Glastonbury
Thomas H. Green
This morning at 9.00 AM would be when Worthy Farm opened its gates to the hedonistic hordes. The weather is scorchio and Glastonbury 50 would have been such a party. Instead, that will all be Glastonbury 2021. So right now, those who love their annual Pilton pilgrimage need to get inventive: the festival and the BBC have laid on a feast of allsorts. It’s about to kick off. Let’s get amongst it…BBC CoverageThe BBC have devoted a whole new special iPlayer channel to Glastonbury and will be showing old sets from 10.00 AM Thursday morning until after midnight, and doing the same every day, up to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The 92nd Academy Awards saved its surprises for a final stretch that saw Parasite make history as the first foreign language film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, pipping to the post the presumptive favourite, the World War One drama 1917 (pictured below). The top prize marked the fourth Oscar of the night for the South Korean success story, following a no less startling director trophy for Bong Joon Ho over 1917’s heavily favoured Sam Mendes, as well as prizes for best original screenplay and best international film.“I will drink until next morning,” Bong remarked to an adoring crowd Read more ...
caspar.gomez
As ever theartsdesk’s Glastonbury report arrives after all other media coverage. Despite management pressure Caspar Gomez refuses earlier deadlines. He told Editorial, “The press tent is like an office, a place of work, full of laptops and coffee. Who needs that?” His annual saga doesn’t attempt to compete with Tweeted micro-reviews or ever-available BBC iPlayer festival highlights. It takes a winding road, explores the scenery, the musical-chemical highs and body-worn lows, capturing in fuller form than anywhere else a most singular plunge into Glastonbury 2019.THURSDAY 27th JUNEIt’s been Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Daft Punk! Kendrick Lamar! The Kinks! Yes! We blew the lid off!What? No! There IS no Glastonbury Festival 2018, I hear you cry. You think that’s going to stop Caspar Gomez? Never! I need my fix. If they’re not going to have Glastonbury this year, I will. In my head. And it will be on Worthy Farm. I call Loki, Glastonbury’s bearded archiving anarchist and trickster, and arrange to camp there. You can’t just plot up, it’s a working farm. I quickly pull together a reconnoitre unit; one of my usual Pilton partners-in crime, Finetime, and GE (pronounced “Jee"), a youthful understudy. We clamber in Read more ...
caspar.gomez
It’s a Tweet-age Glastonbury aftermath. It’s monsooning grey outside. The real world’s back, consensus reality fast encroaching. Everything’s moved on, spun to the next thing as we A.D.D. onto Wimbledon, Hard Brexit or whatever. Even my 14-year-old daughter knows the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant (to the riff from White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”) that rolled across this year’s Glastonbury crowds like a steady rumble of perturbed destiny. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a thing now,” she explained. And I sort of know what she means.I woke up today with Rag’n’Bone Man’s chorus Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Not every Glastonbury can be blazing summer. 2016 was hard work, with real world gloom permeating the already damp party bubble. But, as your teachers used to say, you only get out what you put in. The only way to take things was to go hard or go home, no quarter given and pay later.Thus, this report comes way after the rest. The contemporary media is focused on putting content online as fast as possible. A response after the event is commercial suicide, no longer an option. But how can you smear yourself in Glastonbury’s madness if you spend half your time in the Media Tent, a dead zone of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After two albums in rapid-fire quick succession, 2012’s eponymous debut and its 2013 follow-up, Shangri-La, Jake Bugg could be forgiven for taking a little longer to get his third out into the world. There was talk of working with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D, of taking risks, and rumours were of something darker, different and more diverse.Feburary’s unveiling of the new album’s title track, “On My One”, gave no such sense of a shift. Although Bugg reigned in the worst excesses of his nasal tones, it was familiar and surprisingly safe ground. Then, barely a week later, “Gimme the Love” arrived, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Caro Emerald first appears, spotlit, in one of the aisles of the Brighton Centre’s eastern balcony. Clad in a pleated knee-length black skirt and an eye-jarring yellow and red shirt that brings to mind Russian expressionist art, she kicks things off with the doleful, show tune-style paean to being a mistress, “The Other Woman”. It is a striking beginning and her concert grips the capacity audience by the scruff of the neck from thereon in. By the end of the song, after a twangy guitar solo instrumental break, she is down on stage with her supremely showy, talented, black-clad six-piece band. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury is an odd time. For some it means carrying on carrying on, trying to wring the very last drops out of the weekend and putting off the inevitable, stomach-churning lurch that will signal a nosedive into a colossal comedown. For others, it’s simply a day to be a bit more sensible: after all there’s a long drive tomorrow… Whichever, there seems to be a clamour for the familiar, something to cling to while you take the edge off with more booze or think about A-road alternatives to avoid congestion. This is where the faded glory of the "once-greats" comes in: mid- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many of my friends find the entire idea of festivals abhorrent. It’s not that they’re on some appalled-of-Purley Daily Mail campaign to put a stop to them, just that the idea of staying under canvas for a few days in a field full of noisiness is their idea of Hell. Especially if the weather is inclement. Many of them would also find the pie-eyed utopian warbling, with which this film is entirely packed, irritating in the extreme, irrelevant delusional blather in our world of international debt crisis and cynical political shenanigans.I should state, then, that I am not one of these people. I Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
2011 was a year when the wheels of global history cranked noticeably forward, the news always full of images that will be in school text books within a decade. It was also the year when, for most of us, “a bit peeved” became “utterly livid” that greedy, over-privileged vermin had gambled and lost all our money and were clearly getting away with it, unhindered.On the other hand, such weighty affairs needed a preposterous counterpoint and there’s little in life more inconsequential yet excellent than Lady Gaga, who dominated the first half of the year with the release of her second album Born Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Never knowingly under-mythologised, U2 have chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Achtung Baby with this sizeable documentary about the making of the record and the traumatic soul-searching that went into it. It dovetails neatly with the forthcoming reissue of the album itself, which will be available as a mere single CD, as well as in a vinyl box set and an "Über Deluxe" edition crammed with CDs, DVDs, luxurious art prints etc.To direct their movie, U2 went to Davis Guggenheim, a film and TV veteran who has (among other things) won an Oscar for directing Al Gore's climate Read more ...