenly that band that was the best thing you heard all day on tuesday becomes the cd you wish you really hadn't made everyone listen to, and hope they don't find out you were responsible for, on wednesday. the acoustic stage entries also have a tendency to singer-songwriterness and thence to sameness. general rules: if someone's "band or artist" name on their entry form is their own name, it's an acoustic stage entry. if their description of their music includes the word "honest", it's an acoustic entry. and so forth. resultantly it can feel in these sessions as if you've been listening to the same thing for hours. we cheer up then, when a 22-strong group of vocalists with no instrumental backing who only sing covers surfaces. generally covers turn us right off but when they're really done inventively and with panache - or put it another way, when they really make us grin - high marks tend to appear on scoresheets all round the room. let's call them the new poetry in case they make the final and then i can dramatically reveal who they were. that is actually better than their real name and they should adopt it. i mentioned marks and scoresheets there didn't i? i'll need to explain that too. we've all got scoresheets and we put marks on them. actually let's talk you through the process of listening to a single cd in the secret living room. what happens is, i sit next to the stereo and the others all sit round me on seats in an approximate circle. we all have a sheet with spaces to write down the names of the acts, a mark out of ten, and "notes" which are just to keep us sane - so that we can write "i hate it" or "yay" and not have to say so out loud. we do talk quite a lot while we're marking but we try to avoid it and being able to write stuff down stops us just arguing all afternoon about one act. usually. i pick out a cd from the pile and announce the name of the (to this point) lucky longlistee and everyone writes it down on their sheet. then i put the cd on and pass the band's biography and details to my left. everyone listens intently. when people feel they are ready to give the hopefuls a score, they raise their hand. i leave it playing until everyone has their hand up, and i feel i'm ready, and so long as we've been listening for more than a minute. if anyone thinks anything might happen that might change their score, they have to keep their hand down til then. meanwhile their details are being passed round the room. that's just to have something to look at really, hardly anything affects the scoring other than the music. we rarely get through a whole song but we also never leave anyone unhappy that they haven't been able to make a fair judgement. then, once everyone's happy to give the cd a score on the first song, we play a second one anyway and go through the same "hands up" process again. and if anyone thinks we really should hear a third, or a fourth one, we'll do that too. aren't we fair-minded? also i won't stop a track if it's been playing for less than a minute - which in particularly lacklustre cases draws confused complaints from around the room. "no, really, it's only been 49 seconds" - room groans - "now it's a minute" - room emits collective sigh of relief - "and now track two..." if the acoustic stage entries lullaby us into a group stupor, the dance ones, which are next on the audiomenu, have the complete opposite effect (they wake us up and we start arguing). the dance listenings have a weird atmosphere to them as we sit round assessing hard house and breakbeat while sipping cups of tea. we might actually run the dance listening sessions as a series of parties next year and just judge the suitability of contenders on their effect on the mood in the room. at least that's what i'm hoping. it's also a very complicated area which leads to many circular discussions. "i'd like to see people dance to this... that's not the point... but the dance tent is for dancing...", or "this is dreadful... it's not it's fantastic... no it's shit". sometimes the listening panel suffers internal disagreement on the merits of particular acts. once everyone's written marks down and we all hate each other, they're collated onto the competition database and put in order and coloured in, and generally we find out we all pretty much agreed after all. you'll be wanting to know how the woman warrior did from my last update? she got six and two thirds on average. this roughly translates as "not bad at all", but since we've only listened to 36 cds in the acoustic longlist stage so far that just about scrapes her into the top ten. on the john peel stage list it'd put her about 42nd at the moment... one last thing: some chap emailed me saying he loved the diree and had i heard his band yet. flattery will get you nowhere. well, that's not true actually, it'll get you a mention in the diree. so, go and check out hooper minor, will you, for it is they. just how you do that is unclear as i have no idea of any tourdates, and they don't have a website yet, but it'll be at www.hooperminor.com when they do. and no, i haven't heard them yet and don't know for sure if i will. and yes, for once that is their real name... back to top |
entry 5: january 30th 2005 help! i'm really behind, i've got about a hundred cds still to listen to myself. tomorrow the hope is that we'll get the dance longlist down to a shortlist... exciting, huh? back to top |
entry 6: february 10th 2005 finalists decided: 13 i may have given you the impression, by not writing anything at all for the diree for a few weeks, that nothing has been going on in the world of the glastonbury unsigned competition. the truth is quite the opposite - everything has been going on. which is why i haven't had time to write about it. resultantly this entry is going to attempt to cover some of the most important days all at once, as snappily as possible so as i actually get it written before the festival at the end of june. this is what's happened this last week: thursday (february 2) with just a week to go before we have to notify all our jazzworld and dance entrants of their fate in this competition of ours, we finish listening to the whole longlist for those stages apart from the ones we're going to find hidden in corners of the office over the weekend. at last we have a shortlist! so called because it's shorter than the longlist. there are about fifteen in the jazzworld shortlist and about twenty in the dance one. to make the shortlist you have to have got an average score that puts you around the top 20 (about 7 on jazzworld and 7.5 on these stages this time) or else have someone go "they should be in the shortlist too!", and then that gets you in. in case any bands are reading this, no i won't be able to do that if you ask me to... while everyone else eats and drinks in the secret kitchen, celebrating having got this far, i sit in the secret competition living room making everyone "shortlist cds". these are cds that include two tracks from each of the shortlisted acts. see? then we're to go off and dedicate our weekends to listening to them, and come back on monday armed with our own choices of six, in order. there's a scoring system for it i'll get to on monday. the entire weekend is spent with headphones in my ears, listening over and over to various types of dance, jazz and world music and making various lists of six acts from them. with both shortlists there are a couple of acts that remain in every list made, a couple that never appear in any, and a lot in between that move in and out of the lists. it's not at all easy. it is much better than last year though, which involved us trying to sort out all four finals on the same night without the weekend of careful consideration beforehand. put a group of six people who are passionate about music in a room and get them to argue about which twenty-four out of two thousand acts they should give a chance to and it's not pretty. we all get on well, but those are the sorts of situations where you could willingly strangle even your best friends. well, okay, if you're like i am you could willingly strangle your best friends in about any situation, but you know what i mean. so after three days thinking about nothing else, i finally end up with a list of six i think i have to stop at. the real finalists names are revealed (to them and the wider interested world) in a couple of days, but for now i still have to make up imaginary ones for everyone let's give the bands names of animals, colours, numbers, and shapes then i'll tell you which animals i ended up deciding most deserved to be in the finals. jazzworld animals cat, dog, mouse, horse, dance colours, numbers and shapes one, two, three, four you will notice that none of these are names you recognise as titles on my fourth bookshelf. that's because i haven't had anything that reached the jazzworld or dance shortlists in my boxes, which is mostly because my boxes are full of john peel stage entries, most of the jazzworld and dance ones going off to world and dance music specialists in the first round, see? later on some imaginary names you'll recognise will be in lists like those if we're lucky you'll also notice that "mammoth" appears in both lists despite being neither numberical nor colourful nor shapely, and that's because we decided to consider that act for both shortlists. to try and simplify things a bit i'm not going to go into details of the acts right now, i'll get into that when i do monday's news (i'll nearly be in the present by then), but in order for monday to make sense at all, you'll need to know that my six jazzworld votes went to antelope and my dance ones to red in those orders. by which i mean antelope was my very favourite jazzworld entry, and red my very favourite dance entry. this will be important later. write it down if you want. as for me, after all that initial burst of energy i'm too tired now to actually write monday up. so you'll just have to wait. but trust me there's lots of excitement to come... zzz. (ps while i've been writing this i also listened to four cds... let's call them matthew, mark, luke and john. i've sent matthew to another stage just in case they're liked there, while luke and john are both the kind of act you hope never to have to hear again, and so they have "no" written on their forms. mark, though, do a rather wonderfully strange operatic thing with their pop - no not like that g4 off x-factor - more reminisicent of the magenta house who made our jazzworld final last year - and who incidentally you should all listen to at least once because they're like nothing else you've ever heard. unless you listen to really freaky stuff, in which case you should still check them out because you'd probably like them. so cross your fingers for luke, and then click the link for the magenta house. while you still have them crossed, please. goodnight!) back to top |
entry 7: february 13th 2005 proper update to come, pushing you off that cliffedge i left you hanging on last time, but in the absence of any time at all to write anything, HOW hard is choosing the john peel stage finalists going to be? scores for the current top twenty:
there's stuff we really rate all the way down about fifty places.... back to top |
|
what wes said part 1: thursday most hardened festivalgoers will tell you that glastonbury’s about having some spiritual experience in a muddy field, getting a henna tattoo you can’t make out through the splashes of mud anyway, and finding yourself in an orgy with a persian dancing troupe in lost vagueness when you actually meant to meet a mate for a chicken wrap and a glass of juice at the common ground café. you can assume in that vignette that the orgy, dancing troupe, café, wrap, juice and probably persia are all covered in mud. but that’s rubbish, it’s all about music. the festival starts on thursday at the late and live marquee. you know, the one with the big “control arms” sign over the entrance. yes, that was called late and live. there were acts on there from 3pm but i was working til 4 so i didn’t get there til 8, which meant I sadly had to miss the extraordinary steve ballinger, guitarist of the brothers with different mothers, and instead the first thing i saw was the lovegods doing their heartfelt spiritual emotional rock thing. i seriously found myself wondering if lead vocalist dea might actually be a goddess about halfway through their set. she’s about 7 feet tall, unbelievably beautiful, and when she says “this is going to be a quiet one” it still ends up being very loud. checks all the boxes, see? plus she sometimes seems to be singing in tongues. it hadn’t rained yet. roy stride of scouting for girls turned in a solo performance which proved he would have done better without his band when he played the festival's acoustic unsigned final in april, but left me thinking "hm, he could do with a band". go figure. he has some wonderful songs - keep on walkin’ stands out as a little pop masterpiece already - but they’re quite expansive, rumbunctious things which you find yourself willing him on in his struggles to match on his own. plus there could be a bit more variety about them. roy, get a new band! but not that same one you had at the acoustic final! next up it’s japanese intelligence mind control, aka vicki churchill. when you hear vicki’s music in recordings, it’s impossible not to think: wow! how does she recreate this live on stage! all those sounds in that complexity! when she’s just on her own! well, having studied her closely in an intimate live environment for the duration of her set, i can revealed how she does it: she presses play on her minidisc. yep, she sings and plays guitar, too, but all the weirdest bits are on the minidisc. i’d like to say this doesn’t take anything away from the show, because she has a beautiful voice, is an arresting performer during songs, and the songs themselves are clever and crafted (all of these things are true) - but the truth is watching someone press play on a minidisc and then sing along to it is REALLY WEIRD. that said it works fantastically well in “get the picture”, where rather than singing she kind of tiptoes around the stage making confused noises. get the picture? there then followed a break in the music, during which i accompanied ruth moog, cherb, holly, mris and nick to the ghost train in the circus fields, where we watched a pair of ghosts having a strop outside of the train apparently because it was closed. oh well! back to late and live. still no rain. discuss with moog how much holly reminds us of charlotte subway. holly complains, because she idol-worships charlotte, which makes me want to put them next to each other. so i call charlotte up and tell her to get the band’s arses down to late and live or i’ll call off their pyramid slot tomorrow. AS A JOKE. at quarter to one on friday morning, sound development agency come to the stage, and ruth and holly have never forgotten the moment when it happened. apparently they shouted "generator!!" at random people for the rest of the festival, and no doubt continue to do so in the streets of london. ruth and holly, that is, not sound development agency, who only do it when they’re on stage. i am distracted for some unknown reason by jo, the beautiful, charming cellist with captivating dark eyes from chemical dub theory (who are playing in a minute), asking me if there will be flash floods in the morning. "oh no," i chuckle, "that's one of those funny rumours that get built up onsite…" after them it was the priscillas who went on for aaages, but they're such good fun i didn't mind, until i realised it meant my mum and dad had decided to go home when they finished, which meant missing chemical dub theory. if you know me very well you probably know i don’t like dub, but... well... i... er... wanted to see them anyway. so finally my smug "i don't have to sleep in a tent with you filthy lot" expression is wiped off my face as i'm swept away from the festival site by my parents. still no rain. but as we leave the site, lightning is crackling all around the horizon and sky. contd... - wes |
|
what wes said part 2: friday at 5am i stir in my sleep and am aware of what can only be called rain outside my window. it sounds quite bad where we are but even worse out to the east which is the direction of the festival site. i think “uh-oh, mud”, and go back to sleep. at 6.20 am i get a text from ruth moog. it says "please can you make the weather stop kthnx". about four hours later we're driving back onto site and it's still raining. call ruth to find out if she (and anyone else) has survived. "we can't get out of our field", she tells me. "there's a new river at the bottom". err yes. bet my dismissal of the possibility of flash floods looks really clever now. still, convinced that only the punters will be affected, and all the stages will still be working for the benefit of those of us who can just drive on site each morning undrowned, i make my way as fast as i can down from the top of the festival towards the pyramid stage, where it rapidly becomes apparent that nothing is on. as in, nothing is switched on. no lights, no sound, no screens, nothing. after a significant amount of waiting around for the subways, it becomes apparent that their slot’s been cancelled. what was it i said to charlotte last night again? oops… still, they didn't show, and i did warn them... rather than stick around for the undertones, decide to wetfoot it round to the dance lounge where the fabrics are due to be on. we have to wade through wide stretches of flowing water to get there, and when we do, the dance lounge has collapsed under the weight of the rain it was holding. so that isn't happening either. i vow, rather too late, not to say anything potentially jinxing for the rest of the weekend. finally at 1pm in croissant neuf i arrive at a band who have actually managed to get on and play! admittedly it's partly relief that there is going to be a festival after all, but nizlopi are, at this moment, the best thing ever. people who already know them will be tired of hearing them described but it needs to be done by those who don't, so: one guy, john, is on double bass and relentless beatboxing. the other, luke, is on guitar and wholesome, uplifting guitar-and-vocals (half-sung, half-spoken). it's so upbeat it's a miracle they manage to avoid it being totally naff. by the time they finish you genuinely believe you're going to change the world. or at least, your world. or at least, snog the next girl you see. i didn't, which was for the best, her boyfriend already looked pretty miserable as it was. a long trek over to the acoustic tent follows to arrive at the front barrier just in time for ralfe band. ralfe band keep telling me how much they like my reviews of them. it really puts me under a terrible pressure. every time, this expectation of delivery... and made especially difficult on this occasion because i'm distracted throughout their set by the fact that there are cobwebs attaching the keyboards to the stage. it's either a very fast spider or they've been there a very long time. they play waltzes, yodel disaffectedly and sing about the ravages of time quite a lot, so i suspect the latter. oly, the main ralfe, has a metal donkey round his neck and john, one of the others, a metal angel. all of which strangeness (but particularly the cobwebs) leaves me in no doubt that they've been cursed by some fate or fury to play eternally in this remote tent until their bonds are broken. i decide to go and have lunch. after lunch, and an hour and a half after they're meant to be on (late and live have only just got their power back), vib gyor take to the stage. i'm mightily impressed and think ruth would like them so get her one of their demos. but the demo's not nearly as good, so never mind. basically the point of this review is: don't be too put off by their demos. they make beautiful soundscapes with their guitars and drums and things. and sing over it. admittedly a lot of people do this, but they are quite good at it. it's, you know, captivating, and all that. the sort of thing you want to text your friends about and say "come and listen to this, man!" - then remember all their batteries ran out three hours ago. 24 hour love's lead vocalist is absolutely lovely but put me on the spot shortly before my set by asking "where were all the female fronted bands" in the festival's unsigned competition. for the record, there were loads. so, no 24 hour love, that's not why you didn't reach the final. have a tricky time watching them cos i feel like they could so nearly be great but actually aren't. for a brief moment they remind me of the late lamented sammo hung, which unfortunately just underlines that they really aren't sammo hung. it's kind of pubrock-y but it's not entirely untwisted either. i don't know, let's leave the jury out on this one. actually i left early so i'll have to, they might have been stunning after i went. at this point i make a stupid mistake. i decide to stalk ruth and holly, but go to the wrong band. see i thought they were going to secret machines because they were going to see bloc party soon anyway, but actually they were going to bloc party because they were going to see secret machines soon anyway. i get myself right in the middle, very near the front, for secret machines at the john peel stage before i remember this. then the tent's filled up around me and the band's being announced, and i feel i'd look like a complete pillock if i barged my way back out of the tent from where i am, so i spend their whole set pretending to be well into them. everyone around me, and seemingly all the way to the back of the tent, really is well into them. so if i don't clap enthusiastically i feel like people are going to wonder what's wrong with me. cos, you know, if they all love the band on stage so much, theyre totally going to be looking at me, aren't they? pillock. back to late and live for duke raoul at 9pm. my friend oli thinks they are rubbish. oli is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong; wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. you got that? oli is wrong. and duke raoul are spot on. the best way i can describe them is that my dad says "they're very good, but i think they're just a bit too tight". they play very strictly ordered chaos. a mess that's been honed and polished til it's a beautiful sculpture. er in sound. you know? with honest, careful, lyrics that are tight too. bellyache heart duke raoul. no-one playing anywhere on site is better at this moment. stoney are on the same stage after them. i'm completely knackered and have no idea what they're like, despite paying close attention throughout. they keep reminding me of flipron but it's possibly less to do with what they sound like and more to do with the fact i keep slipping into a dream-state. last thing on friday is the white stripes on the pyramid stage. they were brilliant. boring-too-much-information-bit: if you're wondering, in the course of this review, why i'm spending so much time at the late and live tent, then thank you for paying attention. it's because it's put on by the people at concrete recordings, who make the festival's unsigned competition's compilation cds, and resultantly put a fair few of the finalists on. and anyone who's been reading my "unsigned diary" will not only have noticed that i haven't updated it for about four months but also that i'm closely involved in said competition. but because they (being concrete recordings) are manchester based, the tent is also regularly invaded by what seems like a quarter of all the mancunians at the festival for one of their local favourites. dirty circus (saturday, 00:45 am) are such a band. their lead vocalist put me off terribly by seeming to think he was liam gallagher (never a good start, even if you are liam gallagher), although he seemed like a perfectly lovely chap offstage. the band got better though, and they were at their best in a fetching, trance-like almost-instrumental number near the end. might do well if the frontman starts being himself up there. but what do i know? don’t answer that. then went home exhausted, skipping the deadbeats and sadly the last opportunity to see the stunning cakeboy at this year's festival. will we see the mancunian country rockers again though? contd... - wes |
|
what wes said part 3: saturday will we see the mancunian country rockers again though? er, yes, we will, at half 10 the same morning on the other stage. this year's overall-band-competition-winners the deadbeats are so chilled out as they run through their set of bluesy americana you'd be forgiven for thinking they hadn't slept since we left them at late and live and were running through it in their sleep. except that they'd probably be rubbish, in that case, but they’re not. they were in the acoustic tent a couple of hours later, too. blimey. you could've set up a 24 hour deadbeats stage. mad staring eyes are next up, another competition winner, in the john peel stage section. so guess where they’re playing. correct. and it fills up admirably, and they do very very well. they've moved since winning the competition from theatrical ballads towards spikier, more mental, fast bass-driven songs and it suits them. the sound's a bit fuzzy for them so here's hoping all those people there could make them out. hooray! ralfe band have freed themselves from that acoustic tent curse and are celebrating by playing in the guardian lounge! this is a relief as their manager's a friend and it'd be really awkward to manage a band that was trapped in one tent for the rest of time. well, a challenge, anyway. actually that's quite an interesting idea, what about it, ralfers? "come and see the ralfe band in this makeshift tent, where they have been playing endlessly since before you were born..." sadly i have to leave early to get to... ... low sparks at late and live, so i never get to heckle "why don't you go back to that other tent and stay there for the rest of eternity!!" at ralfe band. maybe it's for the best. anyway low sparks are blinding!! their demos are really good, but their live set is... really good. they sing mostly about personal heartbreak and despondency, and they're sarcastic but they're so clever with it. "i saw a face like yours, it was smiling / with a face like yours i'd be smiling / a thousand ships i'd be sailing / i would chain myself to your railings". one of those bands it's possible to get so excited about that you start randomly quoting their lyrics regardless of whether it’s likely to have any effect on the reader or not. [faaayce - ruth moog] by all rights, should be massive already. i greatly approve. bob geldof entreats us all to raise our hands in the air and say "make poverty history" at 4pm. i do it, and hope it works, but i'm not quite sure how it's meant to. oh well. sign teh list yo. back at late and live genesis elijah has started. or maybe he hasn't. no-one seems quite sure. i think he's just gearing up for it. hardly anyone seems to have found the tent for him outside of our local hip hop heroes the death before dishonour crew. at some point it moves into something that is obviously a performance, so he must have started. the man is a lyrical whizzkid, and says some important things in some arresting ways, but i can't marry the statement "if we want control over our destiny, then we need to take control over the things we can control, such as our physical health, what we teach our children, and most importantly, how we see and treat each other" (brilliant) with lines like the one about the government "fucking you like a right slut" in another track... where it sounds like the "slut" in question is as much a target of indignation as the government. so that needs looking at. but he's clever enough that he ought to work that out for himself sooner or later. and the guy who does his beats is brilliant, too. the barbs follow him, which is quite a change of gear... from righteous hip-hop anger grounded in hard reality to escapist manga rock. the barbs wrote my favourite album of last year in lupine peroxide and their live sound is just thrilling (the leads tim and amy are also among the best looking couples in rock... and have you noticed there are a lot around at the moment?). that sound's dampened somewhat by their effects box being too unwieldy to lug down to the tent in the still pervasive bog that is the festival site, but the songs stand up okay without it anyway. ooh and next!! it's my pet band, the subways, on the john peel stage. eighteen months ago i was listening to their demo of "oh yeah" thinking "i bet if they played a big stage at glastonbury everyone would chant this back at them", and they do. it's lovely to see. anyway you probably don't need us to tell you about them so much any more, they've done popworld and they've got an album out and all sorts, haven’t they? afterwards a gorgeous blonde in pink and black asks if she can borrow my mini-guide and i give it to her and she gives me a lovely smile, which i'm so bowled over by i forget to tell her they're playing late and live that night and ask if i can get her a drink there. so if you're reading this, gorgeous blonde, email me and that, yeah? i'd have been the bald bloke about ten years older than you, i'm sure you've been regretting not giving me your number, too. caught a bit of interpol on the other stage but couldn't get anywhere near close enough to feel involved. that happens there. despite the fact that no-one else can find it, the gravitational pull of late and live's fantastic lineup keeps pulling me back there, not least for steveless, who deserved a lot more people stumbling upon the tent for him, really. steveless is a completely improvised maker of rackets who "talks" about whatever comes into his head with musical accompaniment. today he is mostly talking about how much he doesn’t like all the bands nme like who are playing the festival. he also makes up a really good piece about a dream he had about paris, of which he says "i don’t know why i didn't enjoy it, i should have enjoyed it, it should have been my conviction", and which finishes up with an appropriately gallic accordion solo. and then he gets a mate on stage for his cover of teenage kicks, which ends up with him falling over his drumkit. surely, per head watching, one of the best sets of the festival. i take two flash photographs, one of them right in his eyes, which must be a nightmare if you're improvising, so then my camera battery runs out in karmic return. stay in late and live for fear of music, who are unquestionably talented for their age, but it's the second time i've seen them and i just can not get out of my head the idea that they're muse with brian molko on vocals when i see them. the thing is they're that good that instead of dismissing them as derivative i spend the whole set thinking "so this is what muse would be like if they had brian molko on vocals", which isn't something i'd ever wondered about before, but it's nice to know anyway. hopefully they'll find their own way through in coming years. half of them aren't yet out of school... for now without doubt the best school band ever, anyway. get fed up with music for a bit then, and walk all the way up to the cabaret field where i can still hear coldplay. the fabric of the cabaret tent itself drowns them out though. inside is a lady called nina conti with a cuddly monkey handpuppet. she is a deconstructive ventriloquist. i can tell you she ends up being possessed by the voice of the monkey without giving too much away, because the fun is in how she gets there. she is brilliant. every time i go to the cabaret tent at glastonbury i'm glad i went. so i stay. mitch benn is next, he's good too, but not as good as the lady with the toy monkey. he sings songs which are mostly about music like "everyone sounds like coldplay now" and one that finishes "die, westlife, die" which wins rapturous applause. then he points out that taking a pop at boybands isn't very brave at a festival like glastonbury, which is true. then he points out that it doesn't stop it being right, which is also true. it's good reviewing comics, you can just type out their routines and then you're funny by proxy. last stop at the cabaret tent is kevin eldon. we're told before he comes on stage that he's stuck in the mud and a poet called peter has taken his place, which hoodwinks me for a moment but it turns out to be a cunning ruse. peter is kevin pretending to be a crap poet. it's great, i wish i'd written some of it down cos i can't remember a word of it. by now we're in the wee small hours of sunday morning. late and live are hosting the subways second gig of the weekend. it's lovely to see them in a smaller venue again, and they seem to be really enjoying being in front of a small crowd having been all over supporting oasis and weezer and... generally playing bigger venues recently. poor dears. they ask for audience requests and then play what they want to anyway. billy and josh seem to crowdsurf out of the tent from where i'm looking at the end of the set, while mary-charlotte wisely keeps herself away from all those other people's hands. blackbud follow, i can't go and see any live music without having to see blackbud. it just seems to be something that happens, it's not a choice, it's just they play wherever i go. they are stalking me. this is their first play at the festival because their other stage slot got cancelled in the friday morning deluge. their manager is chatting to me about how nice it is that they've got this opportunity to be more expansive with their music, they've had to play so many 25 minute sets recently and it's good to just be able to play around and be looser with the songs, and i agree with him, it does sound better. then the sound desk announces they've only got time for 2 more songs cos the venue has to close at 3. oops... a few hours sleep later and red hand band are up on the other stage, playing to what i'm sure is more than the 42 people mentioned in the q review, but still not that many. err not that i ever read q. forget i mentioned that, please. PLEASE. forget. eh, why should i worry, it's not as if anyone's making notes from this, is it? anyway red hand band play bouncy twisted kind of cabaret rock for which, with the best will in the world, the stage is a bit massive really. i don't stay til the end though to see if the field filled up any more (hope it did, they deserved it to) because i'm off to the roots tent to see... ...chemical dub theory. who are, as the name suggests, a dub band. kind of. i don't know though, cos most dub has me curled up in a ball sobbing for it to end within ten minutes, and i manage to enjoy theirs for a whole hour, so i'm sure they must be doing something else. and in case you're thinking it's just the sight of jo-the-cellist as described 2am on friday that's having a soothing effect on my rhythm-sensitive stomach, i tried listening with my eyes closed too, and it was still good. anyway mostly how they sound is just really really smart. they're all langourous and emotive when jo's on the cello, and all spiky and cool when she's on keyboards. jimmy the bass basses his way admirably through, which as you know is an important thing in dub, and ollie does all sorts of whizzy things in the middle. god knows what he needs to do all that for, can't he just press play like vicki churchill? and at this gig they've got a trombonist too. and at the end, an mc! er yeah i'm not altogether convinced they need the mc. but give them a break, they managed to make me listen to dub for a whole hour. that takes some doing. after that, i wander off looking for the cider bus, the successful location of which heralds the greatest afternoon in my whole memory of the festival since i was about seven years old. frankly i think it melted so many brain cells there is very little of that memory left anyway. i walk past it several times because the actual "bus" itself is tucked round the corner, then when i do get a pint of hot cider with a shot of brandy just in time to make it back to the guardian lounge for martha wainwright with it. it's so gorgeous i make the rash decision to have one for every band i miss. ms wainwright's set would have been lovely anyway. the power stops and she keeps playing and the whole tent stays hushed to hear her. she plays requests. rufus joins her. it's all just unspeakably lovely and magical. so i’m in a good mood setting off for cake on the other stage. cake are more a lot boring than i expected them to be, and quite a lot younger. wait no they’re not, they’re ambulance ltd. this means i've missed cake, so have to have another cider and brandy before bucky on the bandstand. bucky are a punky twopiece from glastonbury who have a song about loving the library. since i work in glastonbury library, this meets with tremendous enthusiasm in one particular member of the audience. not that many songs are dedicated to how great my stewardship of the cd collection in glastonbury library is. even fewer are fun to listen to. well alright then exactly the same number are fun to listen to. they’re so clever they have a song called "we are the beatles", all about how they are the beatles. how clever is that?! claiming the applause of the most popular band in world history. sneaky. seeing bucky means i missed dennis hopper choppers, which means another cider and brandy on the way back to late and live. by this time i am so thoroughly glowing with alcoholic luminescence i feel like the strange creature you used to see in the ready brek ads. the one that looked like morph's pallid evil nemesis, you know? have i lost you? come back, because the fabrics are on next and they are the best thing at glastonbury festival 2005. i ain't even kidding. they are blinding. they sound like they’re playing music from 1920 and 2020 both at once. it's like jazz songs wrung through an electronic mangler. and then spun out into a smart suit with a bit of a sparkle to it. every member of the band is brilliant and together they are... the fabrics. sorry, i peaked too early in this review, i was never going to get a decent finish after it. the fabrics are so good i don't even mind missing the beginning of brian wilson for it. and he's so good that even though i spend the whole time sat on the ground with my head in my hands staring at a bin, wondering what on earth possessed me to drink three hot cider-and-brandies in quick succession, he still sounds like the second best thing at the festival. sunniest moment evaaah. this still leaves sunday night, but you know what? i'm going to sign out there. rufus wainwright was beautiful on the other stage, but i already mentioned him today, and frankly nothing is going to top going from his sister to bucky to the fabrics to brian wilson in one afternoon. okay, so it's over too soon. well that's how it always really is. r.i.p ruth's boots. - wes |