90 day men

A lot of festival activity this weekend, and Uncut's legions have reported back from T In The Park, Live Earth and Cornbury over at our Festivals Blog. Every time I switched on Live Earth, I managed to catch something worse and worse: Paolo Nutini singing "What A Wonderful World" with what sounded like most of his internal organs rattling around the back of his throat; James Blunt joylessly dying on his arse; Madonna cavorting with the prize dicks of Gogol Bordello in the manner of a geography teacher after her annual joint at Glastonbury.

Cornbury, or Poshstock as it’s sometimes known, is like a mini Knebworth, held in the bucolic grounds of a very big house in the Cotswold country 20 miles from Oxford. There’s champagne by the bottle in the VIP bar and past Cornbury Fests have proved celeb heaven with Prince Harry, Kate Moss (she’s a local) and Jeremy Clarkson all stumping up in 2006. No famous faces ligging here so far today but we’ll keep ‘em peeled. Here’s how it’s panning out so far:

The riff-heavy return of alt.rock's angsty messiah

A bit of a round-up today, since I've spent the past week or so reporting on gigs and messing about with the minutiae of putting a mag out. There is, amazingly, a new Karen Dalton album I'm very excited about, though I've only heard two tracks as yet.

Funny that on the same day the new Robert Wyatt album turns up, the post brings three reissues by one of the British bands who learned most from him, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

A brief dispatch, since I'm fending off hordes of enraged Smashing Pumpkins fans, some of them Argentinian. My crimes are many, but involve bad grammar, liking Zwan and, OK, disrespecting the the untouchable genius of Billy Corgan.

Public Enemy figurehead Chuck D makes his debut as a commentator on the Fox News Channel in the US. His first broadcast includes his thoughts about the ongoing trial of alleged bomber Timothy McVeigh, OJ Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark's new book, a brawl during a New York Knicks basketball game, Tiger Woods' multi-million dollar sponsorship deal with American Express, and blockbuster movie The Lost World.

A nice post from Tunetribe about yesterday's blog on Justice. Not least because he/she seems to have picked some sense out of my gibberish.

I am, I must confess, a bit unclear about what exactly is meant by the very hip term blog house. I've a hunch that it refers to dance music whose success is driven by online theorists rather than exposure in clubs. But to be honest, I've a bit of a dilettante attitude to the dance scene these days: much as I try to keep up to speed with as much music as I can, I think I'm missing a lot of this stuff.

HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO April 30 to May 6, 1997 The first issue of Uncut – the UK’s first music and movie magazine – is published With a cover story that revisits Elvis Costello’s calamitous 1979 Armed Forces tour of America. Also featured in our first issue are Bob Dylan in Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, a major retrospective on Billy Mackenzie, Counting Crows, Clint Eastwood and Taxi Driver. Albums reviewed in the issue include a Jam 20th anniversary box set, described by guest reviewer Alan McGee as “drop dead punk rock genius”, Foo Fighters, Paul McCartneyJimi Hendrix, Iggy And The Stooges and Morrissey’s Viva Hate.