OK, so now it’s 101 degrees and the crowd is crawling from patch of shade to tented shelter, the mass influx of Hollywood types and music biz bigwigs (them that’s left!) arriving in limos when the sun goes down.
COACHELLA FESTIVAL – DAY ONE - The Verve, Les Savy Fav, The Raconteurs!
It’s 97 degrees, 50,000 music tattooed fans are surrounded by palm trees and padding cowboy-hatted and barefoot across the lush polo fields of Indio, California while trucks spray water ON the site to keep the swirling dust down. Read it and weep Mr Eavis! It can only be COACHELLA.
I am the proud owner of my late grandmother's radio. It's a Ferranti, bought, so my mother tells me, around 1950/1, from an electrical shop in Tattenham Corner in Surrey, where my grandparents lived at the time. Radio enthusiasts note, it's a 215 model, with a walnut-finish cabinet and, according to a quick Google, would have cost £27 back in the day, very expensive in a post war world of rationing. It carries Long, Medium and Short Wave and, sometimes, there's a rather eerie whistle running underneath the programme when it's on, like the ghost of electricity moping around in the ether.
I got an email from someone the other day about a new band helmed by Richard Fearless, the sometime leader of Death In Vegas. Of Black Acid, they said, “Half of it sounds like a Japanese sixth form band doing Mary Chain covers. Half of it sounds like Bobby Gillespie telling you about records he likes while trying to play them. The first song is ten minutes of backwards noise.”
