52% intelligent. 9% modest. More monkey than bear.

Saturday, June 30, 2007

man you should have seen it



Morning Runner @ The Social, 30th June 2007

The last time I went to see Morning Runner, I didn't know very much about them except the single "Burning Benches", which I liked. I thought they were pretty good and gave them 7/10. This time around, more than a year later, I still didn't know very much about them except for the single "Burning Benches", which I still liked (in fact, this song popped up on my iPod shuffle when I was out for a run on Thursday evening). It's not that I haven't listened to their album (“Wilderness is Paradise Now”), or that I don't think that it's any good.....it's just that for some reason it hasn't ever quite become a fixture on my stereo.

I'm not quite sure what the purpose of tonight's gig is, to be honest. I had assumed that the band were going to be testing out new material in front of a live audience. Well, I suppose that they did play a couple of new songs, but the hour long set was made up mostly of songs off the album and a few older songs. Singer Matthew Greener told us that they had only played a couple of gigs in the last six months, and as they've been working on the next album, perhaps they simply needed to get out of the studio and to flex the rustiness out of their musical muscles.

They were very good. Greener has got a good voice, and the band themselves are well capable of moving from quite guitar heavy rock to much slower and more sensitive numbers (all of which were very well received tonight). My God but the Social was a sweat box tonight - what the hell is wrong with switching the damn air-conditioning on? Thank heavens it was music to gently sway to, rather than something that required a more active response. Hmmm. That sounds like damning with faint praise.... but I don't mean it like that. The band were good tonight. The new songs sounded tight, although I did think that they lacked hooks and weren't very immediate, but it's really unfair to judge them on a single listen (although wikipedia tells me that the new material sounds like Primal Scream, which is a horrible thing to say about anyone. They didn't - to my ears anyway.)

The band were only onstage for an hour, and then they disappeared without an encore... and we were left to head back out into a rainy saturday night and to marvel at the dress-sense of the youth of Nottingham.

So last time I saw Morning Runner, I gave them 7/10. This time?

7/10.

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Friday, June 29, 2007

there'll be peace when you are done...


Earworms of the Week - Glastonbury Aftermath edition

> “Faster” – Manic Street Preachers

I am an architect, they call me a butcher…

That’s a first line that will ever conjure up images in my head of Richey slicing “4 REAL” into his arm with a razor blade in front of Steve Lamacq. Amy Winehouse eat your heart out.

I love the Manic Street Preachers. As a band, they seem to stand entirely on their own: there is no one that I can think of that is remotely like them. There was a time when I thought that James Dean Bradfield had one of the most difficult jobs in the world – putting the ridiculously wordy, literate and overly complicated lyrics of Nicky Wire and Richey James Edwards to music. The lyrics on “The Holy Bible” in particular are incredibly dense and often disturbing, and the fact that the album is so good pays tribute to Bradfield’s skill. This song in particular is a good example of what makes the Manics brilliant:

I am stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer,
I spat out Plath and Pinter


Who else sings songs like that?

They don’t play material from “The Holy Bible” very often (although more now than they used to), and I was very, very pleased when they launched into this one.

> “Newborn” – Leon Fields

Leon is one of my friends, and this is one of the songs that he played at an open mic session at the Rabbit Hole in the new Park area of the site (the other songs being equally cheerful numbers by happy souls like Joy Division, Pink Floyd, Radiohead and Nirvana). I don’t know how familiar you are with Muse, but this song is both extremely fiddly to play and is sung in an extremely high register. It took a hell of a lot of bottle to play this in front of an audience on an acoustic guitar, and I think Leon just about pulled it off. Mind you, he did start the day with a breakfast punch of industrial strength Somerset Scrumpy mixed with red wine….

> “Behave” – Charlotte Hatherley

It was Charlotte’s birthday when she played the Park stage, watched from the wings by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, and to be honest she looked like she would rather have been anywhere else but where she was…. And the second her set was over she flounced off the stage without a backwards glance and disappeared. Still, I thought that she was pretty good, and this song in particular has stuck in my head. It has a slightly wonky guitar line that I just can’t seem to shake.

> “Rockin’ All Over The World” – John Fogerty

Until he played this right at the end of his set, I’d more or less forgotten that Fogerty actually wrote this song (how much money must he have made out of the Quo?). It was a fantastic set and this was a great way to finish up. Even Fogerty’s guitar solos have guitar solos and he looked like he had an absolute ball throughout. I can easily imagine that he walks around everywhere with a guitar around his shoulders and one of those little portable amps strapped onto his belt… that way he can solo everywhere he goes.

Brilliant. You could say that I liked it, I liked it, I la-la-la liked it, la-la-la liked it.

> “Golden Skans” – The Klaxons

I’m not sure about Nu-Rave, I just think that this is a great song – made even better if you substitute the last “Haaaaa!” in the chorus with a wookie noise.

> “Hallelujah” – Rufus and Martha Wainwright

This is a lovely song at the best of times, but this sent shivers down my spine. Rufus made a bit of a mess of the order of the verses, and the sound throughout the set was a bit ropey, but it didn’t make a bit of difference. Gorgeous.

> “James Bond Medley” – Dame Shirley Bassey

It’s always great to watch a Bond theme performed by the original artist, and here we got three for the price of one: “Goldfinger”, “Moonraker” and “Diamonds Are Forever”, all sandwiched together and belted out with gusto by the great welsh diva. Brilliant. I saw McCartney doing “Live and Let Die” in 2004, and I thought that was pretty good (it had fireworks and flamethrowers and everything!), but this was even better. It was somehow a quintessentially Glastonbury moment that the mud covered masses were stood in their wellies in the mud watching a diva in a bright pink ballgown doing her thing on a Sunday afternoon.

Tina Turner for 2008? A-Ha? Monty Norman?

> “Day Tripper” – The Bootleg Beatles

The Who may have been closing the festival over on the Pyramid Stage, but compared to this lot they just don’t have the back catalogue… As a direct result of the hour I spent in the Acoustic Tent, I lost my voice. I imagine I wasn’t the only one. Audience participation is not a problem for the Bootleg Beatles. They do exactly what they say on the tin.

Plus it was pissing it down outside, so there were other advantages to being in a tent, and no 20 minute guitar solos or pointless new material….

> “I Will Wait For You” – Tiny Dancers

I saw this lot in the Social in Nottingham a little while ago, but I was more than happy to slog my way down to the John Peel stage to watch them performing at Glastonbury. They’re slightly quirky and I can’t really ever see them being Coldplay-big, but they are surely destined for bigger stages than this.

I love his tiny guitar too.

> “You! Me! Dancing!” – Los Campesinos!

When I watched this lot play in the Park at lunchtime on Friday, they were the first band proper that I saw at the festival. Our tent was close enough to the Other Stage that I had been able to listen to Mr Hudson and the Library (not bad) and Reverend and the Makers (single aside, not very good) from the tent, but that’s no real substitute for actually pulling your wellies on and standing in the rain in front of a stage, is it?

Los Campesinos! were shambolic, obviously… but they were also fantastic. This is just such a brilliant pop song.

Naturally, Ben was there too.

> “Fluorescent Adolescent” – The Arctic Monkeys

You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your night dress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis

Unbelievably, Alex Turner was born in 1986. Quite how he manages to write such incisive lyrics is a marvel. The Arctics had an absolutely colossal crowd on Friday night, and although they are pretty no frills as a live act, they totally deserved it. They’re a brilliant band. They rock too, which is always a good thing.

> “New England” – Billy Bragg

Billy Bragg’s traditional set in the Left Field on Sunday night was an absolute joy. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of watching this guy performing his songs… even when it’s just him and his guitar. I love the fact that he gave up about a third of his set introducing the crowd to his “Jail Guitar Doors” charity… a charity that was founded when a guy wrote to Billy Bragg asking for his help raising a bit of cash to buy some instruments to help prisoners find a positive creative outlet for their feelings and frustrations. Three days after he had posted the letter, Billy Bragg rang him at work and offered to help. We were played a film about the charity, treated to a couple of impassioned speeches, a raffle and at one point Bragg even brought onstage a kid who has been out of jail on probation for four days and encouraged him to play us a song using Bragg’s own guitar. It was brilliant. The world is absolutely a better place for having people like Billy Bragg in it.

This song should need no introduction. When I saw Bragg here in 2002, he simply said “I’m Billy Bragg and this is my song”.


Perfect.

My favourite act of the festival.

> “Carry On My Wayward Son” – Kansas

Not strictly speaking a band who played Glastonbury (although they are currently touring the USA apparently)… but thanks to Guitar Hero, this is a song that simply will not budge from my head. I was singing this all weekend.

Argghh!

Apparently the Foo Fighters have covered this. Part of me really wants to hear their version, but I think it could well be the death of me.

Is that the end of Glastonbury 2007 on this blog? Who knows? I haven't seen C's photos yet....

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Thursday, June 28, 2007

I'm tired and I want to go to bed...



I thought that the Manic Street Preachers were quite good, to be honest, but apparently they didn't get everyone up and dancing.

I suppose that for some people, one pint of hot cider is more than sufficient.....and it was nearly 7pm.

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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

it ain't over 'til it's over....

Bored of Glastonbury yet?

Too bad. I'm not.

I've just been watching some of the BBC highlights on Barg & Hen's Sky+ box (kindly served with a tasty risotto and some pear cider to satisfy my cravings). My overwhelming feeling at the moment is that I want to go back and do it all over again - rain, mud and everything.

Hell, in some light, even the mud looks beautiful.



I think that maybe you should read someone else wittering on about the festival for a change. What do you say? After all, there's so much going on, that pretty much every single person who went will have a different take on it.

Let's see:

-> Sarah has just put up some of her fabulous photos

-> Hen shares her thoughts on her first experience of an English festival (she mentions the rain once or twice though)

-> Lord Bargain shares his festival highlights. In spite of what you may have read, not everyone thought Mika was shit. Well, at least one person didn't anyway.

-> Ben has just kicked off his festival review. Expect a rave review of CSS on the Other Stage any time now.

-> In fact, Glastonbury is such a good festival that Ian even finds time to leave Plusnet alone for a bit, and I believe he was actually seen smiling....!

-> Here's the BBC site (I hear they had some great bloggers...)

-> Here's the Guardian

-> and don't miss Charlie Brooker writing about his first festival for the Guardian

"Imagine forcing the cast of Emmerdale to hurriedly construct Las Vegas at gunpoint in the rain. Then do it again. And once more for luck. That's Glastonbury: a cross between a medieval refugee camp and a recently detonated circus".



I want to go back and watch Iggy and the Stooges now. And The Twang. And Editors.... and so on. I also wouldn't mind seeing some of the bands I did see all over again. John Fogerty looked brilliant on t'telly!

Having watched their set now, I think you can keep the Killers though.

And here's a discussion point for you: does Jo Whiley look brilliant or like a Terrahawk? I can't quite decide....

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Just eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it....

I'm sure I must have mentioned it before, but the food at Glastonbury is just sensational. Every time I am there, I try to take great care over where I get each meal. There is so much good stuff, that I would be loathe to waste a perfectly good mealtime on something substandard.

Here's my countdown of my favourites this year (in no particular order).

> "Matador Pie" - Pie Minister

Without a shadow of a doubt, this was the best pie that I had at the festival: beef, chorizo and butter beans... but the main attraction has to be the pastry. It's just delicious, and it's served with mash, peas and - optionally - a sprinkling of dried shalots and cheese. Also handily placed right next door to Brothers Pear Cider bar. Loopy juice. I went back for a second pie here later on in the festival (a "Chicken of Aragon"), and whilst standing in the long queue, I found myself being approached by a number of people and asked if this was worth the wait. Oh yes. Word of my pie expertise seemed to get around, and a bit later I was approached by some more people (I was wearing my santa hat, so easy to recognise in the queue).... "Are you the Pie Man? Is this worth the wait?".

I'm going to take that to my grave. I've rarely felt so happy and fulfilled.

> "Chicken, Leek and Ham Pie" - Square Pie

This is the classic Glastonbury Pie for me. Unlike the Pie Minister pies, this one comes encased in puff pastry. To be honest, I think the Pie Minister pie was better, but nobody comes close to the quality of the mash and the gravy here. At the tent near the Dance Stages (there's another one on the other side of the site), you also get to watch the loons at the Silent Disco as you eat your tea. Bonkers and very, very funny.

> 6 fresh donuts - a van right at the back of the Other Stage

There are lots of donut vans around the place, but this one undoubtedly serves the biggest and the freshest donuts at the festival, and they very much hit the spot when I was walking back up to my tent after the Arctic Monkeys on Friday night.

> Falafel with humous - a van next to the Leftfield tent

Done right, this is the meal of champions. Here it was perfect. And my nice smile at the lady serving me paid off when she gave me an extra scoop of humous (much to C's disgust, as she only got the one spoonful).

> Fish n'chips - The Sea Cow near the Pyramid Stage

I was a touch wary of this to be honest, but I actually think that this van serves better fish n'chips than my local chippie in Nottingham. I had been expecting a small, flat piece of processed fish and some soggy chips... but what turned up was very much the real McCoy - a great big piece of battered cod. Proper chips too. And there was plenty of malt vinegar. Highly recommended.

> Fudge (made with Kenyan fair trade sugar) - a tent in the marketplace.

This was a bit of an impulse stop, to be honest, but we picked up a bag of assorted fudge here (butterscotch, ginger, vanilla, rum and raisin, white chocolate and a piece of turkish delight with pistachio) and then spent the next 10 minutes cooing over how brilliant it was before heading over to watch Tony Benn in the Left Field.

> "Le Super Royal" - La Grande Bouffe

This lot have a big reputation - Michael Eavis is a big fan, apparently - but I've always found them to be slightly disappointing and very stodgy. I decided to give them another go just before I went to see Billy Bragg. The only realistic alternative was a pasty, and although it looked delicious, I felt as though I had eaten enough pies already for one weekend. "Le Super Royal" is a combination of the tartiflette (potatoes, bacon, cream) and a delicious French sausage. I needn't have worried - it was gorgeous.

> Thai green curry - a tent near the Cider Bus

This didn't look very promising on the plate (it was very pale), but as soon as I tasted it, I knew I was onto a winner. Chicken, rice, lentils and various other salad-y bits in a green curry sauce. Mmmmmm. And all for a fiver! bargain.

> "The Appalachian Feast" (buffalo chili, rice, buttery sweet potato mash, sweetcorn salsa) - a van on the corner of the market between the Left Field and Jazz World

The chili came from a massive vat that had been bubbling on a stove at the back for about 12 hours, and the buffalo meat was unbelievably tender. It wasn't that spicy, but the guy in the van was good enough to give me a shot of jalapeno dressing, which fired the whole thing up nicely.

> Organic coffee and a piece of apricot flapjack (or perhaps the Ginger bread) - The Tiny Tea Tent

This is a Sunday morning tradition at Glastonbury for me and my friend Rich, and this year was no exception. The Tiny Tea Tent is just inside the gates of the Green Fields, and is fully wind powered and serves the most delicious cups of coffee at the festival (50p deposit gets you a proper mug too!). I came here a couple of times over the weekend, and both times I spent a happy half hour just getting out of the hurly-burly of the festival.

> Burrow Hill medium sweet cider (with ice) - The Cider Bus

I've acquired quite a taste for this stuff. The Cider Bus is just on the Left Field side of the Pyramid Stage, and it serves cider out of massive wooden kegs. This is none of your fizzy shit either - this is just the good stuff. The first pint I had here was the dry. It comes with a small oil-slick on the top and it absolutely blows your socks off. After that first one though, I tended to stick to the medium-sweet, which was just a bit more quaffable (they helpfully provide buckets of ice as well). They also do an absolutely delicious hot cider.

I'm certainly coming back here next year. Brothers Pear Cider is pretty drinkable, but this is the good stuff.

> Tempura vegetables with rice and prawn crackers - a tent between the Pyramid and the Other Stage

Simple and delicious. Made by the bag of prawn crackers.

> Shiraz drunk straight from a mineral water bottle

Is there any other way of drinking this? It's another Sunday Glastonbury tradition for me to carry around the skin from the inside of a box of wine. I then proceed to share this wine with my mates over the course of the day, slowly getting more and more sozzled.

Brilliant!

I first did this with my friend Vicky back in 2002.... but Vicky has just given birth to a beautiful baby daughter and so was unable to attend the festival. Naturally, I made sure I sent her a couple of drunken text messages to allow her to share in the moment. Bless her, but I think she quite enjoyed it. I look forward to when she next comes along to the festival and brings her family with her.

--

Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen: at the Glastonbury Festival there is absolutely no need to eat a crappy burger from a brown van.... and if you do so, then I think you should be ejected from the site immediately. The only burgers you should be eating here should be hand made, organic and made from rare breeds lovingly reared in perfect conditions. Ideally, they should also be cooked by a member of the Dimbleby family.

I may have put on some weight.....

(Incidentally, I'm not going to go on about Glastonbury forever.... I think I'll do my Earworms from the festival on Friday, and then let it go for another year)

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Monday, June 25, 2007

it's just a state of mind....

Well, it took about seven hours from when we first got back to the cars, but I'm finally home and have had that long awaited and much needed shower. It started to rain again whilst I was in the Left Field tent watching the mighty Billy Bragg, and I don't think it has stopped raining since. My God it was wet. After the Braggster, I watched the Bootleg Beatles in the Acoustic tent, but then broke cover and spent an extremely soggy hour or so standing in the rain at the Fire and Dance stage watching Bill Bailey.

I listened to the radio on the way home, and I've seen some of the press coverage of the festival now, and naturally the focus has been on the weather. Yes, it was wet. Yes, the site turned into a bog. But you know what? When it really gets down to it, none of that stuff is really all that important. Alright, so everything becomes a little bit harder, but if you've come prepared, then it's never unmanageable and you quickly learn to adjust. When I stood in the rain last night and watched Bill Bailey, I don't think I could have been much wetter or dirtier if I had tried.... but it was alright. When you're already wet, you can't exactly get much wetter, can you?

Still, I'd had quite a lot of cider and shiraz by that point, and I think I may actually have been asleep on my feet at one point.... so perhaps I'm not the best person to ask.

Monday mornings at Glastonbury are melancholy affairs at the best of times, but today was even bleaker and sadder than most. More than twelve hours of solid rain meant that rivers of slime were starting to flow down the site, and packing up your tent was even more of a chore than normal. Perhaps that was why so many people had simply abandoned their tents where they stood, preferring to get off the site as quickly and as painlessly as possible. As we slogged our way down from our campsite to the West car parks, it was a little bit like walking through a ghost town.... some tents still had bed rolls and sleeping bags still inside.

Glastonbury's car parks are famous. In 2002, I went down to my car at about 10:30 in the morning, about half an hour after another friend who was also heading back up to Nottingham. A few hours later, I received a call from this friend telling me that she had got home safe and sound, and how was I doing. I hadn't even got out of the field I had been parked in. I eventually got home at about 23.30, some 13 hours after I had first got to my car. This year didn't seem to be quite so bad, although it is something of a slog when you haven't had much sleep, and I was very grateful that I wasn't doing any driving.

Not everyone was so lucky: about an hour after we got back home, I had a phonecall from one of my friends who had been camping with us, but was heading to Oxford out of the East car parks. They hadn't yet managed to get as far as Stonehenge, and still had some way to go before that shower.

So it goes.

A lot of crap is talked about the Glastonbury Festival, and no one ever seems to want to criticise or to challenge the view that this is the best festival in the world - certainly not the BBC, who are all over the event like a rash. It may well be the best festival in the world, and it's an annual tradition now for Michael Eavis to say that this Festival was definitely the best yet. It might be fantastic, but that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Why could half the crowd not hear the Killers properly? (so I hear - I was at Rodrigo Y Gabriela, where there was some kind of a technical problem that meant that their set was delayed by about 45 minutes and in the end had to be cut short.... how many things can go wrong for an acoustic duo?). I also thought that there were too many people. The site has apparently been expanded to cope with the additional 40,000 or so people the licence now allows, but at key pressure points there were frequently too many people, many of whom appeared to be triumphantly wasted. And anyway, exactly how alternative is the festival now anyway? It seems that every stall now takes credit cards and offers cashback. Even Lost Vagueness is now conscious of being a brand.

Still, I'm not one of those people who is nostalgic for the festival as it used to be in the good old days. I remember the days before the fence, and I can remember the drug dealers hanging around on every bridge. If the festival hadn't adapted, then I'm sure that it wouldn't still exist. The festival has evolved to survive, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve. Besides, the old values of the festival are still there if you know where to look for them. You can head up to the Green Fields and as well as being able to buy things that will blow your head off (and possibly make you want to buy a pixie hat), you can learn about alternative futures, and get involved with campaign groups like Greenpeace and Oxfam. The Left Field too has a special place in my heart. It's quite easy to take the piss out things like this, but I got quite choked up when Billy Bragg was telling us all about the charity Jail Guitar Doors. It's a charity that looks to provide musical instruments to inmates to help them with their self-esteem and to give them an outlet for their frustrations and for their creativity. Braggy was looking to raise a paltry £300 on the night to buy some guitars, we had a whipround and a raffle and raised over £1000, which will be matched by the Fireman's Union. We also had one of the inmates come on and perform for us. He had only been out of jail on probation for four days, and was clearly a little overwhelmed, but he was also really good. You don't exactly get stuff like this at Download or Reading do you?

One happy by-product of the huge crowds was that it meant that I increasingly stayed away from the main stages and sought my entertainment elsewhere. I didn't watch The Killers, but I did get to see John Fogerty play a fantastic set on Jazz World (how could I have forgotten that he wrote "Rocking All Over The World"? What a way to finish your set). I gave the Kaiser Chiefs and the Who a wide berth and was rewarded by great sets by Billy Bragg and the Bootleg Beatles. I was a little sorry to miss the Marley brothers performing "Exodus" on the Pyramid Stage, but I got to see Tony Benn's sunday sermon and to see the brilliant Mark Thomas performing. I didn't make it down to the Circus or to the Theatre, but I stayed further away from the Main stages than I ever have before, and I finally made it down to the John Peel stage! I couldn't entirely escape the crowds of course, and sometimes this meant that you got glimpses of some of the more unpleasant aspects of human behaviour. At one point on Saturday night, I saw a man lying in the mud. He was clearly in a really bad way, and was barely moving, although he was being attended to by a steward. A concerned passer-by had collared the steward and brought him over to the casualty who was by now surrounded by a small group of lads who were standing around him and laughing. The Good Samaritan looked up at the lads as the steward bent over the guy in the mud.
"Is this guy with you?"
All of the lads just shook their heads. Hell no, they were just here to laugh at the idiot in the mud. Unbelievable. Another man's suffering as another of the festival's entertainments.

Nothing about that scene was remotely funny, and when I read this afternoon that a 26 year old man had died at the Festival as a result of a suspected drugs overdose, I couldn't help but think of that poor guy in the mud being laughed at.

Perhaps it was him.

Anyway.

Blogging the festival was quite an interesting experience too. I would have posted more often, but the phone I was given by the BBC only had a numeric keypad, so it was a bit of a pain to write more than a few lines at a time. I was also hampered a bit by the fact that the phone seems to use up a lot of power and that one of the two batteries I had been given to use appeared to be duff.... although this did lead me to the Green Fields where some hippies in a wooden caravan with a cat flap offered to charge my phone up using solar power. It took them a little while, but they got there in the end, God love'em. I also didn't want to spend all of my time blogging and not actually enjoying the festival for myself. Anyway, the link on the BBC site is here (all that talk of RSS feeds, and in the end they do it the old-fashioned way with a direct link!)

What a great festival though. There is simply nowhere else in the world that I would rather have been for the last few days. I will say that I'm very pleased to be able to sleep in my own bed tonight, but going to work tomorrow is going to be a very nasty shock to the system indeed.

Here's to the Glastonbury Festival. It's not perfect, but it's still bloody marvellous - even when it's muddy.

See you in 2008.

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

I love to live so pleasantly




There are definitely worse ways to spend a few days. Now I think I'll close my festival with Dame Shirley Bassey, the manics, Billy Bragg and the Bootleg Beatles. I'm running low on batteries, so....cheers! It's been emotional. Until next year...er... or until tomorrow when I get home. cough.

Posted by ShoZu


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Comfortably numb




...or perhaps I should eat something? Nah.

Posted by ShoZu


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Life is but a dream...




Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the Glastonbury 2007 money shot... This, my friends, is what Glastonbury is all about. Well, this, pies and cider.

Posted by ShoZu


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Hold me closer, tiny dancer




I had to wade through rivers of God knows what to get here, but I finally made it to the John Peel stage. Aqualung sounded good, but Tiny Dancers are great.

Posted by ShoZu


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No sir, no dancing today




The administry of sound?

Posted by ShoZu


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Saturday, June 23, 2007

5x5=25





Maximo Park are the best band I've seen so far. Paul Smith is a brilliant front man.

Posted by ShoZu



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If you don't have a dream, how are you going to have a dream come true?





Cheers! Now for the Klaxons.

Posted by ShoZu



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I am a cider drinker.





It came from a massive barrel, it had a small oil slick on the top and it was very, very dry and very, very strong. Another pint then? Lovely.

Posted by ShoZu



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Save it for the morning after...





To my eyes, the devastation in front of the Other Stage is just as bad as 2005. Still, we're here now, eh? It's sunny, it's raining and the site is a bog. Bring it on! Time for another cider.

Posted by ShoZu



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Friday, June 22, 2007

Already thick and you're getting thicker...





The Arcade Fire had a big crowd on the Other Stage, but the one for the Arctic Monkeys at the Pyramid is something else. 100,000 maybe. Big gig. To fortify myself, I had some brilliant fish and chips. Nice.

Posted by ShoZu



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Our house





Not that I'm bitter or anything, but for each of the last 5 Glastonburys, this is the exact spot we camped in. Oh, and a big hello to the nice lady who insisted on being in the photo.

Posted by ShoZu



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Relax





Apparently, Someset is quite rural and the festival is held on a farm? You'd imagine we'd been watching the Wurzels, but no: Chas and Dave.

Posted by ShoZu



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Here comes the sun





....and the sun comes out for Amy Winehouse on the Pyramid. It's very damp here, if not yet 2005 damp. Not yet.

Posted by ShoZu



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Endless rain, endless rain





lots of rain plus lots of people equals lots and lots of mud. Simple and inevitable.

Posted by ShoZu



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You! Me! Dancing!





Los Campesinos! brave a gloomy looking sky at The Park stage and I watch my first band proper at the festival. Well, unless you count Mr Hudson and the Library or Reverend and the Makers who I heard from my tent, which I don't really.

Posted by ShoZu



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Thursday, June 21, 2007

Would I lie to you?





Posted by ShoZu



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Meet me at the matinee, the dark of the matinee...





I'm sat in the cinema tent watching "Serenity". It's a good film, but the irony that the sun has come out and I'm inside watching a film is not lost on me. Pie for tea, I think.

Posted by ShoZu



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Where did you sleep last night?





Leon from Oxford rocks the Rabbit Hole during an open mic session in the new Park area. Glastonbury rises to the great man.

Posted by ShoZu



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You have to follow nature's law...





What would Glastonbury be without the good old long drops? eh? I don't think the photo will quite convey the full olfactory experience. Oh well.

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I don't care what the weatherman says...





Well, they were right about the rain. It turned up at about 3am and has been coming down on and off since then. At least we got the tents up in the sunshine, unlike some. Why would you time your arrival on site for 4am? Takes all sorts.

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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

It feels like I'm all the way back where I belong.





Nous sommes arriver. A touch close to the site of the 2005 lakes perhaps, but we're here now. Beer anyone?

Posted by ShoZu



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Travelling without moving





OK. Slightly bored now.

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Here we go!





A slightly delayed start with the usual packing woes (what to take? what to wear?) Nearly there now though and the sun is shining. Yay!

Posted by ShoZu



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