As this is my new blog, hot off the press so to speak only an hour or so ago, I thought I'd better post something up fairly quickly.
So here it is.
An extract from my third (and yet untitled) book about going to the Glastonbury Festival. It's a work in progress, and some of this may well not make the final cut.
Hopefully, it'll be finished sometime before the end of 2014.
But for now, here's a brief extract about the day the line-up came out and how I discovered the great Courtney Barnett.
Part Two to follow when I've written it....
One of the major
discoveries for me on the music front that year was down to rushing the ironing
and flicking back into the internet. Emily Eavis had done a bit of defensive
interview that afternoon, a Q & A really, which was posted up on the Glasto
website. In it she mentioned specifically the lack of clear and obvious
headliners and mentioned something along the lines about “it not all being
about the headline acts.”
Of course she was totally right. So right that it
barely warrants a mention. What struck my attention was that she talked about
the “exciting artists that (she) was looking forward to seeing that were playing
on the smaller stages…such as Courtney Barnett.” Now, I’d seen the name on the
line-up, but it hadn’t clicked with me at all.
For some reason,
I’d thought that “Courtney Barnett” was some sort of dreadful, derivative,
white-dreadlocked, British soul-jazz chancer and I’d just skipped over the
name. I had them marked down as a lesser sort of Newton Faulkner, if that is at
all possible.
Why then, I mused as I poured myself a coffee, is Emily Eavis
raving about them so much? And then, in some sort of road to Damascus moment,
the penny dropped. A dim light bulb went off over my head.
Courtney Barnett
wasn’t British, nor was she/he (even that point was unclear to me) some sort of
naff poetry soul jazzer; she (I remembered now!), was a hotly tipped Australian
singer. Where had I heard of her? What bells were ringing faintly in my coffee
addled memory?
I looked at the
dog. “Oscar,” I said, “What do you know about Courtney Barnett?”
He wagged his
tail enthusiastically. I took this as a good sign.
“Well, I’ve no idea.
What do you think?”
He barked
excitedly. Either he had become a very astute music critic or he thought he was
getting something to eat. He was that happy that I couldn’t disappoint him, so
I buckled and he ended up with a treat. That was all he needed. His interest in
Courtney Barnett had rapidly waned with the mere promise of a gravy bone. I
tried asking him again, but he was preoccupied.
Then it struck
me. In a moment of boredom and shameful weakness I’d actually bought NME for
the first time in at least ten years just after Christmas. I guess it was just
something to read. It had taken me all of 20 minutes to flick through it and it
was then despatched to the pile of papers to be thrown out each week. I’d only
noticed it still hanging around at the bottom of the pile the day before. It
had been spared. The relevance to all of this was that the main thrust of that
edition of NME was that they were (as per usual) hyping the artists that were
going to make it big in 2014. That’s where I’d read about Courtney Barnett!
And it was still
there, unloved and ready for the recycling. I flicked through it, until I came
across the piece on her. Like most of NME these days, it didn’t really tell me
anything at all. I could have written the piece in about the amount of time it
took me to read it. It made me long for the halcyon days of the NME in the late
70’s/ early 80’s. Now that was a magazine that was worth reading; Lester Bangs
on The Clash, Paul Morley (still arsey even then, but worth reading), Ian
Penman, Danny Baker. 25p a week, photos by Pennie Smith and ink that turned
your fingers black.
Nowadays you don't
end up with inky hands, but that is the only change for the good. No wonder I
(and thousands of others) never buy it anymore. I think its days are numbered.
Courtney Barnett was one of many artists that they were bigging up, and
probably because of that I hadn’t made any effort to hear any of her stuff. It
sort of worked in a reverse way. If they raved about something, then I’d avoid
it on purpose.
Yet Emily Eavis
had singled her out as someone to look out for. I don’t normally think that the
artists she raves about are the same ones I like-Muse being a perfect example,
and I’d bet she personally doesn’t like The Fall very much, and I don’t suppose
it matters at all- but something told me that I should give this Courtney
Barnett lass a bit of chance.
My first Glasto book, "Turn Left at the Womble: How a 48 year-old Dad Survived his first time at Glastonbury " is available here:
The follow-up,"Left Again at the Womble; The adventures of a middle-aged Dad working at the Glastonbury Festival" is also available here:
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