As a rule, I don’t pay much attention to Glastonbury and the hype that surrounds it, and I avoid the TV coverage, in large part because of the team of usual suspects who introduce it. Just the music is fine, thanks. This year, I dipped into the BBC coverage on iPlayer and am slowly working through the things that interest me and a couple of acts who were recommended on Facebook.
It began when I tuned in to watch Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, whose music I’ve enjoyed on CD. They delivered exactly what I expected – seductive music from a haunted swamp. It didn’t contain any great surprises, but I didn’t really expect any.
Paul McCartney is, as any fule kno, a national treasure who delivered a near-3-hour set with verve and stamina that included newer material when he could have just played through his greatest hits at leisure and still filled another couple of hours. He included heartfelt nods to John Lennon and George Harrison, and made my night by playing a lot of Abbey Road, probably my favourite Beatles album. As many have said, we won’t see his likes again.
I knew St Vincent only from an appearance a while ago on Graham Norton and started to watch out of curiosity, but stayed because she and her band were really, really good. Annie Clark is a very fine guitar player, but this was a complete band performance, highly stylised, angular, spiky, inventive and drenched in soul. I caught echoes of a number of artists, but this is a musician, writer and performer hitting a rich streak of mature form. And how she managed to stand on that fence in those boots I’ll never know.
Wolf Alice I will give immediate attention to any band named after an Angela Carter short story, especially a band that’s as determinedly cross-genre as this. Aside from Ellie Rowsell’s flexible voice (that occasionally reminded me of Annie Haslam), what caught my attention was how they’ve absorbed elements from so many styles, from folk to rap to alt-rock to funk to thrash, and turned them into their own sound.
Olivia Rodrigo was good with a great band – and her duet with Lily Allen in response to the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe -v- Wade was a joy. In the end it isn’t for me, but talent is talent.
I had never heard of Mitski until a friend on Facebook said it was worth checking out her set. I was mesmerised for the whole thing and plan to watch it again soon. I caught echoes of Bjork and echoes of Natalie Merchant, but this was another singular woman’s voice and another great band – who, unfortunately, she forgot to namecheck at the end.
In amongst all the alt-rock, Herbie Hancock delivered a well received set that explored the post-bop/fusion/funk soundscape he’s made his own. McCartney may be the oldest Glastonbury headliner, but Hancock is 2 years older and just as sprightly.
My cd and LP shelves are no stranger to either Paul McCartney or Herbie Hancock, but Mitski, Wolf Alice and St Vincent are now on my list for a deep dive into their music. However, I have to finish by saying – and I will brook no argument on this – that the Pet Shop Boys were utterly fabulous – almost as fabulous as their audience. Were I in beard-stroking mode, I’d say that you can discern a direct line back from Pet Shop Boys through Giorgio Moroder to Kraftwerk and – and bear with me here – some of the shifting sequencer patterns on Tangerine Dream’s Rubicon. None of that matters, of course: the only important thing is they make joyful, life-affirming music to dance to like there’s nobody watching.
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In other news, Nicola Sturgeon made her speech again.
Although I moan here from time to time about Twitter, it has its uses, especially when there are significant events in progress. I first noticed this during the London Riots of 2011 when I found a Twitter list of journalists on the ground reporting live. Since then, I’ve maintained a list of journalists whose opinions and reporting I respect, moving individuals in or out of the list as time goes by. Over the past two and a half weeks I’ve been maintaining a list of commentators and analysts discussing the invasion of Ukraine, and I’ve found it to be a valuable way of keeping up with what’s going on without the relentlessness of 24-hour news on TV.
The preponderance of opinion there is that Russia is losing and losing badly. I rather hope that this is the case, but that’s why I’ve tried to build the list to be serious and sober analysts for the most part – to avoid confirmation bias. Still, I can’t help but keep my fingers crossed that they are correct: things can change rapidly with the advent of the unexpected. If anyone is interested, I’ve made the list public for the duration of the conflict; I’ll hide or delete it after that. The link is below, but please note that WordPress will, I think, show the current live feed over which I have no control, and I can’t find a way to disable it.
Something I have to comment on, and part of my reason for sticking with analysts, is the reaction to the sinking of the Moskva by Ukraine. This was treated with glee by many on social media, like they were gamers in front of their TV, controllers in hand, watching the points rack up in the corner of the screen. I understand why there was that reaction and the importance of the sinking as a symbolic act and blow to Russian prestige. But there was no glee here, no gotcha! moment. Why? Because Dad was Royal Navy (although he insisted all his days that the Fleet Air Arm wasn’t mere Royal Navy) from the latter part of WW2 into the late 1940s. He told me once that he was lucky to have a surname beginning with ‘B’ because he was sent to the Mediterranean while others further down the alphabet in his intake were shipped off to the Pacific only to drown when their transports were sunk. That makes it personal because his survival meant my existence. War does not only kill people, it erases future generations too.
The upshot is that, however important the sinking of the Moskva might be, I take no glee in the deaths of sailors at sea. In 2009, one of Dad’s old shipmates, Bill Entwhistle, explained it to me:
The Navy differs from other branches of the armed forces because they have to contend with the sea, one of the four elements and one which sustains them but can kill them in a moment. He was insistent too on the law of the sea – a man in the water is a man to be rescued irrespective of his nationality or allegiance in a conflict.
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One of the other pleasures of Twitter is random discoveries that bring joy. One of these came yesterday when a user called Tarotplane, a Captain Beefheart fan by the sound of it, posted a list of ten experimental Italian albums from the 1970s. Not to everyone’s taste, I daresay, but I fell deep into the rabbit hole last night.
a list of Italian cosmic and experimental albums of the 70’s. While not typical prog, space rock, or psych folk, there were quite a few albums that had similarities with all of these styles but were distinctly Italian. I hope you find a few that are new to you.
After my previous post, I was reminded of the importance of celebrating the mundane, and that is absolutely correct, although it isn’t as if this blog hasn’t been mundane enough over the years. Anyway, today I have
Had a good half-hour ride on an exercise bike testing out a new playlist
Been out for a 5K walk, of which I jogged about 1.5K (cumulatively)
Revised some old writing in preparation for continuing where I left off
Found that I’d sold another copy of Coyote in the Corner in the US
Sampled more tunes for said new playlist(s), with mixed results, and
Contemplated a new musical project.
The playlists are based on a running rhythm of around 160bpm, which is close to my old running pace 15 years ago. So I made up a 1hr playlist of tunes that play at 160bpm or thereby, and another of 80bpm tunes on the assumption that they should be pretty much similar. In fact, the 160bpm one is much easier to use as a click track, and I’m not sure why that is. As I get more into the rhythm of things I may play with different bpms, but it’s early days.
The playlists are currently on Spotify and, before you throw your hands up in horror at my use of Spotify, I should say that I already own most of the tunes and am preparing to buy the rest so that I can create the playlists on my MP3 player.
For those interested, the 160bpm draft playlist is here:
And the 80bpm draft, which is highly provisional, is here:
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New musical project? What’s that about then Ian? Well: I’ve been considering putting together a list of LPs that had an impact on me in me teens/adolescence in the 1970s and that still have meaning for me, and then writing about them. I don’t just mean good or great records, neither do I mean records that I thought were great then but which I’ve since gone off, and nor do I mean 70s records that I’ve since either discovered or revised my assessment of. I mean ones that were important to me then and remain so now.
My rough list has 27 of them, but I’m trying to distil it down to the core. Three on the list were released in the 1960s but I didn’t hear them until the 70s. Two bands appear twice.
More as I figure it out.
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I saw the following on Twitter earlier and it, together with some private comments on Facebook, set me thinking. More blogging tomorrow, maybe.
The weird thing about being a Russian speaker and being able to monitor the propaganda coming out of Russia is that I know what the “I’m just asking questions” crowd in the West are going to think several days before they do. 😂
I don’t plan to write anything about the situation in Ukraine because there is nothing I can usefully say. So here are some inconsequentialities.
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The postman finally delivered 5 complete shows from the 2021 Phish tour on CD today (I ordered them in December as a Christmas treat for myself.) Sadly for them, they arrived on the same day as the new Half Man Half Biscuit CD, The Voltarol Years. Sorry Phish, but one has priorities.
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One of our neighbours has suffered a triple misfortune:
she has injured herself
she is stuck in Sheffield
she can’t use her ticket for Scotland-France at Murrayfield tomorrow.
On a similar principle to that espoused by Half Man Half Biscuit on their timeless classic Dead Men Don’t Need Season Tickets, the ticket for the match is now mine. This will be a decent way to occupy my time before heading into town to see Van Der Graaf Generator on what may well be their final tour.
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A dark day in the life of your blogger, who has opened a new Facebook account. My views on Facebook have been well aired here, they have not changed in the least, and I’m not going to rehearse them again. All I will say is that I have been persuaded that a Facebook presence is a ‘nice to have’ ahead of publishing a novel later this year. It is about marketing – or tawdry self-promotion if you prefer. If you’re interested you’ll find me here: IanBurdonWriter.
A page linking to various places that you’ll find me is now on Linktree.
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Only two years after others tried it during lockdown, I have been trying to make sourdough bread. Results so far:
Batch 1: 100% spelt flour. ‘Good taste but texturally challenged,’ per daughter.
Batch 2: 100% spelt flour. Similar to batch 1, but this time I used a baking tin and not so moist a dough so it rose more.
Batch 3: spelt starter, stoneground wholemeal wheat flour. Would be great had it not stuck firmly to the non-stick baking tin.
Meat Loaf died the other day. There was a lot of reaction, as you might expect, particularly from my generation who were in their late teens when Bat Out of Hell was released, seemingly coming out of nowhere.
Some of the reaction was based on aspects of his personality, and he had recently made public comments about mask mandates and Covid restrictions, making his reported death from Covid unfortunately ironic. To be clear, I do not gainsay those sentiments or criticise those who express them but nor do I take pleasure in the karmic aspects of his death. In fact, since Friday I’ve dug out my cd of Bat Out of Hell and played it several times at high volume in the shed – I’ve probably played it more in the last three days than in the last 40 years. And I’ve enjoyed it.
Part of the enjoyment is the exuberant performance of the songs by him and Ellen Foley, but at least as much of it is the quality of the songs themselves as produced by Todd Rundgren. The material is mostly killer, and Meat Loaf had the perfect voice for it, although – and bear with me here – I have found myself wondering what Roy Orbison would have made of it.
I mean, everyone who was ever an adolescent can relate to we were barely 17 and we were barely dressed. What adult can’t relate to the pains and regrets in our teenage past, all the things we keenly remember and hope everyone else has forgotten? All set to over-the-top orchestrations and guitars sounding like a motorcycle?
The criticism of Meat Loaf the man -v- Meat Loaf the performer brings us back to the thorny question of what to do about disagreeable people who produce good work – the world, and history, are full of such. I’m not going to get into the modern debate about ‘cancel culture’ here – I haven’t really thought about it in sufficient depth, but, when it comes down to it, Bat Out of Hell was a collaborative effort between Jim Steinman, Todd Rundgren, Ellen Foley and Meat Loaf, and however much one might find one of them problematic, the whole is greater than the sum: three out of four ain’t bad, as the song almost said.
Like many in the UK, my first encounter with Bat Out of Hell and Meat Loaf was on The Old Grey Whistle Test and the performance linked below. Paradise by the Dashboard Light, is a sleazy song, but it’s neither more nor less sleazy (and considerably less saccharin-coated) than John Travolta in Grease, and Karla DeVito, who is absolutely not Olivia Newton-John, gives as good as she gets.
I had my first visit to the specialist diabetes nurse at our local GP practice this morning. The uptick in exercise and change in diet have had immediate effects – I’ve lost 3Kg (6.5lbs) in two weeks. I’ll take that as a good start.
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Another first last Sunday – my first full gig in two years: Public Service Broadcasting at Barrowland in Glasgow. It was weird being in a large room with 1500 other people, but it was good to be back. The band were great, my ear protectors did what they were meant to, and I got home safely around 00.45.
Because of Cop26, Glasgow was swarming with police. Noticeably, they were from all over the UK – we spotted vans from Wales, London and Manchester. We didn’t see any trouble anywhere, except one lassie shouting abuse at officers who had stopped her. That could be any city anytime. It isn’t that long ago that I would have thought twice about wandering back from Barrowland along Argyle Street at that time of night, but it felt fine.
Before the gig, we found a great little Indian place that offered Indian ‘street food’ as an option – think tapas Indian-style. We also had a couple of pints of ale in the Scotia Bar, an east-end favourite. A band was setting up when we went in, and got cracking on their first set while we were there. They opened with Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath covers and offered a fine, punk-inflected reading of Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz. What really caught my attention was when they played Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way and everyone in the bar sang along. I was buying our second pint and the barman was singing harmonies. It was one of those impromptu, transformative communal moments that borders on the joyous.
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