It’s not for the cock, it’s for a beautiful mess and chaotic success

by It’s not for the cock Post to Twitter

Glastonbury Festival 2009

Spotify this bad boy while you read!

 http://open.spotify.com/user/g-town/playlist/6ApR9k7FLFzGkJA7Va15He   

After a Thursday night spent tragically missing East 17, wondering from field to field in the rain, catching great sets my Kap Bambino and Metronomy and having the news of the King of Pop’s ™ death gradually filtering through from “blatant festival rumour” status to a full on “Oh Shit!” reaction (through the haze, I somehow remember sitting at the Stone Circle at about 5am adamant that it is actually a fake death by MJ to escape the crippling debt, child molestation accusations and massive workload of the O2 residency…seriously, mull it over! Well, it sounded ok at the time….)….ANYWAY, after all that and much more besides, it’s time for the festival proper to kick off with the full music schedule.

In what is an almost too perfect to be true style situation, the run stops, the sun comes out and the Maccabees perform their beautifully soaring alt. pop gems in a glorious coinciding moment. It’s not just the now tried and tested classics from first album ‘Colour it In’ that see the hoards of Glastonbury “revellers” at the Other Stage singing the words back, its also newer songs such as ‘Love You Better’ and ‘Can You Give It?’ which send ripples of excitement and adulation running through the sweaty masses.

Next, over on the Pyramid Stage, is the not so secret special guest N*E*R*D. Their set feels like one big smooth as fuck, jazzy, rappy, smokey jam session. Only that there is about 100,000 people watching and joining in. Everyone seems to splitting their time roughly 50% between doing a hilariously white/middle class “rap dance” and discussing how untouchably cool Pharell Williams is. Although the set is cut inexplicably short, it’s still a great ending with the stage being swamped by a chaotic knees up of a stage invasion.

Over at the Park Stage, there is a piece of line up scheduling that is so beautifully constructed that surely it can’t be as mesmerising as our little, underworked minds have been imagining for months? Wrong.

I am of course, as any fellow massive music geeks and fans of good albums released this year will understand, talking of The Horrors being billed, as the sun goes down, directly before Animal Collective.

As The Horrors begin playing their set, exclusively made up of their infinitely better second album ‘Primary Colours’, the crowd thickens to become a nodding mass of movement. Everything is blindingly out of this world; from the strobe lights silhouetting singer Faris Badwan and his sturdy fist held high to the bodies jumping around to ‘Three Decades’ and becoming as blurred and giddily unrestrained as the guitars in the song. Set closer and previous single, ‘Sea Within A Sea’ is, basically, awesome and sees everyone going FUCKING MENTAL. About half way through the song, when the Kraftwerk style synth starts shimmering in some dark loop of the psyche, the crowd wait patiently and then behave as if God himself is literally descending from the clouds. This is most definitely appropriate.

 What would normally become something of a comedown after such a mind blowing gig is turned into fresh excitement and the perfect link to tonight’s Park headliners, Animal Collective.

Starting with the perhaps surprising choice of ‘Also Frightened’, the crowd are instantly hypnotised the band’s unravelling, chaotic sound. As recent single ‘My Girls’ is played in a long, drawn out version, the crowd lap up every second. It’s neither unusual nor laughable to see people all around having seemingly religious experiences; many a punter can be seen closing their eyes, opening their arms to the sky and singing along loudly and unashamedly. Some are clearly chemically enhanced, others just totally wrapped up in the music. The joyous explosiveness of ‘Summertime Clothes’ sees similar scenes of pure ecstasy as groups of friends are seen hugging and jumping in unison. Onstage, the trio can be just about made out wearing Orbital style flashlight glasses but its just as much about the dizzying effect of the memorizing light show combined with the life affirming, mish-mash of soaring melodies, made all the more jagged by the filtering through computers, that really creates the jaw dropping atmosphere.

As the band end on an epically extended version of ‘Brother Sport’, the crowd are left in awe and adrenaline in what is almost definitely a “Glastonbury moment” for anyone smart enough to be there. 

Saturday morning: somewhere in the campsite the phrase “comeover” is heard. This is both hilarious and horribly, bitingly accurate. Onwards and upwards though…

In the circus area, “The Insect Circus Museum”- looking from the outside like the size of a caravan but inside holding a world of infinite wonders- is popular enough for a small queue to form outside its doors. The museum features everything from model “reconstructions” of little men taming massive wasps to newspaper articles describing the trials and tribulations of a touring insect circus. The tour de force of the museum is the section of “The People”, a mock band in which insects make up, in a parallel world, The Beatles. This includes a plethora of press cuttings, mock up track listings and even the cover of “Sgt Peppers…” featuring many “famous” bugs. There is something beautifully tongue-in-cheek and very much off the wall that makes this odd museum a brilliant thing to witness when in the middle of a chaotic, muddy farm.

After seeing some kind of folk duo (Fist Aid Kit?), who are what everyone wants to lie on a hill in the sun and watch at 12.30pm, on the Park Stage it’s time to for some grinding, euphoric, new age shoe-gazing…

An hour and a hazy walk through the festival later and The Big Pink are playing at the John Peel Stage. Although the large crowd suggests they may be heading snarling further into the mainstream, there is undeniably something quite unique about the way they pile wave upon wave of melancholy and distortion over their would-be pure 90s style pop songs. They drone on and on like My Bloody Valentine teasing the Stone Roses and all the while they sound brilliantly mind bending and epic.

Over at the Pyramid Stage, Dizzee Rascal is performing a hit studded set to an ongoing sea of people. Spanning his amazing career so far, Dizzee cracks out the likes of “Stand Up Tall”, “Fix Up” and “Old School” to much appreciation from the crowd and suddenly you realise how integrated into the fabric of British life this man really is. Dizzee is a natural performer too, bursting out of a suit, covering “That’s Not My Name” by Ting Tings and drawing the crowd into some great vocal interplay are all things he does with a great, fuck off smile on his face.

After walking around for a bit, getting pissed and throwing food (i.e- being at a festival) it’s finally time for the headliners which, for many, means The Boss.

Having to endure the end of Kasabian’s set is a shame, but at least it means getting to the front for Bruce isn’t too hard. As the crowd waits for the main headliner to come on, it’s clear almost everyone here is a diehard fan. Chattering among themselves, people talk excitedly about different times they’ve seen the one known as The Boss.

Finally his time comes and, with his seemingly endless army of musicians making up the E Street Band, greets Glastonbury with a smile and a pair of aviators. Starting the epic set alone, Springsteen plays a song penned by the late, great Joe Strummer- “Coma Girl”. This is touching- since Strummer was a massive Springsteen fan and apparently had always pushed for him to headline Glastonbury- as well as a brave opener. Instead of coming out all guns blazing, Springsteen plays this slow, wistful ode to the festival itself.

After this, though, it’s almost all very much blazing guns. Knees are used to slide on, the barrier is used to run along by adoring fans, guitar solos are used to make orgasm faces and the air is used to jump into. It’s pretty much text book American rock band. It’s almost like watching a rock concert on the Simpsons. This is no bad thing, though, and he keeps the crowd enthralled with a combination of new and old stuff (though any hits that Springsteen does play are played almost reluctantly). After an epic, exhausting set, his time is long up and the crowd walk back either singing “Born To Run” or complaining that he didn’t play “Born In The USA”.

Sunday morning and shit really hits the fan with the realisation that you are literally a piece of mould by now and simultaneously that you only have one more day of this fun filled mayhem.

  Over at the Park Stage again and Micachu and The Shapes are opening the days proceedings to a slow reclining hill full of people taking in the sounds and sun. There’s most definitely something quite deliciously out of synch about Micachu- perhaps it’s the way the band take the basic structures of gorgeous and brilliant sounding pop songs and distort, contort and deform them with detuned children’s guitars, empty wine bottles and jagged time signatures. There’s also something quite daringly deadpan about the way lead singer Mica introduces the last song, “Golden Phone”, by saying simply that it is a song about suicide and, as the pocket of dances gradually increases, their slot is over.

One band that have always been pretty damn popular with alternative music lovers, yet have never quite been accepted fully fledged by the mainstream, are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Today’s show at The Other stage is immense. Of course there are the diehard fans that know all the words but there are also the casual listeners who eventually realise that they too know the majority of what Karen O throws violently but beautifully from her lips. The set draws almost equally from all of the band’s albums and is a triumphant sing-along in which the band, Karen O in particular, acts as a magnet for the adulating crowd. As the set finishes with the swirling headrush of “Date With The Night”, Karen and guitarist Nick smash up their equipment in slow, somehow significant, blows to the stage as the crowd wail out for more. A success then, you could say.   

After stumbling to Madness, skanking around drunkenly and somehow getting back to the Other Stage, it’s time for Bon Iver. Here is a band whose place in the mainstream seems about as comfortable to them as Michael Eavis feels comfortable not wearing little shorts. Somehow a broken heart, the recovery process and the songs that came from it has resulted in this band becoming much bigger than they probably ever thought possible. But when the gorgeous harmonies, simple strumming and mournful slide guitar of “For Emma” washes out over the Glastonbury crowd, it makes all the sense in the world. These songs act as a calling card for anyone who is in love or ever has been in love and is as close to a genuine, bona-fide Glastonbury moment as you can get.

To close the festival is the recently reformed Blur. As they take the stage, they seemed to havce barely aged. Damon Albarn looks just as much equal parts awesome and a prick as ever, Graham Coxon will always be cool, Alex James seems to have suddenly lost the cheese making podge and Dave Rowntree…well he’s still a little bloke who plays drums.

Although they play purely hits and well known songs, this seems nothing more than the natural order of things. Blur have such an amazing and expansive career that to just play through their “best of” would beat most other bands in terms of diversity and pop gems. Within the first twenty minutes, they have already played “Girls and Boys”, “She’s So High”, and “Tracy Jacks”.

The crowd lap it all up- knowing all the words, as knowing Blur lyrics is what happens to you when you have lived in Britain at some point during the last 15 years or so. It is a great show, a calling card for so many generations and probably the best and most successful reunion in memory, if not ever. And that’s about all I can say…

And with that Glastonbury 2009 is over. Last year’s festival overcame trickling ticket sales to eventually become a success, but this time tickets flew to sold out status and was ten times more fun. Although so much of a media storm is always whipped up around Glastonbury- the line up, ticket sales, “dumbing down the festival”, it not being the same anymore etc- it never fails to blow any other festival out of the water. It is the most fun, eccentric, weird, insane, eclectic, sprawling and life affirming music festival out there and that doesn’t look like changing soon. 

http://open.spotify.com/user/g-town/playlist/6ApR9k7FLFzGkJA7Va15He

Here is a spotify playlist to remember Glastonbury with. It’s not “the ultimate” Glastonbury playlist. It’s just a pretty good mix by bands that played Glastonbury this year. So have a listen!