"Latitude - the Waitrose of festivals"

Much as I'd like to, I can't do the full Latitude experience any more. I went in 2008 and 2009, and found it to be the best of festivals. I really liked the look of the line-up in 2010 but couldn't make it. I did, however, manage a day in 2012, with the mighty Weller headlining. And I managed a day again this year, with a certain Mr Albarn (right) as my excuse to go. Here, then, in the best tradition of my old festival diaries, is what I saw.

Saturday:

• Teen : i Arena. A long queue getting into the car park meant I missed my first intended port of call, Jack Dee's Help Desk. Instead, I listened to the sweet harmonies and twisty bass of Teen, a female four-piece from Brooklyn. Their band name may be awful, but they sound lush and smooth - an unexpected, pleasant surprise.
• Luke Wright : Poetry Arena. Luke used to be in a band (Dorian Gray) and it shows in his stagecraft and wannabe rockstar swagger. Poetry highlights included The Bastard of Bungay and, especially, Dad Reins, during which I may have got something in my eye. He concluded his set with a poem in a garage style, for which he was joined by musical collaborator Laura Stimson - poetry, comedy and music, all at once!
• Rag 'n' Bone Man : Lake Stage. From the write-up in the Latitude programme, I was expecting a sort of Seasick Steve, but with a more contemporary backing. Well, the contemporary backing bit was right but The Rag 'n' Bone Man himself, a mountain of a man with a mountainous voice to match, reminded me more of CeeLo Green. The stage felt a bit empty, as he performed with just a drummer and a backing track, and his take on House Of The Rising Sun felt a bit hit and miss but anyway, Rag 'n' Bone Man was very keen to stress that you can download tracks from his album for free at Soundcloud... here's a link so you can make up your own mind.
• Booker T. Jones : Obelisk Arena. Yes, you read that right, soul legend and multi-instumentalist, Booker T. Jones. Mannish Boy was a highlight, perfectly suited to his now-grizzled bluesman credentials. Of course, he did Green Onions too, from his days with the MGs. He also covered Take Me To The River, introducing it by saying it was written just around the corner from his house by two friends of his, Al Jackson (MGs drummer) and one Al Green. Music history, right there. I was less certain about his cover of Hey Joe, but Booker T's sideman filled the Hendrix shoes, just. He really got the crowd going with Soul Limbo (aka the theme from Test Match Special - yes, really) before closing with Time Is Tight. Peerless stuff, a pleasure and a privilege to see one of the old school still doing his thing.
• Liam Williams : Cabaret Arena. Just caught a bit of Liam's set in passing. Slightly unusually for stand-up, Liam had a quiet accordion track playing in the background as he delivered his pathos-laden, tragi-comic "anti-lad" routine. His meditation on the value, or otherwise, of Wetherspoons pubs was interesting. His best line though was this: "When I'm 40 my wife won't divorce me, she'll just decide she doesn't love me very much."
• Mark Thomas : Theatre. The longest queue of the day was to squeeze into the 500-seat Theatre tent to see comedian and activist Mark Thomas perform his new, hour-long solo show Cuckooed. There were plenty of laughs but plenty of seriousness too, as Mark detailed how a personal friend and fellow activist turned out to be a spy, no less, paid (though not even handsomely) by BAE Systems to infiltrate the anti arms trade movement. Despite the weight of the subject (and the stupefying heat of the tent), Mark held the audience rapt, prowling the stage and interacting with interview clips of fellow activist friends. Over the course of the show, the poor guy soaked through his shirt, a dark ring working its way down from his neck to his waist - that's how hot it was. But it was well worth it, another real highlight. And he coined the "Waitrose of festivals" phrase too.
• Oliver Wilde : Lake Stage. An unintended bonus, purely because my intended next stop - James - had been postponed for a day, owing to missed flights. What can I tell you about Oliver Wilde? Not too much, to be honest. Wilde describes him own sound as "Downer pop? Tinsel rock maybe? Lo-fi glitchtronica?” All of that seems fair enough but, for me, it was a bit bland (possibly because I was still gutted at missing Tim Booth et al), but nevertheless provided an adequate accompaniment to eating churros in the late afternoon sunshine.
• Mark Watson : Comedy Arena. I've wanted to see Mark live for a long time; he didn't disappoint. Just as well really, as 6.30pm gave me a three-way timetable clash and I forsook seeing First Aid Kit on the main stage and Sheffield's finest in "Pulp: a film about love, death and supermarkets", in favour of the Comedy Arena. Conducting his show from the centre of the crowd, Mark's set (I can't really call it a routine because so much of it was improvised, and therefore far from routine) lasted well over the allotted half an hour but the time whistled by (always a good sign). Riffing on whatever seemed to catch his attention, Mark was equal parts energy and honesty - far from off limits, his past drinking to excess was mined extensively to dark comic effect. He also reprised his Bouncy Castle song, which got a big laugh too. How I wish I could have been at Latitude on Sunday too, for Mark's book reading...
• Gavin Osborn : The Little House. After grabbing some tea from the smaller Greenpeace tent (top festival tip: charity tents sell cheaper fare than commercial food concessions, and with shorter queues), I popped into the tiny Little House to see Gavin Osborn. He sounded a bit croaky (too much booze and fags, by his own admission) but still did his thing with aplomb. A singer-songwriter in the style of Billy Bragg (witness the self-confessed rip-off homage to (Waiting For) The Great Leap Forwards at the start of the excellent Left Side From My Right), Osborn adds a little more humour than Bragg to the mixture of pop, politics and love songs. The tiny crowd (60 in the Little House and a healthy gaggle crowded outside the open door), myself included, lapped it up.
• Damon Albarn : Obelisk Arena. The big kahoona, and the main reason I'd stumped up for a day ticket in the first place. I've seen Blur live twice, in '91 and '94, but never in their later years, and although I'd heard a few solo Albarn tracks on TV I haven't heard the whole Everyday Robots album - all in all, I wasn't sure what to expect. Relief then, to see that Damon has lost none of his frontman/showman skills, even if the band behind him (The Heavy Seas) are different. After a concise intro from Steve Lamacq, Damon was off and running and, fair play to him, he even had a woman signing the lyrics in the corner of the big screens (and dancing awkwardly during music-only middle-eights) - a nice touch. But what of the music? Some Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad and The Queen tracks crept in amongst the solo material, but the biggest cheers of the evening were reserved for the Blur tracks. Out Of Time and All Your Life were performed by just Damon at the piano, as was encore-opening End Of A Century (augmented by a lone trumpet solo). Then, as the lightning and storm clouds that had been circling throughout his set finally let rip above the arena, Damon said, "There are some Blur songs I can sing on the piano, but this is one that's impossible to do without the man I wrote it with: Graham Coxon." On walked Graham to join Damon and the band for a joyous, anthemic Tender. The crowd were soaked in less than a minute but I for one didn't care a bit. This felt a bit special. Graham didn't stick around though, or say goodbye - he just hugged Damon and ruffled his hair before exiting stage left. The appearance of rapper Kano during Clint Eastwood felt a bit anti-climatic after that, if I'm honest, as did the full choir on-stage for Mr Tembo. Tender should have been the last track, I reckon, but if it had then those that left early to avoid the downpour (or beat the car-park exit queue) would have missed out. Bottom line though - it must be difficult to compete with one of the most spectacular lightning shows I've ever seen, but Damon did okay. His solo show is definitely worth seeing, should you get the chance. Oh, and there are some good photos of Graham with Damon on the NME website - my pic of them is blurry because of the heavy rain.

And that was that. I had intended to see Robin Ince's late show in the Literary Arena after Damon - experience tells me this would have let the queue of day-trippers exiting the car park clear - but I was soaked to the skin, and Literature, like every other tent, was stuffed to the gills with festival-goers seeking refuge from the rain. So I joined the car park exodus, and over the next hour crawled the 200 yards out of the field... at least the windscreen made a fine picture window onto that incredible (and incredibly sustained) lightning display.

A tie-in too far?

I understand the need for film and TV commercial tie-ins, I really do. I get that it's a sales thing, and it works very well. I'm even going to resist the temptation to take the moral high ground and say it's appalling, simply because if Lego had the Star Wars tie-in back when I was a kid and up to my eyes in space Lego, well, I probably would have melted...

These days, Lego has superhero tie-ins too, and is no discriminator - Marvel and DC characters get equal shelf-space, and sell equally well from what I can see. The comedic Batman in the recent Lego Movie has probably helped shift a few units too.

At what point should there be a cut-off though? Because Lego now have superheroes in their Duplo range, i.e. aimed at pre-school kids. Now in my book (and depending on how old you are), the Joker should look like one of these guys:

Credit to the excellent First Rule Of Film Club blog for making this composite image, thereby saving me the trouble

Except if you are three, and playing with Duplo, the Joker looks like this little chap:

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against Lego - quite the opposite, in fact, I could still happily spend all day building things with it, despite being in my mid-forties. And I'm a realist, not a prude, when it comes to the modern reality of how companies seek to maximise sales through commercial tie-ins. But shouldn't there be a limit, especially where toddlers are concerned?

If not, how long before the Lego Technic chainsaw from American Psycho hits the shelves?

Five

Europe. It's like a different country or something... II

Fresh from bringing you evidence of Flemish Belgium's love of crack on toast, behold the majesty of Portugal's equal love of crack.

To your new irresistible snack!

Not pictured: any maturity on my part, or an interesting blog post.

Five a day

Some health food, yesterday

According to the wrapper of my raisin and biscuit Yorkie, 13% of the contents are raisins. 13%! More than an eighth, nearly a seventh of a bar, in other words. Quite a lot, relatively speaking...which got me thinking.

13% of a 53g bar is 6.89g (i.e. 0.13 x 53 = 6.89)

According to the NHS [source], 30g of raisins or other dried fruit equates to one of your five a day.

Now, 30 ÷ 6.89 = 4.354136430

In other words, eat approximately 4⅓ raisin and biscuit Yorkies and you've had one of your five daily portions of fruit and veg.

Nearly 1200 calories, more than 130g of sugar and 33g of saturated fat as well, but hey, it's all about the balanced diet...

Who ever said maths wasn't fun?

Where Is My Mind?

For reasons that will become apparent, I am too tired to blog about yesterday properly. Instead, I will try to tell a tale using embedded content rather than words. Here goes.

Yesterday, I went here:

View Larger Map

to see these guys:

do this:

which looked and sounded a bit like this:

My ridiculously long train and coach journey home was full of people (and their parents) who looked like this:

and I got to bed at:

If you haven't bought Indie Cindy yet, you can get it here:

Clandestine Classic XXXVIII - Levitate Me

The thirty-eighth post in an occasional series that is intended to highlight songs that you might not have heard that I think are excellent - clandestine classics, if you will. Maybe they'll be by bands you've never heard of. Maybe they'll be by more familiar artists, but tracks that were squirelled away on b-sides, unpopular albums, radio sessions or music magazine cover-mounted CDs. Time will, undoubtedly, tell.

The question, though, is how to choose a clandestine classic by a band as successful, for so long and in so many places, as the Pixies. Knowing my blog's readership as I do, I'd say there's a fair chance you like the Pixies. There's a pretty good chance you own a copy of Doolittle. You might even have had a "Death to the Pixies" t-shirt back in the day. So how am I, with my little series of lesser-known greats, going to sneak a Pixies track by you? Well, chances are I'm not... but, in honour of the fact that I'm going to see the band live this weekend, I am going to try.

Let's go back before Doolittle, back even before first album proper Surfer Rosa, to the Pixies first release, the Come On Pilgrim EP. This in itself was just eight short tracks re-recorded from their demo, the Purple Tape, and weighed in at little more than 20 minutes. But even for a band so much in its infancy, the Pixies were pretty much fully formed. All the trademark sounds were there: Frank Black's vocal range and twisted lyrics, Kim Deal's rumbling bass and deceptively sweet harmonies, Joey Santiago's meandering guitar lines and David Lovering's dynamic percussion. Oh, let's not forget the whole quiet/loud/quiet thing that became a trademark of the band, and was much copied a big influence on many other bands, including such luminaries as Nirvana and Radiohead. In fact, so ready, so complete was the Pixies experience in those early days, even though only eight tracks from The Purple Tape made it onto Surfer Rosa, many others later resurfaced on other albums, even as late as Subbacultcha on Trompe Le Monde. But I digress - what of today's classic?

Well, Levitate Me is pretty much an early archetype. Quiet/loud/quiet? Check. Subterranean bass? Check. Vocal range? Check. Obtuse lyrics, with pop-culture references and possible ominous subtext? Check. It really is all there. Much has been written about the Eraserhead connection, but you don't need to be familiar with that film to enjoy this song, as I can attest. All I know is that the sound of Frank and his band have been embedded deep in my consciousness since my own Elevator Lady introduced me to Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa a barely believable 24 years ago. I've been in her debt ever since, for this and so much more.

You can pick up Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa together here - honestly, I can't think of many better ways to spend seven pounds of your money. For today's classic only there is, of course, YouTube. And if you're off to see the Pixies at this weekend's Field Day festival, who knows, we might walk right by each other...

Our number's up

If you haven't already seen it, I recommend reading Georges Monbiot's latest online article for The Guardian. Entitled "It's simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up", I can't pretend it's a cheery piece but just because it's full of sobering thoughts, doesn't mean you shouldn't read it.

In a single essay, Monbiot touches on so many themes of such import: climate change; biodiversity collapse; the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; fracking; deforestation; overpopulation... and then trumps them all with the inherent problems for us all in the relentless pursuit of economic growth. Of course, being powered by fossil fuels this drive for growth is both time- and resource-limited anyway.... but the damage is already done. Over the last 200 years, the West (and, increasingly, the developing world) has undergone a wholesale change from a needs-based to a wants-based economy. And with the global population set to hit 9bn by 2050, it seems inevitable that greater risks, greater conflict and greater ethical compromise will be required to meet ever increasing needs.

Maybe it's an age thing, maybe it's parenthood, but this sort of thing worries me more than at any time in my life. Take time out to read the Monbiot Guardian piece. Take a look at Population Matters. See if you can be inspired to make some changes by consuming mindfully.

And before anyone trots out the old "necessity is the mother of invention" response - mankind is clever and will prevail through technology and innovation - Monbiot makes this observation:

Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180% in 10 years. The trade body Forest Industries tells us that "global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow". If, in the digital age, we won't reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

I don't mean to bug you, but in case you've looked at the Guardian piece, seen how long it is and thought "hmm, perhaps not", well, maybe I can persuade you. I'm not as eloquent as George but the bottom line is that average global consumption per capita is increasing, as is the global population: in other words, there's a double-whammy of increase in demand. And, with the exception of heat and light from the Sun, the Earth is effectively a closed system: in other words, there's a finite supply. Simple logic dictates that demand will exceed supply - it's not a question of if, but when. It's patently obvious, but seems a truth too harsh to face, and so it remains the elephant in the room. Here's Monbiot's conclusion for you anyway, in which even he is reducing to mild swearing:

Statements of the bleeding obvious, the outcomes of basic arithmetic, are treated as exotic and unpardonable distractions, while the impossible proposition by which we live is regarded as so sane and normal and unremarkable that it isn't worthy of mention. That's how you measure the depth of this problem: by our inability even to discuss it.

I'm guilty, of course. Guilty of being a consumer, just like you, and not always a mindful one either. I try though. And I'm trying to discuss this... maybe you will too.

I'll hush for a bit now. Thanks for reading.

Four things we have learnt from the Euro elections

No caption necessary

1. There are an awful lot of voters who would not describe themselves as racist but are perhaps concerned about "national identity". How else do you explain UKIP's record result?
2. Only 33.8% of those eligible to vote did so, suggesting more people are disenfranchised with democracy in general, and EU democracy in particular, than are concerned about Farage et al holding any kind of authority in their name...which is a criminal shame.
3. We are not alone. France is suffering too.
4. Even having an utter tool as your party's deputy chairman won't stop people voting for you.

Of course the most sobering lesson learnt is how much UKIP has changed since it formed in 1997, especially as those changes have corresponded with its move from being a curio to a political force.

Anyway... I've tagged this piece "Opinion", so here's mine - voters of Britain, get your arses in gear at next year's general election. By not voting, you allow buffoons into office by the back door. It's bad enough when they're just snout-first in the EU trough, refusing to vote and quaffing pints in carefully staged photo calls but when it's your representation at Westminster that's at stake....? Come on!

Mirror in the bathroom

We've just had a new bathroom put in and now, for the first time in our five years in this house, we have a mirrored cabinet above the sink. Not only that but for the first time in my life I have a mirrored cabinet with a hinged door above the sink.

Now if everything that Hollywood has taught me is correct, I suspect it is only a matter of time before I close the cabinet after cleaning my teeth one night to find a psychopath/murderous spouse/supernatural horror behind me. Or, more likely (because teeth-cleaning is less photogenic on-screen) I'll be going in there for some non-specific medication...

Or am I just being a putz?

In other news, one of my other blogs has been DMCA'ed - please read all about it.