Glastonberries

I don’t like watching music on TV unless it’s miming. There I've said it.  Unfortunately The BBC seems to spend most of the summer setting up horrible live feeds from Glastonbury, T in the Park, Reading, V Festival, Clydebank Fete, a couple of buskers in Argyle Street , a duck quacking on St Kilda and so on. A festival is best enjoyed by actually being there, getting loaded with booze or other things and wandering around and seeing something you may like, then getting lost, pissing yourself and having an epiphany to some Dubcore in the dance tent and being unable to hear for a few days. You cant really do that on your couch, although I have known some people that could.

I’m not entirely sure it’s about whether Coldplay will or wont or will or wont or will or wont be able to live up to their headline slot at “Glasto”. Jo Whiley seemed really worried about this. She’s obviously been having sleepless nights. To her this was equivalent to the Greek debt crisis only more important. She asked Mark Radcliffe what he thought. He said something bland like “they’ll be alright” (he’s got to pay his mortgage) but deep underneath you could see him thinking “I couldn’t care less if Coldplay played Three Blind Mice on a Xylophone”. Then Coldplay came on. The singer did his dance like he’s got huge welly boots on and he’s stuck in mud. He shouted “how we doing Glasto?”.  I watched three songs. The lyrics were so non specific that they could be about a cat lying on a car bonnet or love. There was lots of footage of pretty girls singing along and being generally very happy. I’d watched the Human Centipede the night before and I was wondering whether my  imaginary human centipede would utilize all of Coldplay with Chris Martin at the front or would I play the joker and put Jo Whiley there?

There was a kind of soul guy in a zoot suit with a name like Argos Batbug. He was wasn’t very good compared to Bobby Womack or Prince but he had a 60's hat on and that lady TV presenter who 's always advertising shampoo kept saying he was “amazing, that was totally amazing, life changing”. She’d probably been swayed by the hat. Then Elbow came on and the thought came to me that even though Britpop was the last British movement that really took over the charts and the festivals (before music was fragmented by the internet) it was the bands immediately afterwards like Coldplay, Elbow, Travis and all the “tonight Matthew I’m going to be Jeff Buckley” bands that have really lasted and people still buy their records in vast quantities in Tesco. Fair enough. After about 30 minutes I watched Wimbledon which was much better.