There were, as usual, tens of thousands of sun, mud and music worshippers at Glastonbury – but increasingly the festival feels primarily like a broadcast-media event, so here is one armchair viewer’s take on how it looked from the TV/radio/digital sidelines…
The weather was a near-perfect illustration of the age-old north/south split. Friday was wet at Worthy Farm – witness the rain on Bono’s wraparounds and the muddy squelch underfoot. Scotland, meanwhile, was enjoying a glorious day – your correspondent spent the evening strolling over three Perthshire Munros with views stretching as far as Strathconon, before tuning in to hear the aforementioned tax controversialist and his chums on the drive home.
Saturday and Sunday, by contrast, were damp up north but glorious down yonder, with the mud looking – from a televisual distance – like a beach on which blokes in shorts and bikinied women basked. It was ever thus.
Best in show? – There seemed to be a lack of really engrossing moments this year – there wasn’t, for example, anything to equal the sweat-dripping-from-the-roof intensity of the Ting Tings from 2008. Janelle Monáe gave it everything in terms of vigour, hairstyles and on-stage antics, while Rumer was pleasantly mid-afternoon mellow. And Wu-Tang Clan were fascinating: half-a-dozen blokes shuffling around in bathrobes and other ill-chosen attire, swearing.
But a lot of people who were actually there have been saying that the true highlight was Pulp on the Park stage – where the BBC didn’t have any cameras. Thank goodness for the real public service broadcaster – the YouTubers.
Most curious pundit award – Does Zane Lowe have the strangest relationship with the English language of any presenter on TV? Everything is analysed with a face-straining, middle-distance-staring intensity that seems visibly painful at times. A comparison could be made with The Late Show presenter turned failed Liberal Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff, but in NZ-born Lowe’s case he often seems to be a page or two adrift from where he wants to be in the dictionary. A good example came with his description of Paul Simon as “louche”. Not sure that’s what you really meant, Zane: louche (adj): Disreputable or sordid in a rakish or appealing way.
Also in the realm of odd language, the strangest quote relating to Glastonbury 2011 came from the prime minister, speaking about the death – in a toilet on the festival site – of his constituency chairman, Christopher Shale. “A big rock in my life has suddenly been rolled away,” David Cameron was reported as having said.
The “rolled away” gives a sense of a weight having been lifted, and links with the Biblical resurrection story (and also with Mott the Hoople), as per a famous book in Christian-evangelical circles, Who Moved The Stone?, by Albert Henry Ross aka Frank Morison.
Clearly the prime minister didn’t mean it in a positive sense at all, but his phraseology stretched the metaphor and strayed into Diana “My Rock” territory. A sad incident, and an odd way to describe it.
Paul Simon might also rank as quite a few people’s chief disappointment, partly because he was by his own admission feeling off-colour and lacking vocal oomph, but also because he was one of several victims of BBC audio-mix problems – something about which Tom Morton tweeted in frustration.
Don MacLean – hammering out his singalong personal-pension-plan American Pie for the 39,745th time in his career – was another to fall foul of this, and generally the quality seemed iffy quite a few times. There was a theory last year that coverage-quality dipped because so many BBC techie people were away at the World Cup. Could the audio engineers' struggle to cope with Maria Sharapova's assorted squawks, grunts and squeals at Wimbledon now be proving a major drain on resources?
In terms of the old-timers, Glasto 2011 provided no serious challenge to Neil Diamond’s feelgood singalong from 2008.
Surprises? How posh the catchy-songsmiths Noah and the Whale looked, especially the chap with the fiddle and the David Byrne-alike doing the singing. But then they do come from Twickenham.
Overall, it was a disappointing Glastonbury in surprise terms – even if the BBC website feed did offer hope with its disclaimer strapline: "Warning – This is a live stream, anything could happen."
Several fine bushy beards were on display – perhaps a sign of the religious times, or more likely an attempt to provide nesting territory for displaced insects and birds. TV On The Radio (which is how the late Tommy Vance used to plug his Radio 1 Friday Rock Show) sported a couple, but the prize surely goes to Eels, where every member of the band appeared to have strolled in from a Ray LaMontagne / Cat Stevens lookalike competition. A candidate for the best Glastonbury gig by beardies since Grandaddy adopted the grizzled-trucker look in 2003.
And then there were the headliners, starting with U2 on Friday. Someone should have talked Bono out of doing that Jerusalem bit, and his voice sounded ropey at times, but One was wonderful and the gig as a whole did the job very nicely. Interesting to see the Dublin über-group outside their usual bells-and-whistles audio-visual framework, just being a band again (although a band with the clout to call in Major Tom lyrics from an astronaut on the International Space Station).
There was also a bonus in the form of Larry Mullen visibly fuming before having a right good moan in the after-gig interview. Might be another quarter-century before they play a festival again…
Coldplay on Saturday. Hmm. Viva la Vida is a fine crowdpleaser, for sure, and Chris Martin can’t be faulted in either the commercial success or domestic bliss departments. But there is a drabness to several highly rated British bands, and Coldplay exemplify this – neither the songs, nor the singing of them, lived up to the hype and the home-gig fervour.
There was also an at-times blandness to the current uncriticisable music-media darlings, Elbow. They were on immediately before Coldplay and their frontman, Guy Garvey, might resemble an affable mix of Ricky Gervais and Johnny Vegas – but he risks reducing things to a plod at times. (Garvey, Gervais and Vegas aren’t far off being anagrams of each other, either – how weird is that?)
Mrs-Z on Sunday. Your correspondent dipped in and out of what appeared to be a brightly lit, leather-and-spangles cross-pollination of the Royal Variety Performance and synchronised Olympic gymnastics – and increasing felt he was the wrong age, sex and sexual persuasion to really understand or enjoy proceedings.
But it was quite a show – with a female band that carried echoes of Prince (and a Prince cover, Beautiful Ones, was duly performed) – while the whole thing seemed warmer, more endearingly amateur-nervous and more likeable than Coldplay. Whether it really worked as a festival-closer is debatable, but for one night at least, in front of a beach-happy crowd, an old joke could be trotted out: the Pyramid stage was indeed transformed into a Beyoncé castle.
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