Glastonbury Festival 2009 (Part 2)

Michael Eavis has been quoted as saying that he thought this year’s Glastonbury Festival was the best yet, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? Nevertheless, looking at the headline line-up of Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and a reformed Blur, you feel he may have a point. Certainly, there was a good feeling about this year’s event and I for one enjoyed it immensely. It has made my task of picking my favourite three acts humongously difficult and I have thought long and hard about it, as well as going to the BBC website to see highlights of bands for the second time just to make sure. In the end, I have just had to go with what I enjoyed on a personal level rather than what was clearly good stuff but didn’t touch me in the same way. So here goes in time honoured reverse order:

In third place is Florence And The Machine who played to a huge crowd on the John Peel Stage. This is a controversial choice for me because a) they didn’t quite meet the hype put around by the media, and b) Florence’s singing was a little wayward at times. But what sealed their place on the podium was the performance. Florence prowled the stage like a wild animal and every feral snarl and leap was a captivating watch. This is what separates live music from MTV video. There was nothing choreographed, nothing thought about for more than a nanosecond just pure instinct – it’s called star quality and Ms Welch has it. Pity the music wasn’t a bit better but the performance was captivating and for that reason alone they get my vote.

In second is Bruce Springsteen. I am not a Boss fan and have never seen him play live but I sat through nearly an hour and a half of his set without knowing most of the songs and still loved it. I dare say that the size of the Glastonbury set up was not too daunting for Bruce – he’s probably played to bigger audiences before but somehow the occasion seemed to get to him and he looked like he was savouring every minute of it. He sang, he danced, he played guitar and risked life and limb in the audience and it was clearly as much fun as his old mate Joe Strummer had told him it would be. A true icon.

And so to the top spot and after much heart searching I’ve given it to Bat For Lashes who played the Other Stage on Sunday night. Never have I enjoyed seeing someone whom I wasn’t quite sure about blossom so assuredly on stage. Natasha Khan and her fabulous backing band (including Charlotte Hatherley on guitars, basses and keys) have elevated the nursery school music lesson to epic heights. All manner of strange percussion instruments were rattled and shook, ancient keyboards were prodded and a staggering variety of drums thumped, yet despite the musical complexity somehow you felt you could join in if only you had a detergent bottle filled with rice.

The playing was highly inventive, especially the drumming and Nat’s vocals were cool and beautiful. Top stuff.

There are so many other bands that have had to be relegated to the ‘Highly Commended’ category that I would have to continue this post into part 3 but mention in dispatches should go to Neil Young, Blur, Ting Tings, Crosby Stills and Nash, Franz Ferdinand, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Lady GaGa, all of whom I enjoyed unreservedly.

Follow that Mr Eavis.

Cool, Mann!

Reviewers eh? Don’t you just love ‘em? But seeing as I pontificate about all sorts of stuff here in this blog, I suppose I shouldn’t complain (as per the stones and glass houses principle). The person who reviewed my book for a local newspaper concluded that ‘...in short, it is more like a decent Manfred Mann album than a Sgt Pepper’. At the time I resented this appraisal but on reflection, it is rather a back-handed compliment.

OK, so Sgt Pepper is an historically crucial album which is musically inventive, blah blah blah. But how many people actually listen to it a lot? I don’t...but I have just purchased ‘A World of Mann – the best of Manfred Mann’ and what an interesting listen it has turned out to be.

It comprises a double CD collection which gathers together the 1960s Manfred Mann (the Paul Jones era) singles on disc one and the later 1970s Earthband configuration selections on disc two. Listening to disc one in all its blues/pop glory it is difficult not to get carried away by that peculiar 60s naivety as represented by ‘Do Wah Diddy’, ‘Pretty Flamingo’ and ‘Mighty Quinn’. On moving to disc two, however it is amazing how Mann reinvented himself as a hairy earnest progrocker (well, hairier than normal) once the decade of innocence had ended.

Whilst the Earthband were undoubtedly a progrock band of their time, they were perhaps unique in that they wrote very little of their own songs but rather tended to reinterpret others’ material in their own style. Two regular providers of material for them were Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen whose American vignettes were given a very English progrock treatment. Unexpectedly, this seemed to work very well. It was the stuff they did write that let them down and remains the reason why they were never really fully integrated into the accepted progrockers club with Yes, Genesis, ELP and the rest.

Yet tunes such as Springsteen’s ‘Blinded by the Light’ and Dylan’s ‘Father of Day, Father of Night’ are classics of the genre, the former even giving them a respectable chart hit. My favourite, though, is Springsteen’s ‘Spirits in the Night’ from their ‘Nightingales and Bombers’ album where the incongruity of Bruce’s all-American tale of teen lust and debauchery set against the early 1970s Englishness of the arrangement just doesn’t seem to matter a jot. It’s powerful stuff.

I remember that copies of their 1974 album ‘The Good Earth’ came packaged with title deeds to a square foot of some Welsh hillside. I wonder how many people are still proud owners of a tiny plot of Welsh grass?

All things considered, I’m quite proud to be a Manfred Mann album!

'Who the Hell Doesn't Like Springsteen...?'

Here is the news (courtesy of The Scotsman):

‘An Australian woman who stabbed her common law husband to death because she was tired of being bossed around said a row over her playing a Bruce Springsteen CD was the last straw.
Karen Lee Cooper, 50, pleaded guilty to manslaughter yesterday and was sentenced to eight years in prison for killing partner Kevin Watson, 49.

"I mean, who the hell doesn't like Bruce Springsteen, for God's sake?" Cooper told police.’

Well, exactly. Who doesn’t? Er...me, actually. This is not to say that I hate him with a vengeance, it’s just that I am entirely neutral and am not really that bothered whether I listen to him or not, which is probably just as well judging by the above snippet. In fact this little vignette of life under the influence of pop music could well be played out at our house (note to self: hide all kitchen knives). My wife is also a big fan of the Boss (show me a female who isn’t) and owns a fair amount of his output whereas I do not. But she tends to play his stuff when I’m out of the house so a murderous assault will hopefully be avoided. If this blog suddenly stops, you’ll know why.

Let’s face it, there are much worse things to end up killing someone over: ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, ‘Agadoo’, ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and I could go on...and on...so don’t get me started. If someone played any of these at ear-splitting volume in the same house as me I could very well see myself reaching for the carving knife. I’ve long suspected that pop music has a meaningful role to play in international torture – perhaps some dubious dictatorship could employ me as a consultant?

However, whilst I profess to be neutral in respect of Bruce, I did buy her his latest offering, ‘Magic’ as a Christmas present, and I admit to having listened to it a few times and begrudgingly have become rather fond of it. Especially ‘Girls in their Summer Clothes’ which has one of those incredibly annoying melodies that you catch yourself humming by the photocopier just as your boss walks by.

But what this all amounts to is that it is in the nature of all Music Obsessives to treat most music as a life or death passion - literally in Mrs Cooper’s case – because it matters to us. And what a shame it would be if it didn’t.