Fire: Saturday's Glastonberries

Erik Truffaz w/ Murcof - Leaf-like glitters, slightly spazzd beats. Dark and Hopeful, like Mexico according to Bolaño.

Dizzee Rascal - accidentally / deliberately famous. Music for dancing on one leg, waiting for the cramps to subside. A smile in sound.

La Roux - Music for beautifully bitter teenage girls and awkward guys with those 'dislocated thumbs' dancing hands...

The Klaxons - Dayglo socks for the blind. Magickal populism.

Then an evening spent lurching round the fire pits and skulls of Trash City;



and in the Drag Strip, watching transvestite versions of Alice Cooper spin through the air, blasting out Poison, watching disembodied voices lurching across a stage that looks like (and I guess is supposed to look like) the Titty Twister from Dusk Til Dawn...



then accidentally watching an onstage beatbox competition...then dancing to bizarre bluegrass covers of Radiohead, Abba and Beyonce in a fifties Diner in Shangri La... before finding ourself in a middle of a Sci-Fi film from the 80s, watching Evil Nine playing inside a steam punk surveillance tower (only this time nothing remotely Bentham; no bugger is watching anyone because they're all as wasted as a Sunshine Bus, stranded without medication) while Victorian streetlights exploded into flame...

TAZzing Media Death: Thursday's Glastonberries

...Glastonbury used to make you feel disconnected from the real (RT) world... the festival was a temporary autonomous zones, a dry flip into

Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty

an area sufficiently iridescent and grey to send people off on new tangents, happily waving goodbye to their old lives and jumping on a different bandwagon each hour - "this is the best band ever; no, this is the best band ever...and the best curry... and this guy is the coolest guy ever, with the coolest flag...".

Glastonbury was a semipermeable membrane; every ion, every molecule could travel one way - OUT. Tiny little bands accidentally caused waves. Others realigned themselves. Some bulked up and found themselves a place in the zeitgeist.

Obviously, Glastonbury is a mirror (which is why the 'Glasto' tag to was a hard thing to take; not because it had spoiled Pilton but because the world had been spoiled) but the outside influence stopped on the Wednesday night, as if the media artefacts from the past year hurled towards the Festival and then found themselves trapped, with the door shut and locked behind them, while the people inside mangled them into new shapes.

Kidnap someone & make them happy.

The real world could be let in only very selectively - I can remember a few World Cups, a European Championship, a massive Jeremy Paxman head scaring all the acid kids - and that was partly the point; better not know what's happening out there because this world of mud and songlines and brain-frying sun and fluttering flags and bangles is all there needs to be.

Things are different now, not necessarily worse but irretrievably changed.



It doesn't take long for the ripples about MJ's death to start; people's phones are flashing information at them at a pace too fast for them to take; the slowburn of Glastonbury is being assaulted by the information, a Burroughs word virus, spinning off through the fields - shops start playing Jackson records (everyone can see him in the Thriller video; a media zombie at the beginning of his zombification - an image that reminded me of Bill Hicks:

“A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross? It's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant.”

Gossip rifles past: "Samuel L Jackson is dead? Michael Barrymore is dead?" Information is streaming over the membrane, contaminating the performers - Dizzee Rascal, the Black Eyed Peas - shout outs everywhere. T-shirts and badges are being printed and by Friday the disrespectful ones (MICHAEL JACKSON WAS ALREADY DEAD, I KILLED MJ, WE KILLED MJ, MJ IS SNIFFING COKE OFF PRINCESS DI'S BARE ASS (WITH SHERGAR)) they are already being vandalised by bloodshot, shelled fans armed with Sharpie pens and recently whittled Drune daggers...

The Festival is glistening with change: ghost music is everywhere - the Thriller bass, the Billie Jean guitar, the generalised ums and ahs of Michael's electrified inarticulacy...

But still, other things push through:

Kap Bambino is the first thing I see and the crowd jump around like Skins extras - these guys are flashing like strobes, a 32 bit Crystal Castles...

Kap Bambino - Dead Lazers (Maton Remix)

Then we hear just a drifting of Billy Nasty's dubstep set before kicking off towards the odd Neverland that is Shangri La where I seem to have lost the hours between 1 and 4 AM...

Elephant Dub

The Spice Has Stopped Flowing

Ian Loveday AKA Eon, one of the early Rave superstars (i.e. before there were rave superstars - are there rave superstars - etc) has died.

Had some fun times with Eon; out here in the wilds, hearing him through bucket bins hidden in the trees, through tinny car stereos, where the bass couldn't flow and you were just left with the samples and the tunes and the bleeps.

Maybe this is just the beginning; the old MDMA soaked ravers starting to bow out as their neurons twist and their bodies strain... an old school pandemic, gradually tearing them apart...

Perhaps more of this to come: Altern8 crumbling in front of our eyes on the Thursday night at Pilton, falling apart from the inside out,leaving just their boiler suits and enviro-masks discarded like a Joseph Beuys sculpture, or a Christo coast....

Graveyards of dummies and Vicks inhalers, day-glo whistles sticking out of the ground like swollen arms in the aftermud of the Somme...

Malfunctioning LCD t-shirts from Cyberdog, left in piles to blink out blank, cut-up, neuroded messages...

Everyone listening to the death of rave...

Eon - Inner Mind

Eon - Spice

R.I.P. Eon...

Gruff Reese Jones Family

This made me smile - the sugar rush, the protein fix and the psychedelias all in a handy, bite size cupcake...

Pilfered fvia Tara

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Wickerman

Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Spacemen 3

Coil & Coh - fffetish

Pilfered from the pinkly mysterious Robot Dreams

The Subways @ Bridgwater

Well, I need to revise my bitching about no one dancing at indie gigs... at The Subways in the legendary Palace nightclub in Bridgey everyone danced, kind of... the place just erupted, like irony never happened... about 50% of the people there knew every song (maybe they'd been cramming on Spotify) and belted out every word inbetween breathless oldschool moshing of the kind that lesioned your occipital lobes with enough accidental enthusiasm to trigger long-suppressed King Kurt fascinations...

Crowd surfing? Yep.
Stage diving? Of course.
Small girls being flung across the room like small dogs blown over walls by the wind? Plenty.

Maybe it's something in the water, down here in the hart of the wud, where the littl shining man lies...



Best fun I've had at a gig in ages. We'll see how The Mighty Diamonds compare in Exeter tonight....

Fire Walk With Me

Tricky - Smoking Beagles

- forgot how much I loved this, the B-Side to the Tricky Kid single. Actually, I think PMT period Tricky is a lot better than I imagined at the time.

Tricky - Tricky Kid

Anyway, I watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on ITV4 last night and the Roadhouse nightclub scene had subtitles, an additional which utterly wrecked the atmosphere of what has to be my favourite scene in any film....not being able to hear the dialogue gave a stuffed-ear, wasted authenticity that is just lost when you know what they're saying. Ridiculous.

Soisong

Well, this is simultaneously weird and exactly the kind of thing you might expect from the Soisong boys. And while it's perhaps viral in every sense, it takes a little while to sink in how odd it is to focus on the actual source of a Soisong voice, especially in this kind of imaginary, hyperstitional ethnography...