wed 04/12/2024

Glastonbury

Glastonbury Festival 2024: A Sunlit Epic of Music, Madness, Chaos and Culture

SUNDAY 30th June 2024It’s late. But not really. Not by the standards of this place. Photographer Finetime and I are in Block9 in the South-East Corner. The so-called “naughty corner”. We take turns juggernauting quomble off a pinecone. Finetime’s...

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Bill Bailey: Thoughtifier, Brighton Centre review - offbeat adventures with a whirling, erudite mind

I first saw Bill Bailey at least 30 years ago in the cabaret tent at Glastonbury Festival, the audience lying on hessian matting, a fug of hash smoke in the air. He seemed one of us, a bug-eyed, Tolkien-prog hippy with a stoned sense of humour and...

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Glastonbury Festival 2023: Down to the Paradise City

TUESDAY 27TH JUNE 2023I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.My carcass has been ridden over by Immortan Joe’s entire fleet of vehicles from Mad Max: Fury Road. My inner head has been scooped out like a cantaloupe. Where my brain once...

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Theatre at Glastonbury Festival 2023 - so big and wild a hallucination, you're always left wanting more

And that’s it again for another year. Oh Glastonbury. A fever dream where the time of reality stops as you hop on a ride to a land of magic.Yes, it might be celebrated for its musical marvels (Elton John, surely, the set of 2023 that will make the...

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Glastonbury Festival 2022: an unexpurgated odyssey around the best party on the planet

Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion...

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Album: Reef - Shoot Me Your Ace

I have a theory about Reef. In the mid-Nineties, when the Somerset outfit appeared, they were reviled by London music journalists. This was mostly because they sounded like a hoary, unreconstructed early-Seventies blues-rock band. Those same...

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An Oral History of Glastonbury Festival 1992

There is never one Glastonbury Festival. There are as many Glastonbury Festivals as there are people who attend. Thus it ever was, even back in 1992 when the capacity was only 70,000 (plus multitudinous fence-jumpers!). What follows, then, is a...

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Glastonbury Festival: Live at Worthy Farm livestream review - glitched access upstages beautifully shot live footage

INTERLUDE 1: INVALID CODE-AGEDDON6.45 PM on Saturday 22nd May and all is well. Like tens of thousands of others across the UK (or maybe even more?) my wall flatscreen is tuned to Glastonbury’s livestream. Prior to the event itself promos for Water...

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New Music Unlocked 4: The Streets, heavy metal, punk rock and R.E.M.

This week would have been peak summer event antics but not in 2020. However, the game is far from up; the punks and the metallers are making a strong show in full virtual festival force this weekend, and there's another chance to time travel to a...

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Glastonbury Festival 2020: Beyoncé, Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., marijuana and time travel

Coronavirus blah blah blah. Glastonbury cancelled. What to do? Didn’t go to the 2010 festival for reasons too tedious to go into. Suffered the worst FOMO of my life. This is different. There is no Glastonbury. But sitting around at home… we’ve all...

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New Music Lockdown 12: Glastonbury Festival Special

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...

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Oscars 2020: a 'Parasite' love-in caps a night of firsts

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 (...

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