Latitude Festival have announced yet more additions to the amazing lineup, starting with Texan singer-songwriter Micah P. Hinson!
British Sea Power have announced they will hold their own festival, set to take place in the grounds of the Tan Inn Pub in the Yorkshire Dales – the highest pub in the UK – on August 29-31.
BSP will play the festival, which has been christened ‘Sing Ye From The Hillside!’, and will make further line-up announcements before the event.
Frontman Yan may have given some clues to the line-up in this month’s issue of Uncut Magazine where he reveals his most treasured albums in ‘My Life In Music’.
“When I was eight, I ended up with a load of Wurzels vinyl and me and my brother used to sing along, trying to work out the relationship was between farm machinery and girls,” says Yan. “We’re officially twinned with The Wurzels in the way that towns are.”
The famously playful band, who once bamboozled journalists by handing them grid reference coordinates instead of a press release, have worked with local Dent Brewery to create a new beer especially for the festival.
The event is also set to feature husky racing and duck herding as part of the fun.
British Sea Power will play a set at Latitude festival and the following live dates.
Suffolk Latitude Festival (July 18)
Brighton Corn Exchange (October 2)
Southampton University (3)
Cambridge Junction (5)
The Breeders have announced they will play an extra London date at Shepherds Bush Empire on September 3.
Kim Deal’s band will squeeze in a live show between their four UK festival appearance, including a slot at this year’s Latitude festival.
The band will then go on to tour Europe, Australia and the US to promote their latest album Mountain Battles.
The dates:
Suffolk Latitude Festival (July 20)
Inveraray, Scotland Connect Festival (August 29)
Stradbally Ireland Electric Picnic (30)
London Shepards Bush (September 3)
Isle of Wight Bestival (5)
In this month's Uncut, Guy Garvey previews Latitude and notes, with regard to The Mars Volta, "We're all into some heavy prog." A sceptic might say that you'd need to be, given that this remarkable Californian band have a much more unambiguous relationship with prog rock than most of their more timid contemporaries. When they're on form, though, The Mars Volta are one of modern rock's strangest and most gripping spectacles. Cedric Bixler-Zavalas and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez' band conjure up a frantic combination of punk rock velocity, Santana-esque virtuosity, strangulated vocal ululations, dub-derived sonic trickery, Latino rhythms, the more complicated bits of Yes, mind-blowingly unintelligible lyrics and - yes! - some pretty excellent tunes. Mars Volta shows are often wild, untethered and epic. But for newcomers (and for some mildly shellshocked veterans), the relative economy of a headlining slot on the Uncut stage might just work to their advantage. Get a good position to watch Bixler's fabulous gymnastics, and let's hope they play "Cicatriz ESP", right?
In this month’s Uncut, Guy Garvey previews Latitude and notes, with regard to The Mars Volta, “We’re all into some heavy prog.” A sceptic might say that you’d need to be, given that this remarkable Californian band have a much more unambiguous relationship with prog rock than most of their more timid contemporaries.
Neil Young delighted fans with a classic career-spanning set at Hop Farm Festival yesterday (July 6).
Dressed in a paint-splattered jacket and jeans, Young launched in the opener ‘Love and Only Love’ from his 1990 album Ragged Glory before playing an extended version of ‘Hey Hey My My’.
Young then surprised fans with a rendition of ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You’, from his first album before playing ‘Spirit Road’ and a furious ‘Fuckin’ Up’.
Switching to acoustic guitar midway through the set, Young played favourites from his 1972 classic Harvest including ‘Old Man’, ‘Heart Of Gold’ and ‘The Needle And The Damage Done’.
“I don’t play this very often. I don’t know why…” said Young.
For his encore, Neil Young performed an unexpected cover of The Beatles ‘A Day In The Life’.
For a full review of Neil Young’s set see Uncut’s Live Blog.
Neil Young’s latest directorial project, “CSNY DEJA VU” opens at cinemas on July 18. To celebrate we’ve got three pairs of tickets to the exclusive preview screening in London on July 14. See the CSNY DEJA VU competition for details.
The setlist:
Love And Only Love
Hey Hey, My My
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
I’ve Been Waiting For You
Spirit Road
Fuckin’ Up
Oh, Lonesome Me
Mother Earth
The Needle And The Damage Done
Unknown Legend
Heart Of Gold
Old Man
Get Back To The Country
Words
No Hidden Path
A Day In The Life
PIC CREDIT: PA PHOTOS
Just playing the new Love As Laughter album, as recommended by one of you on the albums of the year thus far thread, when Sam Jayne serendipitously sings, “Listen to the radio play ‘Cowgirl In The Sand’.” Serendipitous because I’ve just posted John Robinson’s excellent review of Neil Young’s Hop Farm jam yesterday over at the Live blog.
Few, if any, TV programmes have worked so meticulously to conjure such a precise intersection of content and form. Mad Men, set in a fictional NYC ad agency at the dawn of the ’60s, looks uncannily like an animation of a magazine advertising spread of the period: every outfit sharp, every hair slicked, every grin radiantly insincere, every human interaction a masque ball of ulterior motives conducted through a swirling silver mist of cigarette smoke. Created by Matthew Weiner, who worked as a writer and producer on later series of The Sopranos, Mad Men is clearly intended to fulfil the modern definition of quality drama. Like The Sopranos, The West Wing or The Wire, Mad Men is made on the assumption that it’s as likely to be watched in splurges on DVD as it is in weekly instalments on TV (in the UK, the BBC seemed to acknowledge as much by interring the series on BBC4 late on Sunday nights). As such, Mad Men represents part of an interesting cultural reversal – just as music, especially among younger consumers, is becoming unmoored from its collectible artefact, the album, so the previously transient, disposable medium of TV is being made more and more in the hope or expectation that people will want to own it. The question, then, is whether Mad Men warrants this sort of devotion. It seems, on the strength of its first season, unfortunately unlikely. Though Mad Men looks fabulous – in a laudable act of period verisimilitude, it’s shot on film – and though the writing, plotting, acting and characterisation are taut, there is an abysmal emptiness at the soul of the series. That’s due principally to the fact that the characters are corrupt, neurotic, self-absorbed, vicious and venal to an extent that makes it desperately difficult to care what happens to them. This does, of course, beg the obvious retort that Mad Men is set in an ad agency, after all, but it doesn’t encourage the passing viewer to invest 13 episodes’ worth of time in it. Which is frustrating, as there’s a great idea struggling beneath the viscous gloss on the surface. Mad Men is a rare reflection of the under-examined America that the ’60s counterculture revolted against, and which was never entirely vanquished: conservative, sexist, racist, boorish, smug, materialist, complacent (the sub-plot of the Sterling Cooper agency working on Richard Nixon’s doomed 1960 presidential run is a beautifully waspish touch). Central figure Donald Draper (Jon Hamm) – the Madison Avenue superstar whose implacable coolness conceals a secret life of infidelities and falsehoods – is one of the most unpleasant creatures ever floated as an anti-hero, rendered relatively bearable only by the utter ghastliness of his colleagues, especially predatory lech Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and unctuous would-be usurper Pete Campbell (an excellent, infuriating Vincent Kartheiser). Even the put-upon female characters fail to elicit sympathy, inhabiting perhaps too comfortably their largely decorative roles in the office. Intentionally or not, what Mad Men most often ends up provoking, as this snakepit of charmless, grasping, unhappy schemers festers and bickers, is idle reflection on which of today’s workaday mores and practices will be regarded as shockingly backward 40 years hence. An ad agency is an apposite setting for an exploration of the distance and the difference between appearance and reality. But, as is often the case with advertising itself, the disconnect between the two can leave the consumer feeling somewhat depressed and aggrieved. Mad Men has been applauded far and wide as a genuinely great TV show, but it’s difficult not to suspect that this is largely for no better reason than that it looks so much like a genuinely great TV show. But with a formidable rank of skeletons still closeted, pending emergence during the second season, due for broadcast later in 2008, this unremittingly bleak, weirdly seductive tragedy has time yet to prove itself. EXTRAS: Commentaries, featurettes. ANDREW MUELLER
Few, if any, TV programmes have worked so meticulously to conjure such a precise intersection of content and form. Mad Men, set in a fictional NYC ad agency at the dawn of the ’60s, looks uncannily like an animation of a magazine advertising spread of the period: every outfit sharp, every hair slicked, every grin radiantly insincere, every human interaction a masque ball of ulterior motives conducted through a swirling silver mist of cigarette smoke.
Created by Matthew Weiner, who worked as a writer and producer on later series of The Sopranos, Mad Men is clearly intended to fulfil the modern definition of quality drama. Like The Sopranos, The West Wing or The Wire, Mad Men is made on the assumption that it’s as likely to be watched in splurges on DVD as it is in weekly instalments on TV (in the UK, the BBC seemed to acknowledge as much by interring the series on BBC4 late on Sunday nights).
As such, Mad Men represents part of an interesting cultural reversal – just as music, especially among younger consumers, is becoming unmoored from its collectible artefact, the album, so the previously transient, disposable medium of TV is being made more and more in the hope or expectation that people will want to own it.
The question, then, is whether Mad Men warrants this sort of devotion. It seems, on the strength of its first season, unfortunately unlikely. Though Mad Men looks fabulous – in a laudable act of period verisimilitude, it’s shot on film – and though the writing, plotting, acting and characterisation are taut, there is an abysmal emptiness at the soul of the series.
That’s due principally to the fact that the characters are corrupt, neurotic, self-absorbed, vicious and venal to an extent that makes it desperately difficult to care what happens to them. This does, of course, beg the obvious retort that Mad Men is set in an ad agency, after all, but it doesn’t encourage the passing viewer to invest 13 episodes’ worth of time in it.
Which is frustrating, as there’s a great idea struggling beneath the viscous gloss on the surface. Mad Men is a rare reflection of the under-examined America that the ’60s counterculture revolted against, and which was never entirely vanquished: conservative, sexist, racist, boorish, smug, materialist, complacent (the sub-plot of the Sterling Cooper agency working on Richard Nixon’s doomed 1960 presidential run is a beautifully waspish touch).
Central figure Donald Draper (Jon Hamm) – the Madison Avenue superstar whose implacable coolness conceals a secret life of infidelities and falsehoods – is one of the most unpleasant creatures ever floated as an anti-hero, rendered relatively bearable only by the utter ghastliness of his colleagues, especially predatory lech Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and unctuous would-be usurper Pete Campbell (an excellent, infuriating Vincent Kartheiser). Even the put-upon female characters fail to elicit sympathy, inhabiting perhaps too comfortably their largely decorative roles in the office.
Intentionally or not, what Mad Men most often ends up provoking, as this snakepit of charmless, grasping, unhappy schemers festers and bickers, is idle reflection on which of today’s workaday mores and practices will be regarded as shockingly backward 40 years hence.
An ad agency is an apposite setting for an exploration of the distance and the difference between appearance and reality. But, as is often the case with advertising itself, the disconnect between the two can leave the consumer feeling somewhat depressed and aggrieved. Mad Men has been applauded far and wide as a genuinely great TV show, but it’s difficult not to suspect that this is largely for no better reason than that it looks so much like a genuinely great TV show. But with a formidable rank of skeletons still closeted, pending emergence during the second season, due for broadcast later in 2008, this unremittingly bleak, weirdly seductive tragedy has time yet to prove itself.
EXTRAS: Commentaries, featurettes.
ANDREW MUELLER
Between November 1975 and January 1978, the Sex Pistols played approximately 130 gigs. Judging by the number of dewy-eyed forty- and fiftysomethings who claim to have witnessed them, each one must have taken place at a packed Wembley Stadium, instead of in front of half a dozen people on the London pub-rock toilet circuit. It’s this ongoing desire to say that you’ve seen the Pistols that accounts for their ability to sell out five nights at the Brixton Academy in November 2007, as documented on this DVD. Of course, this isn’t the first time the Pistols have reformed. Eleven years ago, you could have seen them playing at Finsbury Park in front of 30,000 anarcho-crusties and neo-Nazi Oi! scum who, like Japanese soldiers stranded on remote Pacific islands decades after VJ Day, refused to believe that the punk wars had ended. What’s refreshing about the Brixton residency is the change in atmosphere. No longer even pretending to be seditious, the Sex Pistols are now part of the social glue holding together our fragile notion of Englishness. As they march out onto the stage to the accompaniment of Vera Lynn’s “There’ll Always Be An England”, Union Jack knotted hankies and unapologetic beer bellies ahoy, it’s as gleefully patriotic as The Last Night Of The Proms, or an England football international. “Like you, we had a manager called McLaren,” announces Lydon. “He was also a cunt.” Julien Temple’s film details this good-natured idiocy wonderfully, spending as much screen time documenting the audience as the sub-heavy-metal histrionics of the band. Where Scorsese’s audience in Shine A Light seemed to be a specially invited crowd of glamorous young models, here Temple’s wandering cameras capture the sheer diversity of Pistols fans today – balding fortysomethings, curious wentysomethings, baffled teens, Japanese tourists, besuited accountants and ageing crusties. And the band finally seem comfortable with their archetypes – Lydon the pantomime dame, Paul Cook the Dickensian chimney sweep, Steve Jones the unpleasantly priapic career criminal and Glen Matlock the floppy-fringed art-school dropout. These indentities becomes clearer in the bonus DVD, a film called The Knowledge, where Cook, Jones and Matlock take us on a nostalgic tour around the west London of their childhood, revisiting old Pistols haunts like WWI veterans at Paschendale. Meanwhile Lydon narrates a lengthy bus journey across London, wistfully reporting how his beloved “shithole” has been gentrified, moaning about spectacular modern architecture like City Hall, the London Eye, the Gherkin and the Emirates Stadium (“I kind of agree with Prince Charles on this”). Intercut with some impressive (and often hilarious) vintage footage, you can see it as the third and final –and most good-natured – part of Temple’s trilogy of Sex Pistols films. EXTRAS: The Knowledge, an 80-minute film of the Pistols’ guide to London, also directed by Temple. JOHN LEWIS
Between November 1975 and January 1978, the Sex Pistols played approximately 130 gigs. Judging by the number of dewy-eyed forty- and fiftysomethings who claim to have witnessed them, each one must have taken place at a packed Wembley Stadium, instead of in front of half a dozen people on the London pub-rock toilet circuit. It’s this ongoing desire to say that you’ve seen the Pistols that accounts for their ability to sell out five nights at the Brixton Academy in November 2007, as documented on this DVD.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the Pistols have reformed. Eleven years ago, you could have seen them playing at Finsbury Park in front of 30,000 anarcho-crusties and neo-Nazi Oi! scum who, like Japanese soldiers stranded on remote Pacific islands decades after VJ Day, refused to believe that the punk wars had ended.
What’s refreshing about the Brixton residency is the change in atmosphere. No longer even pretending to be seditious, the Sex Pistols are now part of the social glue holding together our fragile notion of Englishness. As they march out onto the stage to the accompaniment of Vera Lynn’s “There’ll Always Be An England”, Union Jack knotted hankies and unapologetic beer bellies ahoy, it’s as gleefully patriotic as The Last Night Of The Proms, or an England football international. “Like you, we had a manager called McLaren,” announces Lydon. “He was also a cunt.”
Julien Temple’s film details this good-natured idiocy wonderfully, spending as much screen time documenting the audience as the sub-heavy-metal histrionics of the band. Where Scorsese’s audience in Shine A Light seemed to be a specially invited crowd of glamorous young models, here Temple’s wandering cameras capture the sheer diversity of Pistols fans today – balding fortysomethings, curious wentysomethings, baffled teens, Japanese tourists, besuited accountants and ageing crusties.
And the band finally seem comfortable with their archetypes – Lydon the pantomime dame, Paul Cook the Dickensian chimney sweep, Steve Jones the unpleasantly priapic career criminal and Glen Matlock the floppy-fringed art-school dropout.
These indentities becomes clearer in the bonus DVD, a film called The Knowledge, where Cook, Jones and Matlock take us on a nostalgic tour around the west London of their childhood, revisiting old Pistols haunts like WWI veterans at Paschendale. Meanwhile Lydon narrates a lengthy bus journey across London, wistfully reporting how his beloved “shithole” has been gentrified, moaning about spectacular modern architecture like City Hall, the London Eye, the Gherkin and the Emirates Stadium (“I kind of agree with Prince Charles on this”).
Intercut with some impressive (and often hilarious) vintage footage, you can see it as the third and final –and most good-natured – part of Temple’s trilogy of Sex Pistols films.
EXTRAS: The Knowledge, an 80-minute film
of the Pistols’ guide to London, also directed by Temple.
JOHN LEWIS
DIR: THOMAS McCARTHY ST: RICHARD JENKINS, HAAZ SLEIMAN, HIAM ABBASS You might not know the name, but, unless you’ve avoided American movies and TV for the past 25 years, you will almost certainly recognise Richard Jenkins, a character actor par excellence who’s supplied uptight lawmen, crumbling husbands, distracted doctors and distant fathers in everything from There’s Something About Mary to Six Feet Under. The first great joy of Thomas McCarthy’s movie is that, after a career spent providing pitch-perfect support, it finally gives Jenkins, at 61, the lead, and he responds in a manner beyond most of the stars he has helped prop up. He plays Walter Vale, a lonely economics professor at a leafy Connecticut college. A widower, he has retreated from life, erecting the excuse of his work as a wall between himself and the world; but when work forces him back to New York City and the empty apartment he and his wife used to share, the world presents a surprise: a young couple living in his home, immigrants – Tarek (Sleiman), from Syria, and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab – conned into renting the place. Walter’s wife was a pianist, and love of music remains his one tenuous lifeline. As it happens, Tarek is a musician, too, a drummer, and the two gradually hit it off, forming an odd couple as the fascinated Walter takes lessons from the younger man. Just as their friendship is cemented, however, disaster: Tarek, an illegal, is arrested and faced with deportation. A familiar actor himself, it’s perhaps no surprise that McCarthy elicits uniformly exquisite performances, but he’s emerging as a writer-director of singular vision. As with his previous film, The Station Agent, here is a quiet comedy about healing, but the stakes have been upped. Set against post-9/11 Manhattan, it casts Jenkins as a man learning to loosen up and open up in a world intent on shutting itself off and shutting itself down. McCarthy is hardly subtle: his plot is basically “white American sees black Muslims are people, too”, yet he handles a strident subject in a gentle way. This is a modest miracle of a movie – and, in Jenkins, you won’t see a more perfectly modulated performance this year. DAMIEN LOVE
DIR: THOMAS McCARTHY
ST: RICHARD JENKINS, HAAZ SLEIMAN, HIAM ABBASS
You might not know the name, but, unless you’ve avoided American movies and TV for the past 25 years, you will almost certainly recognise Richard Jenkins, a character actor par excellence who’s supplied uptight lawmen, crumbling husbands, distracted doctors and distant fathers in everything from There’s Something About Mary to Six Feet Under.
The first great joy of Thomas McCarthy’s movie is that, after a career spent providing pitch-perfect support, it finally gives Jenkins, at 61, the lead, and he responds in a manner beyond most of the stars he has helped prop up.
He plays Walter Vale, a lonely economics professor at a leafy Connecticut college. A widower, he has retreated from life, erecting the excuse of his work as a wall between himself and the world; but when work forces him back to New York City and the empty apartment he and his wife used to share, the world presents a surprise: a young couple living in his home, immigrants – Tarek (Sleiman), from Syria, and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab – conned into renting the place.
Walter’s wife was a pianist, and love of music remains his one tenuous lifeline. As it happens, Tarek is a musician, too, a drummer, and the two gradually hit it off, forming an odd couple as the fascinated Walter takes lessons from the younger man. Just as their friendship is cemented, however, disaster: Tarek, an illegal, is arrested and faced with deportation.
A familiar actor himself, it’s perhaps no surprise that McCarthy elicits uniformly exquisite performances, but he’s emerging as a writer-director of singular vision. As with his previous film, The Station Agent, here is a quiet comedy about healing, but the stakes have been upped.
Set against post-9/11 Manhattan, it casts Jenkins as a man learning to loosen up and open up in a world intent on shutting itself off and shutting itself down. McCarthy is hardly subtle: his plot is basically “white American sees black Muslims are people, too”, yet he handles a strident subject in a gentle way. This is a modest miracle of a movie – and, in Jenkins, you won’t see a more perfectly modulated performance this year.
DAMIEN LOVE
Toms Waits is raising money for charity by putting front-row tickets for his live shows up for auction, including dates in Dublin and Edinburgh.
Five pairs of tickets are available for one date in each city on his Glitter & Doom tour.
Tickets for all 15 concerts went on sale last month, with the best seats in each house held back for series of online auctions.
“Some folks prefer to pay more. You get a great seat, and a good feeling for helping some needy folks,” says Waits. “It’s scalping for charity.”
Access to the auction is through www.ticketmaster.ie/tomwaits, which lists all the sales and when they close. The last auction finishes on July 25.
Tickets will be auctioned for the following concerts:
San Sebastian, Spain Auditorio Kursaal (July 12)
Barcelona Auditorium Forum (14, 15)
Milan Teatro Degli Arcimboldi (17,18,19)
Prague KCP (21, 22)
Paris Grand Rex Theatre (24,25)
Edinburgh Playhouse(27, 28)
Dublin Ratcellar Marquee in Phoenix Park (30, August 1)
His grey hair blows wildly in the breeze. His dishevelled clothing suggests an eccentric who’s been around a very long time. There’s a determined expression on his face which suggests he may be old, but he’s not going anywhere soon… But enough about the average Hop Farm punter – this, after all, is a day dominated by Neil Young. A new one day event, Hop Farm is geared towards the greyer pound, and is filled today with some quality traditional rock – there are fine sets from My Morning Jacket and Supergrass – but this is an event whose clientele have only one act in mind. Neil, here playing to those, so it seems from a brief straw poll, who were unable to make it to his recent UK shows, does not disappoint. Using a similar stage set to his indoor gigs – the massive klieg lights, a cigar store Indian, an enigmatic illuminated code of letters and numbers arrayed on the backdrop behind him – this is a show of very different character. Neil himself is wearing the now familiar paint-spattered Jackson Pollock suit, but the bemused eccentric tinkering with props that characterised those gigs is substituted for an unequivocal directness of approach. “Love And Only Love” opens a show which uses Neil’s heaviest guitar strafing to sandwich a set of softer, acoustic-based favourites. Early surprises include a terrific outing for first album classic “I’ve Been Waiting For You” (“I don’t play this very often. I…don’t know why…”), a comparatively terse “Spirit Road” (“A new song, but it sounds just like the last one”), and a fiery “Fuckin’Up”. Effectively, this clears the stage for the quieter section of the show. It’s here – with “Oh Lonesome Me”, a trip to the pipe organ for “Mother Earth”, then “Needle And The Damage Done”, “Heart Of Gold” and “Old Man”– that you’re reminded that alongside the occasionally Dylanesque performer who can throw bizarre setlist curveballs, there still exists the Neil Young who’s a master of judging the mood. This selection of evergreen (i)Harvest(i)-based material also showcases the schizophrenic nature of Young’s band. Twenty minutes later they will be embarking on more scarifying noise adventure; right now they are simply perfectly harmonious. If it’s a show that makes a huge success of this kind of juxtaposition, making it seem like the most natural thing in the world, the closing portion is interesting, if ever so slightly mystifying. After an epic voyage with “No Hidden Path”, a brief hiatus is followed by Neil’s take on The Beatles’ A Day In The Life. Undoubtedly, it’s a kind of headline-grabbing statement – apparently on occasion Neil would play the song through the PA before he came onstage in the USA in the 1970s – but to carp in a minor way, the turn-on-a-sixpence nature of the song seems ill-suited to Neil’s behemoth sound. Still, as a way of underlining a job well done, it’s about perfect. He’d love to turn you on. And, of course, he did. JOHN ROBINSON SETLIST Love And Only Love Hey Hey, My My Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere I've Been Waiting For You Spirit Road Fuckin' Up Oh, Lonesome Me Mother Earth The Needle And The Damage Done Unknown Legend Heart Of Gold Old Man Get Back To The Country Words No Hidden Path A Day In The Life
His grey hair blows wildly in the breeze. His dishevelled clothing suggests an eccentric who’s been around a very long time. There’s a determined expression on his face which suggests he may be old, but he’s not going anywhere soon…
PAUL Simon and Crowded House were the billed main headliners but if the phalanx of photographers snaking its way across the field during The Bangles’ Saturday set is anything to go by, the biggest star at this, the fifth Cornbury Festival, is an inconspicuously turned out gent and a lady we take to be his wife who are making their way, as casually as possible, down into the throng around the stage. Blimey, it’s David Cameron. But hey, that’s the sort of festival Cornbury is. Last year Kate Moss was knocking around, the year before that Prince Harry, and only 10 minutes ago we were supping shoulder to shoulder with Jeremy Clarkson in the Pimms and Champers VIP bar. Billed - somewhat ironically as it turned out – as “The Complete Summer Weekend”, the Cornbury Festival takes place on the beautiful country estate of Lord and Lady Rotherwick near Charlbury in Oxfordshire; the sort of place where fallow deer graze peacefully under ancient giant oaks. Past line-ups have seen Amy Winnehouse, Blondie, David Gray, The Waterboys, Proclaimers and Joe Cocker perform and here’s how this year’s most family fun you can have in the Cotswolds shook down. BEST BITS: 1. Toots & The Maytals doing ‘Monkey Man’ as the sun did battle with the blackening sky and, sadly, lost. 2. The Bangles – that’s the Petersen sisters plus Susanna Hoffs – playing a perky ‘Going Down To Liverpool’ and ‘Eternal Flame’ – the latter a real lighters aloft moment. 3. Carbon/Silicon on the Second Stage, Mick Jones toothily grinning in the face of the driving rain as Tony James and co delivered a dapper ‘Why Do Men Fight’. 4. Paul Simon. Just Paul Simon. It was weird he was here, especially as Hugh Phillimore, the guys who runs the show, had originally tried to book ZZ Top! Anyway, the titchy half of the most successful duo of the 60s saw us all home in good humour on Saturday with a set smattered with solo hits like ‘Me & Julio’ and ‘Slip-Slidin’ Away’ plus S&G greats like ‘Mrs Robinson’. 5. 10cc. There’s only Graham Gouldman left from the original line-up but the set is still a jukebox of hits – ‘I’m Not In Love’, ‘Rubber Bullets’ and the exquisite ‘I’m Mandy, Fly Me’ – all immaculately played. 6. KT Tunstall – braved the elements which had, by Sunday evening, assumed the characteristics of Noah’s mythic flood, to put on a plucky and ecstatically received show. BUMMERS SO now we know where all the traditional Glastonbury weather went. STEVE SUTHERLAND
PAUL Simon and Crowded House were the billed main headliners but if the phalanx of photographers snaking its way across the field during The Bangles’ Saturday set is anything to go by, the biggest star at this, the fifth Cornbury Festival, is an inconspicuously turned out gent and a lady we take to be his wife who are making their way, as casually as possible, down into the throng around the stage.
PAUL Simon and Crowded House were the billed main headliners but if the phalanx of photographers snaking its way across the field during The Bangles’ Saturday set is anything to go by, the biggest star at this, the fifth Cornbury Festival, is an inconspicuously turned out gent and a lady we take to be his wife who are making their way, as casually as possible, down into the throng around the stage. Blimey, it’s David Cameron. But hey, that’s the sort of festival Cornbury is. Last year Kate Moss was knocking around, the year before that Prince Harry, and only 10 minutes ago we were supping shoulder to shoulder with Jeremy Clarkson in the Pimms and Champers VIP bar. Billed - somewhat ironically as it turned out – as “The Complete Summer Weekend”, the Cornbury Festival takes place on the beautiful country estate of Lord and Lady Rotherwick near Charlbury in Oxfordshire; the sort of place where fallow deer graze peacefully under ancient giant oaks. Past line-ups have seen Amy Winnehouse, Blondie, David Gray, The Waterboys, Proclaimers and Joe Cocker perform and here’s how this year’s most family fun you can have in the Cotswolds shook down. BEST BITS: 1. Toots & The Maytals doing ‘Monkey Man’ as the sun did battle with the blackening sky and, sadly, lost. 2. The Bangles – that’s the Petersen sisters plus Susanna Hoffs – playing a perky ‘Going Down To Liverpool’ and ‘Eternal Flame’ – the latter a real lighters aloft moment. 3. Carbon/Silicon on the Second Stage, Mick Jones toothily grinning in the face of the driving rain as Tony James and co delivered a dapper ‘Why Do Men Fight’. 4. Paul Simon. Just Paul Simon. It was weird he was here, especially as Hugh Phillimore, the guys who runs the show, had originally tried to book ZZ Top! Anyway, the titchy half of the most successful duo of the 60s saw us all home in good humour on Saturday with a set smattered with solo hits like ‘Me & Julio’ and ‘Slip-Slidin’ Away’ plus S&G greats like ‘Mrs Robinson’. 5. 10cc. There’s only Graham Gouldman left from the original line-up but the set is still a jukebox of hits – ‘I’m Not In Love’, ‘Rubber Bullets’ and the exquisite ‘I’m Mandy, Fly Me’ – all immaculately played. 6. KT Tunstall – braved the elements which had, by Sunday evening, assumed the characteristics of Noah’s mythic flood, to put on a plucky and ecstatically received show. BUMMERS SO now we know where all the traditional Glastonbury weather went. STEVE SUTHERLAND
PAUL Simon and Crowded House were the billed main headliners but if the phalanx of photographers snaking its way across the field during The Bangles’ Saturday set is anything to go by, the biggest star at this, the fifth Cornbury Festival, is an inconspicuously turned out gent and a lady we take to be his wife who are making their way, as casually as possible, down into the throng around the stage.
Franz Ferdinand, Glasgow’s most eminent art-college band turned international rock stars, close the main stage on the first night of Latitude. According to frontman Alex Kapranos, Franz Ferdinand set out to prove that art-rock could involve “really, really catchy tunes that girls can dance to”.
Previously, Radio 4 has hosted its arts magazine show, Loose Ends, from Latitude. Loose Ends returns this year, to the Radio 4 stage, along with satirical comedy The Now Show, Roger McGough's Poetry Please and current affairs programme, Broadcasting House. But surely the most impressive presence on the Radio 4 bill is the legendary panel game, Just A Minute. Now in its 41st year, the show – where contestants have to talk for a full minute without repetition, deviation or hesitation – will include Phill Jupitus and Ross Noble among the panelists, while the redoubtable Nicholas Parsons will, as ever, be in the chair. Who knows – maybe we’ll also see Parsons out and about at the festival, listening to the beatific harp noodlings of Joanna Newsom, enraptured by the sweaty punk blues of Grinderman or Julian Cope’s psychrock assault..? If you’ll indulge us, we’d even like to see Cope or Nick Cave on the Just A Minute panel. We can but dream…
Previously, Radio 4 has hosted its arts magazine show, Loose Ends, from Latitude. Loose Ends returns this year, to the Radio 4 stage, along with satirical comedy The Now Show, Roger McGough’s Poetry Please and current affairs programme, Broadcasting House. But surely the most impressive presence on the Radio 4 bill is the legendary panel game, Just A Minute.
Sub Pop, the Seattle label which signed Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney in the early ‘90s, have announced the re-launch of their singles club.
Limited edition singles by Om, Notwist and Black Mountain will be released every month on special 7″ vinyl.
Black Lips, Unnatural Helpers, Tyvek, Arthur & Yu, Mika Miko and Blues Control have also been confirmed as fiuture releases.
Subscriptions are restricted to the first 1500 people who sign up and costs $75 within North America and $90 for international members.
See the Sub Pop website for more details
The Hold Steady have revealed that their older fans were the inspiration behind their new album, Stay Positive.
“In talking to them, we have found that no matter their ages, they are so much like us as people, that they seem at times an extension of the music,” said frontman Craig Finn.
“A great American philosopher named D. Boon once said ‘Our band could be your life.’ I think that is true. But ‘Your Life could be Our Band’ is also a true statement.”
Stay Positive gets its UK release on July 14 and the band have a number of headline festival appearances this month.
The live dates are:
London O2 Wireless Festival July 6
Liverpool Summer Pops Festival (8)
Leeds The Irish Centre (10)
Newcastle Carling Academy 2 (11)
Scotland T In The Park Festival (12)
If there’s anyone appearing on the Latitude bill this year who might legitimately be able to claim that poetry is the new rock’n’roll, then step forward Huddersfield’s finest, Simon Armitage. Anyone who’s read his brilliant memoir, Gig, will remember his often hilarious observations on life as a card-carrying Eighties’ indie fan, from The Wedding Present to The Smiths and beyond. His own, intermittent attempts to kick-start a music career resulted, finally, in launching his teenage fantasy band, The Scaremongers. Hopefully, during his performance in the Literary Arena, Armitage will regale us with some of his shrewd, witty observations on Dylan, Morrissey and – ahem – David Gedge, as well as some of his magnificent poetry. His recently published, earthy translation of Sir Gawain & The Green Knight is recommended, as is his own wry, amiable observational poetry, located somewhere between Morrissey and Alan Bennett.
If there’s anyone appearing on the Latitude bill this year who might legitimately be able to claim that poetry is the new rock’n’roll, then step forward Huddersfield’s finest, Simon Armitage.
Madness have announced an extra show in Manchester on December 18.
The band plan to replicate their recent performances at London’s Hackney Empire, where they played their new album ‘The Liberty OF Norton Folgate’ in its entirety, follwed by a set of their greatest hits.
The Hackney shows featured jugglers, ukelele playing chimney sweeps, pearly Kings and Queens, and had a full orchestra.
Split into 3 acts, Madness performed the major part of forthcoming album ‘The Liberty Of Norton Folgate’, topped off with a 40 minute classic singles set including ‘Baggy Trousers’, ‘Embarrassment’, ‘My Girl’ and ‘House Of Fun’.
The band performed new tracks ‘Bingo’, recent single ‘NW5’ and ‘Sugar and Spice’ during the second part of the show.
Suggs described his duet on ‘Out On The Town’ with guest vocalist Rhoda Dakar of Bodysnatchers, Special AKA, as “A dysfunctional Sonny and Cher.”
Lastly Madness played the 10 minute title track, ‘The Liberty Of Norton Folgate’ a stunning opus, classic Rise And Fall era Madness.
Madness played:
Overture
We Are London
Idiot Child
Bingo
NW5
On The Town
Overture II
MKII
Sugar And Spice
Dust Devil
Clerkenwell Polka
Forever Young
————
The Liberty OF Norton Folgate
————
One Step Beyond
Embarrassment
The Prince
House Of Fun
Baggy Trousers
Madness
Our House
It Must Be Love
My Girl
Night Boat To Cairo
For tickets see www.gigsandtours.com
Stephen Stills has announced he will play an extra London date at Shepherds Bush Empire on October 20.
Tickets for the additional gig will go onsale July 5.
He will now play a total of eight dates, kicking off in Brighton on October 10.
Last year Stills released a collection of demo versions from a lost tape of a recording he made in 1968 called “Just Roll Tape” and embarked on an extensive US tour.
On his last tour Stills performed songs from throughout his four-decade career, including material from his most recent solo album, 2006’s “Man Alive!” and classics from his time with Crosby, Stills & Nash, CSN&Y, The Buffalo Springfield and Manassas.
The tour dates are:
Brighton Centre (October 10)
London Shepherds Bush Empire (11)
Manchester Apollo (13)
Birmingham Symphony Hall (15)
Newcastle City Hall (16)
Sheffield City Hall (18)
Glasgow Clyde Auditorium (19)
London Bush Empire (20)
Tickets are available from www.bookingsdirect.com or by calling 0870 735 5000.
