Features

Most Glastonbury headliners save their triumphant fireworks for the encore, but Arcade Fire make their own rules.

“Glastonbury! Are you seeing clearly now the rain has gone?” Guy Garvey bounds onto the Pyramid Stage, flooding the festival with avuncular game-show cheer, like that favourite teacher who always managed to get the kids on his side at school.

In a welcome blast of sunshine between downpours, an excursion to the fringe stages on the southern slopes of the Glastonbury site provides a welcome relief from the liquid mud lakes and crowd crushes around the main arenas.

Thunder, lightning and heavy downpours over Glastonbury right now. Deep joy for the 125,000 people already onsite, with more arriving every hour. It seems the gods of rock are angry. And they are not the only ones making a racket.

"Glastonbury!" beams Debbie Harry. "Nowhere else like it!" Just past midday on Friday in the Vale of Avalon, and the world’s largest voluntary refugee camp is already on the move.

Metallica headline Glastonbury this weekend, and “Enter Sandman” will most likely be a highlight of their set. So we delved into the archive, back to Uncut’s March 2007 issue (Take 118), to discover how the group created The Black Album’s anti-lullaby. Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and producer Bob Rock spill the beans to Stephen Dalton…

Lots to dig into this week, not least a song to sample from the Hiss Golden Messenger album that I’ve been alluding to for so long. Strong Ronnie Lane vibes there, perhaps. Among some biggish new entries here, some lesser known names to check out, too: Jennifer Castle; 75 Dollar Bill’s weird adaptation of desert blues; the new Blonde Redhead album that increasingly feels like their strongest in an age; and Hurray For The Riff Raff, magnificent on Letterman.

For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of Belle and Sebastian songwriter Stuart Murdoch, God Help The Girl – his debut as a writer and director – will hold few real surprises.

“Welcome to an evening of country and eastern,” smiles Robert Plant as he gestures expansively round this fabled Paris venue, taking in not just the lively capacity crowd gathered here tonight but also to his latest musical collaborators, The Sensational Space Shifters.

Edwyn Collins has just performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London as part of this year’s Meltdown festival – here, in a fascinating feature from Uncut’s April 2010 issue (Take 155), the tale of Collins’ Orange Juice is told by the man himself alongside the group’s other members. Get ready for a tale of wilful perversity, vicious in-fighting, pant-wetting on TV and how Edwyn Collins “traded in all our equity for a funny bassline”… Words: Alastair McKay ___________________