Five years ago I received a call asking me to play at the second Greenman festival. The first had completely passed me by but since nobody was offering me gigs then I readily agreed. The festival was ace. A handful of gentle, bearded folk with lots of kids running around and acts like Alisdair Roberts, Four Tet and The Earlies playing amidst the soft rain, it was small enough to navigate (nobody has ever been lost at a Greenman festival) but just big enough that you could get out of your cake without upsetting anybody. I’ve been every year since and even though it has become much bigger (the first one, in 2003, was attended by 350 people. In 2008 there must have been ten times that number). The mixture of folk, electronica and random esoterica is far more interesting than the usual festival lineups of identikit indie bands and commercial heavyweights.

Jo and Danny, the organisers, had been members of the indie scene in the late eighties before it was seduced by money, cocaine and fame and have used their love of music and their experience in putting on bands (they used to run the Buzz Club in Aldershot) to create an experience completely lacking in cynicism, violence, corporate interference and the usual multi tier backstage pass shenanigans that are the hallmark of most major festivals. They are lovely people too, enthusiastic, generous and, for the time being, completely committed to ensuring the festival remains purely about the artist and their audience.

Over the past five years I’ve seen incredible performances from Bonnie Prince Billy, The Earlies, Dead Meadow, Bert Jansch, Pentangle, Richard James and this year didn’t disappoint. The Cave Singers were the act that I was most looking forward to seeing and they were great. Knee slapping, beard totin’ tunes sung by a guy who sounds like a girl with a guys voice.

The Fuck Buttons were disappointing. I’ve been playing one fuzzy note from a laptop for decades and it took two of them ages to do very little. Kling Klang would have been so much better.

Oh yeah. Music that moves.

I loved the first North Sea Radio Orchestra album and they were better this year than last. Then they were lost in the big tent but somehow managed to overcome that this year. Maybe it’s just that I was standing a little closer to the stage. Spiritualised were ok but relied heavily on the ballads and their performance was a lost opportunity for a crowd who wanted to finish off the night with a display of Astaire footed abandon. Threatmantics, playing early on Friday, were the best I’ve seen them. Lurching between, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, The Specials and a host of others using a guitar, drumkit and viola, they left me breathless.

I was standing in the courtyard of the Green Man cafe waiting for Mary to finish watching The Peth (who, it must be said, were utter shite and need to sort out their priorities. People don’t but tickets to see a singer who’s fucked his voice up so completely that he could only muster a bellow akin to a stricken yak. It’s alike a guitarist chopping his arm off just before he’s due on) with a beer in my hand when two people walked on the small stage and started playing. Wildbirds and Peacedrums (and what an ace name that is) are a couple of Swedes who make a free soul racket that had me transfixed. At times it was difficult to believe that there were only two of them up there.

I checked out the dance tent on the Sunday night and, as usual, it was Andy Votel playing undanceable psych music to a handful of his mates. For somebody with a supposedly wide ranging taste in musical styles, his sets always sound to me like two bands at the most. I called it a festival and slid back down the muddy hill and to bed.

0 Comments | Read More

Superheroes are, on the main, a rather dull bunch and none duller than that goody goody mummy’s boy; Superman. What a snooze that alien is, everything in his world(s) fits neatly into two categories, ‘GOOD’ and ‘BAD’. There are no shadows, no darkness. His character is wooden and a penny tossed in wouldn’t have far to sink. His alter-ego Clark Kent is a bumbling suit with self image problems which, presumably, is to deflect our curiosity about his real self but I don’t see why he needs to bother; as long as he keeps his glasses on nobody will ever guess that he and Superwuss are the same bloke which says plenty about the intellect of the inhabitants of Metropolis especially Lois Lane who knows both men intimately and still has no idea as to his true identity. 

As for James Bond, well who wants to watch what is primarily a twelve year old boys wet dream. At least Carry On films had Kenneth Williams in them. I’ve never read the books so I can’t comment on their literary value but the films are scoreless draws on a freezing weeknight in Bournemouth. The acting in the last one was so bad that the director might as well have held two bits of two by four with ‘James Bond’ written on one ‘Boobs’ on the other and waggled them about (but not too much, don’t want them stealing the show). I knew what was going to happen when i saw the poster. Actually I also knew what was going to happen in Batman, after all it’s been happening for almost seventy years but the difference is that I care about what happens to Bruce Wayne and to Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Dent and The Joker. Empathy kids, that’s the difference… real people. Ok, real people dressed up as a bat but some of us need to hide behind a mask in order to express ourselves.

In Batman’s world nothing is ever as simple or as straightforward. His ass is torn. He is convinced of his mission, to rid Gotham City of it’s dark and seedy underworld elements and yet without them he does not exist. It’s as if every criminal, rapist, mobster he beats up/puts away is Joe Chill (the mugger who killed his parents) but what happens when they’ve all gone, when there are no Chills left? There is little doubt that all that grief and rage powered intellect and muscle would turn it’s destructive force inwards. So he needs them, especially the Joker, one of the greatest mythical characters of all time. With his burning intelligence and his first in Capebait Psychology from the Arkham Asylum he holds up a mirror for Batman to see what he really is; a tragic figure wearing a bat costume who shouldn’t spend so much time down the gym and who should maybe learn to relax a bit more. C’mon Bruce, Eat a Peach. This just winds up the Bat even more because, deep, deep down (and that’s a penny you wouldn’t hear land) he knows it’s true. He knows that all he’s done is thrown his lot in the with the crazies, oddballs and costume freaks, that innocent people have died simply because he exists. 

He also knows that he would increase his effectivity ratio by getting Alfred to locate a really big BATGUN so he could really go to town on this house of mirrors Joe Chill infinity collective that stain his beloved streets but then that would make him as bad as the very people he has pitted himself against even though everyone else, including the few people who know his identity (how many is that? three? four?) wish in their hearts that he would. As Bobby Seale once said ‘Power comes from the barrel of a gun’ and he knew a thing or two about politics and what constitutes a fair fight. If, as Bruce Wayne so often says, Batman doesn’t need to be liked, he just needs to be whatever suits Gotham’s needs at the time, then he should get out the gun catalogue and splatter a bit of claret about the place sooner rather than later. It’ll make him feel so much better.

0 Comments | Read More

 

 I guess I was always gonna fall this band. As a devout disciple of Melancholia in most of it’s forms, the uplifting sadness rung from the lusty throats of these young, bearded Americans with their premonitions of death, their graves, Red Squirrels and Blue Ridge Mountains has captured my heart so completely. Mary and I have a copy in the van and as soon as we set off it’s on. A couple of months ago we stayed in Norfolk for a week and hung about in ancient graveyards, walked through the poppies and crabbed off the pier and it was the Fleet Foxes album that was our soundtrack, so aptly suited to the ghosts, half seen in the twilight; and the Windmill, cheerfully sturdy beneath sixteenth century skies. 

We drove down to brighton to watch them play, drank beer on the seafront (well, I did) and walked through the lanes. Afterwards I bumped into three of them and tried drunkenly to trick them into coming out drinking with me but I was a wee bit slurry and was soon having my head bounced off the kerb by their driver. They are a powerful band live, full throated and sweaty and my only disappointment was the absence of ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’, a song that I will take to my grave.

The album landscape puts me in mind of Dylan’s ‘John Wesley Harding’ where open fields, towns and strange meetings dominate and yet seem intangible, ever shifting, glimpsed through the miasmic cobwebbery of the vague. Lyrically, I find only secrets and puzzles, songs about dead boys and Meadowlarks drift past, like a scene taken from Alexander Sokurov’s trippy film, Russian Ark and at the end I’m none the wiser about who’s dead, who isn’t or who is related to whom. The melodies never stay around for long, there’s always something else about to happen and as a musician I love the way they work their chords. The whole thing makes me want to try just a little harder.

I put my order in for the vinyl the week it came out on eil.com and Amazon but nothing’s come through yet. I hope they haven’t deleted it already. 

Because thataways Melancholia doth lie. 

Oh yes.

0 Comments | Read More