Blade Runner 2049 : It's No Game

It's over a week since I saw BLADE RUNNER 2049 a second time and I'm still thinking about it a lot. The dam has just burst. Prepare for random thoughts.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 is not only better than the original, by having characters you actually care about, it makes the plot of the original movie 20% better by giving that slightly abusive Deckard and Rachel relationship some consequence.

Apparently BLADE RUNNER 2049 has been a box office flop. I'm neither shocked or disappointed by this because it means I'm not going to hear theories on it from some empty headed trendy who only went to see it for Ryan Gosling.

Gosling is brilliant, better than Ford in both movies (and Ford is pretty good in this one). Gosling seems to be playing a ghost version of his doomed character from DRIVE and his work with  Ana de Armas as Joi makes for a level of hearbreak we never get anywhere near in the cold, sometimes brutal original movie.

Officer K/Joe and Joi are just about the best screen couple I've seen all year. It's horrifying when Joi is destroyed and absolutely devastating when 'Joe' finds (or is reminded) that Joi is essentially a very smart App, and the important bond he has established with this 'woman' actually meant absolutely nothing beyond his own mind.
It was a nightmarishly relatable moment.

According to Slash Film podcast review, the hero of Kafka's The Trial is 'Joseph K', who thinks he is the center of a huge conspiracy, only to find is a minor functionary. Gosling's Officer K/Joe is an instant classic movie character, tragic on several levels. The narrative's flirtation with the plot twist from ANGEL HEART is all the more tragic and pathetic when it is revealed to be a cruel tease.

Wow that was a lot of spoilers wasn't it!
Tough. You should have paid to see the movie instead of waiting to see such a breathtaking cinematic experience on your shit television.

The debate used to be
IS DECKARD A REPLICANT?
It's now
CAN DECKARD'S MANGY DOG TALK?

This movie is worth seeing more than once. After the three way love scene, between K, Joi and Marriett you hear Mackenzie Davis (also great as a kind of Pris 2.0) say to Joi
"There is not as much to you as you think" .
The first time you hear it this is needlessly cruel.
The second time, when you know what Joi is, this is cruel, accurate and heartbreaking all round.

Apparently this and other scenes are getting flak for their portrayal of women. I'm not going to defend this movie from feminists because most feminists I know have a brain and won't be offended by this movie. Like the similarly devastating and disturbing HER, there is nothing in this movie that makes me think
"wow losing my emotions to an App controlled by a immortal, omnipotent, all powerful faceless corporate is a great alternative to some sweet but dozy bird I might find on Tinder".

Denis Villeneuve has instantly become, like David Fincher and Christopher Nolan, someone whose entire back catalogue now needs to be watched. I wasn't knocked out by ARRIVAL (or INTERSTELLAR for that matter) but SICARIO is a classic. I hope he's not bitten off more than he can chew with D U N E.

Another great scene, another great actress, Sylvia Hoeks as Luv, who isn't really a powerless male fantasy figure

Standing in for Bowie (see below), Jared Leto is actually great as Wallace, 2049's frustrated Tyrell. The Slash Film podcast  summed up Wallace perfectly;
"He's the CEO of Samsung coming on stage decades after Steve Jobs (Tyrell) has left and taken all his secrets with him".

As we know Denis Villeneuve is a D U N E fanatic did he cast Jared Leto because he wants Jared Leto as Leto?

I have had issues with the BLADE RUNNER since it was the crushing disappointment of 1982 but the more I see it on better quality medium the better it gets. The first time I saw the BLADE RUNNER FINAL CUT at my friend Rob's house in dazzling HD I had a genuine Philip K. Dick moment when I thought the characters in the Philip K. Dick movie looked more real than we did in the reality that was watching it.

DANGEROUS DAYS BLADE RUNNER DOC 1 The brutal love scene in original movie was more originally more tender according to Sean Young but it was cut to look like abuse. If they were "made to be together" as Sean Young says in one cut scene, this makes Tyrell even more of a cruel god.

The more I watch the original the more intriguing Edward James Olmos's character Gaff becomes as he is obviously some form of handler for Deckard, whatever he is.

For all my re-evaluation and late appreciation of BLADE RUNNER, if you want something genuinely Philip K. Dick from the 1980s, that also screams 1980s in all it's vulgar glory, Paul (STARSHIP TROOPERS) Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL seems a little forgotten today.

C4's ELECTRIC DREAMS, a Philip K. Dick anthology show from the channel which originally brought you BLACK MIRROR. is worth a watch. A little patchy, the most mind bending thing I've seen it in so far is Benedict Wong's spot on Mancunian accent in the episode"Impossible Planet"
Benedict Wong is also in one of the BLADE RUNNER 2049 short films  (BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2036: Nexus Dawn") so you know he's a Philip K. Dick fan.
EDIT: Benedict Wong has a spot on Mancunian accent because Benedict Wong was born in Eccles, Greater Manchester :-)

One of the other shorts, BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "Black Out 2022", should be a full length movie and I would guess will be one before long.

DANGEROUS DAYS BLADE RUNNER DOC 2 While doing painstaking model work to ensure that every microscopic light source in the cityscape for the opening of the orginal movie looks real,
Douglas Trumble's exhausted Special Effects crew gets a trip to director Ridley Scott's breathtaking actual sets. They are gobsmacked to find beautiful interiors like Tyrell's office with light dancing around like Midsummer Nights Dream from no realistic sources whatsover.
Later, graffiti on piece of  tiny modelwork is shown to say "RIDLEY IS GOD"

We speculated in the 80s that the ultimate cyperpunk accessory would be cybernetic eyes what would show you the world as if shot by the Scott Brothers. (You could have a dropdown that could switch between Tony and Ridley).

Anyway.. back to BLADE RUNNER 2049

When listened to on headphones. soundtrack to BLADE RUNNER 2049 by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, just like the astonishing Vangelis soundtrack for the original, will put you right back in the movie, even when you are actually just queuing up for a flu jab at Boots.

Jóhann Jóhannsson was the original choice for the BLADE RUNNER 2049 soundtrack before Denis Villeneuve decided quite late on to go with Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch. (If we we got is a last minute rush job it is all the more impressive). Jóhann Jóhannsson is a brilliant modern composer  which means eventually we will get a probably excellent variant soundtrack for this movie before long.

The soundtrack for the BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "Black Out 2022" short, by Flying Lotus is also good and should be expanded to album length. (While we wait for the live action movie of these events).

Bowie was the original choice to to be Wallace because Denis Villeneuve and Ridley Scott considered him to be hugely influential on Blade Runner and cyberpunk aesthetic.
As I've mentioned elsewhere cyberpunk was coined as a term AFTER Blade Runner to describe the look and concept. So what Bowie music inspired Blade Runner?
Diamond Dogs? - no, too 1970s, too glam
Outside? - no, a response, a reflection back from the 1990s

You'd need something from the big technological/style bang of the 1980s as it sloughed off the 1970s, something like this.

This is the sound of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and eventually literary cyberpunk being born screaming into life


**UPDATE** Now I come to think of it Bowie's 'Heroes' and 'Low' are much more influential on both actual movie soundtracks.


One final note.
When Denis Villeneuve needed a location to show a defunct dying Las Vegas he chose a Stock Exchange (in Budapest). I wonder how ironic and prophetic that will seem when we finally get to see BLADE RUNNER 2075?

​​Can I interest you in a forgotten Ziggy Stardust album?

After "the kids had killed the man" The Spiders From Mars made ​a few​ more record​s, one great, ​​before they had to break up the band​.


The official Spiders From Mars album isn't too great

this is more like it


Slaughter on 10th Avenue, the first solo album by glam guitar deity Mick Ronson.

Well, no okay it isn't a Bowie album... and though it is his greatest backing band playing songs written by him for a them I don't think Bowie even plays on it.

But Holy Look-in, Tomorrow People Magpie it sounds like a Bowie album. Ronson actually does a fairly convincing Ziggy  Stardust impression even with the vocals.  It sounds like an album of a particular era as well, 1975, not an uncreative time. The lineup of musicians on this album, aside from Ronson, was the exact same used by Bowie on his 1973 covers album, Pin-Ups.​

This was a time when Bowie was SO creative he could throw thunderbolts of inspiration at people like Mott The Hoople, a wasted Iggy Pop and a discarded Lou Reed and rescue them from mortality.

In Mick Ronson's case he had already been basking in this creative radiation for some time and was perhaps reaching peak exposure. Mick was the guitar god that drove the first stage of Bowies career, effectively Chief Arachnid in The Spiders From Mars. With Ziggy gone the Spiders were gifted one last album and this is it.

Sadly it was released with perhaps too much fanfare around the time Bowie himself was releasing Diamond Dogs, against which it must have looked like a cash-in.

Opens with he definitive glam rock version of Love Me Tender, and ends with a nice souful glam instrumental. Along the way it has a few bumps, (​Pleasure Man is like a bad Black Sabbath experiment) and the bonus tracks it has been laboured with over the years make a slightly repetitive experience even worse as the central Slaughter riff is played over and over again. (Bonus tracks really are the curse of the album since the 90s, mushing the end to end experience with content the artist was usually correct to keep obscure.)

I'm not claiming Slaughter on 10th Avenue a classic, I'm not even claiming its up there with the albums for others that Bowie breathed on​​ (let alone his own product from that era) but it defiantly deserves more attention. And if you are still too sad to return to Bowies own stuff it is a gentle re introduction.

Overview of David Bowie's brilliant career reveals contemporary critical opinion is mainly horseshit driven by fashion

Now we can see Bowie's career from beginning to end it is possible to see how consistent it is. And how chasing critical opinion (1983-87) was nearly the end of it

I was going to review Blackstar over the weekend. It's good, very good, but like The Next Day (covered here) and a lot of Bowie over the course of his life the critical reaction seems ruled by fashionable opinion in the media of the artist.

Then.. this morning.. he's dead. Quite a shock. If there is one contemporary artist who I thought could evolve past that whole tiresome death thing it would be Bowie. Bowie directly inspired almost everything creative I've ever done - and I'm a writer!
God knows how musicians are feeling today.

In the wake of his death I anticipate a mass re-writing of  critical history, in which the period he was ridiculed is quietly forgotten.

This is his career as I see it, charted against how fashionable it was to be a fan.

Bowie's career starts unfashionable and laughed at as a novelty Anthony Newly knock-off

David Bowie (1967)

He then catches the zeitgeist and becomes fashionable with Space Oddity

Space Oddity (1969)

and after that goes on a run of incredible creativity perhaps unsurpassed in popular music

The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
Hunky Dory (1971)
Aladdin Sane (1973)
Diamond Dogs (1974)
Young Americans (1975)
Station to Station (1976)
Low (1977)
"Heroes" (1977)
Lodger (1979)

He is then obviously shocked to the core by the assassination of John Lennon, prompting what I think is his masterpiece

Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980)

After which he seems to panic. Ever present on an adoring media and critically sanctified, he jumps headfirst into chasing popular mainstream acceptance in an execrable pop phase, which (at the time) was critically lauded

Let's Dance (1983)
Tonight (1984)
Never Let Me Down (1987)

reaching a climax with a film that was hyped in the UK to Star Wars sequel levels by a suffocatingly cozy media

Absolute Beginners

.. and...then the film subsequently vanished from the face of the Earth. Bowie was the only decent thing in this gaudy stinker - hugely ironic as an entire industry in film criticism was built around running down his career as an actor. (Already forgotten in the coverage today).

At the end of the 80s, having over exposed himself to the point of ridicule ('Dancing In The Street') Bowie tries to  crawl out back out of the cheesy Saturday Morning kids show his career has become but he's left it too late and has become unfashionable. Attempts to bury himself in Iggy Pop's guitar crew are met with a wide ridicule oddly never applied to Iggy Pop.  The fearless drastic career right turn later performed by Radiohead (into KID A) is years away.

Tin Machine (1989)
Tin Machine II (1991)

Tin Machine was widely mocked, usually from the Britpop critics otherwise extolling the sophistication of classic (at the time) Oasis albums like Be Here Now. After that for the rest of the decade he was mainly is regarded as a comedy figure producing weird albums, not only unfashionable but also now OLD

Black Tie White Noise (1992)
Outside (1995)
Earthling (1997)
'Hours...' (1999)
Heathen (2002)
Reality (2003)

Bowie finally turned critical opinion decisively by turning himself into a hermit  just in time for the nostalgia industry to rediscover the talent they claimed he'd lost with  The Next Day.

I've spent all weekend listing to BlackStar and like The Next Day it's very good. Is it significantly better than
Outside, Earthling, 'Hours...'?
No not really, certainly not better than Outside, but then now, he's fashionable again, so that makes all the difference

It is all forgotten now but there were periods in the 90s when it seemed the only acceptable way to listen to Bowie was the ripped off sample in Ice Ice Baby. I remember disbelief when I explained to people the brilliant soundtrack contributions to David Lynch's Lost Highway, David Finchers Se7en and Paul Verhoeven's classic foreshadowing of the Iraq War, Starship Troopers, were all from Bowie and Eno's Outside.

Brian Eno's tribute to Bowie mentions Outside as their one (their last) collaboration which 'fell through the cracks'. I expect it will be top of the list as a rehabilitated classic in the re-written history.





The fluctuations in credibility never seemed to bother him much, in fact you can see him sending himself and the whole circus  up in Zoolander.


Fame, Fashion.. he wrote several classic songs about on the subject himself after all.

But it does demonstrate the bitchy incompetence in the critical press. Example : at the time I would have like to have known that Black Tie White Noise was written as a soundtrack to his own wedding (which it was) instead of reading endless pages of yuyuks at Tin Machine and the Laughing Gnome.

As a gauge of how actually in-the-know these clowns in the music press were, the very Britpop bible in the 1990s mocking Bowie's crawl back to respectability was also telling us at the same time that the

emerging 'internet' was a fad and it would be the "CB radio of the 1990s"

Thank you, long extinct SELECT magazine, that one is only going to get funnier with time.

BowieNet: how David Bowie's ISP foresaw the future of the internet

All The Majesty Of A City Landscape..*

It might be the administrative hub of all the worlds tax havens and probably the major centre of all of the worlds financial ills but the City of London it quite an impressive place when you get a (short) contract there.

Tower 42, was the NatWest Tower, rebuilt, sold and renamed after the 1 tonne Bishopsgate truck bomb in 1993 which nearly destroyed it.

*more Bowie,

lyrics from Thru These Architect's Eyes, from Outside

At last ... The Next Day.... (David Bowie)

What you need to know - David Bowie's The Next Day really is his best since Scary Monsters and, unlike Heathen and the other albums since his classic era you'll know this immediately at first listen. It's certainly the catchiest album I've heard for ages, possibly since Yeah Yeah Yeah's It's Blitz!  Right now after third listen I've three or four tunes buzzing in my head, Stars, Valentine, Boss of Me, How Does The Grass Grow.. I've even finally appreciated the almost Vangelis Blade Runner synths in Where Are We Now

God .. The guitar on The Stars are Out sounds like the best guitar I've heard on anything in years. It helps that it comes with a brilliant Lynchian music promo.Valentine's Day could have come right off Hunky Dory, followed by If You Can See Me, which brings us right back to 2013 with a bang.

(just looking through the track list now I have another tune from The Next Day - Dancing out of Space - in my head despite listening to different stuff all of yesterday)

It's all lyrically very dark. I'd Rather Be High and How Does The Grass Grow feature anti-war  lyrics that could have come off PJ Harvey's Let England Shake

As for the help, I thought the guitar (Earl Slick?) on The Stars Are Out was Pete Townsend guesting.. and Gail Ann Dorsey.. I think I remember falling madly in love with her and her Ken Russellesque outfit at Pheonix Festival in 1996. Great to see she is still on board and I might check out some of her solo stuff (as I'm a big fan of another bassist gone solo - Melissa Auf Der Maur)

Slight suspicion Bowie has given up here trying to be groundbreaking and is rehashing rather but much as I like Heathen and Reality they did sound empty and bereft at first listen, certainly in comparison with the new one.

Full Bowie disclosure

I'm yet another Bowie nut. I was exposed at college, when Bowie was at his creative nadir in the mid-80s, by future novelist Jaine Fenn (new novel Queen of Nowhere just out) 

Jaine was desperate to stop my painful tirades about the hideously over hyped, over trendy  British pop movie Absolute Beginners, which embarrassing mid-80s mainstream pop Bowie found himself a part of. (Bowie is of course known for creating stage persona's like Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke. His persona in the Absolute Beginners/Let's Dance/Tonight/Never Let Me Down era was The Shameless Douchebag)

So mid 80s I was skeptical ....but first fell for the guitars in Man Who Sold The the World and then simultaneously fell for everything in that classic era. It's a great buzz, really getting into a musical artist and realising that that have an entire decade of brilliant work, in different flavoured eras, to enjoy. Like an audio version of five Christmases at once. This culminated in a deep synchronic bond with Scary Monsters and Super Creeps just as I discovered the neo noir of William Gibson and cyberpunk. I only recently discovered that that incredible guitar howl that opens that album is courtesy of Robert Fripp. King Crimson was my old music discovery of 2009.

So in light of his current output at the time - the Bowie narrative then (in the mid-late 80s) was more tragedy, the brilliant super cool musician reduced to cringing awful mainstream music videos with a similarly bereft Mick Jagger. It was depressing but I was primed to be positive to any subsequent releases from Bowie, and, further spiked by the discovery of Iggy Pop (via the opening titles to Repo Man) I found out Bowie was making a come back with Iggy's guitar heavy backing band...

..what I'm avoiding saying is that I've been a passionate defender of the critically reviled Tin Machine for decades..  (I am a habitual defender of lost causes ... coming soon to this blog - Quantum of Solace is better than Skyfall). Tin Machine might well be awful to most ears but it is the screeching sound of an artist jamming on the brakes and trying to turn a corner before a career ending collision. Tin Machine is Bowie's Kid A, (he just left the left turn a lot later than Radiohead), and The Next Day to me completely validates his decision to throw out his day-glo pop era and temporarily start a (very good BTW) metal band.

Of his albums since I'll also defend the Brian Eno produced Outside from a slightly more secure defensive position. Songs from Outside appeared in three classic movies of that era - Se7en, Lost Highway and Starship Troopers (but such was Bowie's lack of credibility at the time the 'edge' in Outside seemed to be credited to Trent Reznor). Interestingly looked at now the scifi themes of Outside is Bowie trying to overtly jump on the cyberpunk bandwagon late, when he seemed to have helped kicked it off in the first place with Scary Monsters.

To digress, it fascinates me that William Gibson is the only author I know to rip themes visuals and moods from movies and music. As the more mature medium this usually happens in reverse, with sci-fi movies reliably 20 years behind their written inspiration. It's an incredible tribute to to the visuals in Blade Runner that they were a direct inspirations to a ground breaking classic novel that appeared AFTER (Neuromancer - the reason I work in IT)

Black Tie White Noise makes a lot more sense when you find it was written as music  for his wedding (and congrats on that BTW, obviously a smart move, Iman must be a lovely gal, though I struggle to imagine her in the kitchen). Prompted by the first single from The Next Day I revisited Heathen which I had hated on first listen but seemed to be one of my few positives in the endless winter of London 2012-13. This blog post was to have said something like "I seem to be perpetually ten years behind Bowie" but it seems the accessibility of The Next Day has broken that theory.

One thing he has very sensibly done is movie back out of the media limelight. In the hideous Absolute Beginners/Let's Dance/Tonight era you could not turn on a tv or a radio without hearing his voice and the brutally funny caricatures of him that appeared from Stella Street and The Adam and Joe Show (all fans I'm sure) are a direct result of this. Mick & Keith take note.

So David, you are back! Hurrah!... but please stay out of the limelight and keep reclusive for at least another ten years. Let the current generation of music journos continue to wank out their careers over Morrissey - they've been dancing on your grave for decades.

Blast from the past : Phoenix Festival 1996

Another festival diary.
Glastonbury takes a year off every few years, requiring regulars to go out looking for other festivals. Phoenix ran in the 90s in the Midlands at Long Marston. The difference between Long Marston and Shepton Mallet in Somerset is that Long Marston is an airfield with a vast flat wide open space in the Midlands with no shade.. 

and the difference for me in 1996 was that I'd just moved to a village in the middle of nowhere.. Kye and Cath had just met and where to get married shortly after but moved away (like virtually everyone I got to know in Parracombe). I've just got back into contact with them via Facebook. Pictures were all lost when Castelinks first server died.

"MORE LIKE PHOENIX ... ARIZONA" The first sign of a major mover at Phoenix was in the weather reports the weekend before. Our month long cold spell would end and by the weekend it would be hot. Very Hot. Perhaps 82 degrees in some regions. Principally the Midlands. So - I took a flimsy sleeping bag. (This was so I could freeze my a**se off in the morning before I got a chance to get heat stroke).Amazingly in this tiny village I'd found a neighbour called Kye - who had offered me a lift with his girlfriend Kath to Phoenix on the Thursday morning. .

  

DAY ONE: In the middle of a tortuous journey word reaches us that a mutual aquaintance who shall remain nameless will arrive at some point at the weekend WITHOUT a tent but WITH a portable barbecue. Well anyway, we arrive - put up tents. Jeez its hot already. Adrian and Noelle just happen to camp next door. get on the wine. And champagne. Finally enter arena much later. We catch the end of PRODIGY and then BOWIE arrives. (The Times and ET would say later that those still in the huge queue to get in left their cars were they were at this point and ran in) The first surprising thing about BOWIE was how close to the front we were able to get. 20 yards ? Ten years ago My friend Jane Weddell described how she had been unable to get close enough to DB to see more than a spec at the Milton Keynes Bowl. Its a sad reflection of his output since that the crowd here was so much smaller. Of course - I thought he's been getting slowly better since Tin Machine... and I like the new stuff (some of which sounds amazing on the soundtrack of Se7en). Obviously I thought the old stuff was better. Which was the second surprising thing. Most of the set came from the Alladin Sane/Lodger era but a lot of it - other than the stuff off OUTSIDE - was pre SCARY MONSTERS. Brilliant. Just to show how much of a sop it was to potential new fans three of the songs he did were more notably covered by someone else - MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD (by Nirvana), LUST FOR LIFE (Iggy Pop) and ALL THE YOUNG DUDES (Mott The Hoople) - which was by far the best of the three. So convinced was everybody that he would not be doing old stuff that it felt like we were seeing a very good tribute band. Except it was the real thing. Both session musicians were stunning.. The black bassist was dressed up like an Inquisitor from a Ken Russell film and filled in the other half of the duet on a quite moving version of UNDER PRESSURE. The bald lead guitar was a worthy stand in for Mick Ronson (?) Climax of a brilliantly theatrical performance was MOONAGE DAYDREAM and the rest of the music at Phoenix was frankly a bit a an anti-climax afterwards.

DAY TWO My jeans have been taken out of my tent during the night. Sigh. AND I had to go for ANOTHER shit. This wasn't going to plan. Onto the main site with a bit of festival tutoring for Kye and Cath. Lesson One: Do not drink Snakebite all day. KYE: What does snakebite taste like then ? ....OK, since you don't know I'll get you some. Just one right... IAN MCNABB comes on. Kye is very impressed (he's just had his first snakebite). He is good but has no stage presence. (That's Ian Macnabb not Kye) Then FLAMING LIPS. Psychedelic US rock which gets nowhere with the crowd until the lead singer announces the next song. Its about his brother apparently. On acid. Trying to escape from a grocery store. (You could see the bassist grimace with embarrassment). It was very funny and ended with ".... and he called upon the power of the Insects, and the Waterbugs attacked the Policemen..." Had BECK come on early ? No. Beck came on in a very silly suit that looked like something Dennis Pennis would try and wear at the Garrick Club. Before launching into the first song he lit and dragged on a very conventional looking pipe. Rather too much to look respectable it seemed to me. He opened with DEVIL'S HAIRCUT and played a lot off the new album. Surprisingly - he Rocked. With some aplomb. Only the Truckdriving neighbour song came out quiet. "..Bellyflopping naked in a pool of yellow sweat, Shouting JACKASS with a wet cigarette.." LOSER was a big hit with the crowd. And at the end he pulled out a hanky and tried to stuff it up his nose as he collapsed. People came out and carried him off the stage. Beck is sometimes compared to Bob Dylan but even ol' Bob couldn't do slapstick. It gets hazy. I dragged my attention back into reality for FOO FIGHTERS but they were a big disappointment. They were at the end of a long tour apparently. I'd seen Faith No More and Radiohead under similar circumstances and it had only made them super-sharp. Grohl and co had given up already. They thrashed out their set and went home to bed. Errr.... Comedians. Mark Hurst. Very good.

DAY THREE ... marked principally by a failure to get too interested in the dance tent. Since at night it was so crowded we thought it was a disaster waiting to happen. I thought I go during the day It is Freezing in the mornings.... I need another shit.... Very bad news as the prefab SEARCH loos and portaloos are becoming practically unusable. Suddenly Glastonbury seems like a hospital. IS A HOLE IN THE GROUND TO SHIT IN TOO MUCH TO ASK ? The bands start and in a long hiatus waiting for the appearance of ANDREW WEATHERALL in the dance tent, I see a comedian, MARK STEELE, who is first on the bill and very good. One speech in particular, about the uselessness of language teaching, was not funny but so spot on it got a large round of applause. Destined for bigger things. As LAMB would seem to be - who came on first in the Dance tent and who were so good they came back to play one of their few tunes again. They were the best thing on in the dance tent. Weatherall appeared eventually about an hour an a half late. I never saw the dance floor so empty. Next good thing on was RED SNAPPER in the dance tent but not for ages so I morbidly took a look at JAZZ PASSENGERS FEATURING DEBBIE HARRY in the (eek!) Jazz tent. Initially Debbs looked like she had finally succumbed to the ravages of age . (But even at the start she looked like the Worlds Grooviest Granny) Peering through reading glasses at a music stand with lyics on, tied back greying hair, she still has one of the best voices around. Smart and funny too. When the Jazz Passengers let rip the granny routine was revealed as an act as the reading glasses and tied back hair came loose in a on stage pogueing session which got BIG cheers. After that all the old power was back. Only downer was the crowd forcing the Jazz band to play "The Tide is High" as an enchore. A big shame as their own stuff was good enough to see even without Debbs. RED SNAPPER are good once, maybe twice, but third time they are boring. For no apparent reason I wrote a screenplay on the back of a post card. It seemed very very good at the time. Returning to the main stage I found MASSIVE ATTACK, who were OK. They were supposed to be on last according to the running order but this had been hijacked by Bjork for reasons which became apparent. Shortly after we saw a man in a Rhino suit go through the crowd, someone behind the stage launched (according to NME) 1000lbs of fireworks into the sky. The two seemed unconnected though the strange little Icelandic thing was singing "HUMAN BEHAVIOUR" at the time so you never know. Poor Bjork - took her at least three songs to get over the size of the crowd - after that she had to cope with the sky exploding. Later... and tales reach us of the most outrageously original Rock and Roll stunt of the Festival . Disorientated by a cocktail of totally legal substances two nearby festival goers got so wrecked they got their ears pierced by accident (?) , then ran off without paying to lie prone in the campsite trying to pool their mental resources in an doomed attempt to eat a Mars bar. Only the hasty administration of a chip sandwich prevented them becoming the Peter Green and Syd Barret of Long Marston. ("DRUID" bought in rather large quantities and available from the rather sad "Legal Highs" stall. Laced with that slightly lesser well known mind altering substance "L.S.A" ....."Lucy In The Sky With Armadillos ?" mused Kye) Thank god I had something healthy to be going ton with - like a bottle of tequila. (I was totally unconscious within an hour and still not over the experience week later)

DAY FOUR: As every other day - wake 6am absolutely freezing. Put all my clothes on. Wake up again at 9 boiling hot. Take them all off. have to evacuate tent by 10 - its an oven in there... Lunchtime. Everyone else gone and we begining a desperate search for some shade. Difficult as all the secluded bits in the main stadium have been used as toilets. (Night before I had taken a short cut and had to step over two girls having a shit.) Now praying for home and wondering how bad the queues will be tomorrow ("Lets see.... six hour jam on Thursday and Friday.... how big will that be when we all leave together ?"). Got the first symptoms of Heat stroke just thinking about the inside of my tent. Everyone outside the comedy tent were we are huddled (with every other sensible person), is looking like the remains of Lawrence of Arabia's Akabar expedition as they cross "The Suns Anvil". Kye says he is thinking of leaving early. Tonight. He apologises. I begin to laugh hysterically and lose the ability to blink. He suggests we get a drink. I am grinning so much I can only nod my head. Mere hours later we back in the sticky clutch Nova headed home. I am still suffering. Kye and Cath, who seem to like each others company A BIT TOO MUCH are now determined to go to the Reading Festival this year and want to know why I'm not interested. I suggest, as an answer, that they just put me out of my misery and go on a rampage - kilin' everyone they meet, like Micky and Mallory - they could just become Devon's NATURAL BORN KILLERS. There is a pause. The sign saying "KEEP DEVON SHIPSHAPE" goes past. They make not entirely convincing excuses not to go on the rampage and tell a Devon joke.  Two cows in a field. One says to the other "You know Daisy, Oim a bit worried about cartching this 'ere mad cows disease thing." "Oh ?" says Daisy "Oim Nart" "Why's thart then?" " ' Coz Oim a Tractor !"

Pharaohs of London

I listen to music at work and occasionally the two fit perfectly.

Last year I was working the middle of Whitehall for the Department of Energy and a particular album of music fit like a glove and it's only after the next London stint has started and I've stayed here at length that I've come realise why.

I'm not to into Philip Glass, (only really got into him via his versions of Heroes and Low) but  Akhnaten  is awesome. A fantastic operatic soundtrack to ominous reading of the inscriptions around the Pharaoh's tomb, ending with the sad little notice given to tourists, it was very weirdly appropriate listening in the middle of the English white marble Vatican city of civil service bureaucracy. 

Lately I've come to realise that London is in a wider sense starting to resemble ancient Egypt. Not in climate terms obviously. But in social mobility terms.

The non-domicile tax status provided by successive British governments (that we now know have been terrified of the media elite) have made London the preferred haunt of the 1% of the 1%. 

A British Monaco? Sounds good? 

Aside from further completely isolating London from the nation of which it is supposed to be the capital city, and as a Northerner I probably feel that more than most, it also creates a creeping unease with some of the scum you are sharing the pubs and environs with.

This morning over coffee Akhnaton came on as I read this..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/16/london-grotesque-bashar-boris-ken 

.. which prompted me to blog today