Music Tuesday September 6, 2005
I enjoyed watching the Glastonbury Festival this year. It looks like a vision of hell sloshing around in mud and a sea of drugs and alcohol, with inadequate toilets, no washing, and about 2 millimeters of flimsy fabric between you and endless rowdy cacophony, if you want any sleep. It seems the people that go there don’t sleep, don’t care about hygiene, accept the rain and mud as one of its British quirks, and probably spend most of their time out of their heads on illegal substances. Someone should do an Hieronymous Bosch painting, called The Garden Of Glastonbury Delights.
What it does though is showcase contemporary talent, bands that I personally may have heard of, but really know nothing about. Bored and irritated with endless streams of choral boys and choral girls, like teenagers messing with music software in their school lunch break – except it’s produced by the corporate industry – I tend to reject musical culture as vapid, dumb and commercial. But of course there are some decent bands about, people who can sing without choral boy-girl accompaniment, who actually play guitars and compose melodies. What’s noticeable about Glastonbury is the absence of “garage”, the avoidance of girl-boy bands, the disinterest in the insipid Top Ten stuff that saturates daytime radio like bad wallpaper. It’s a different kind of audience, where you get to see real bands playing real music: Franz Ferdinand, Razorlight, The Kaiser Chiefs, and Coldplay. Brit music isn’t dead, it’s just hidden under a blanket of Radio 1 rubbish or even worse – where I live – Galaxy FM, a local station.
I wondered recently if there’s a direct correlation between political climate and music. There’s obviously a link; in some respects the creative Britpop of the 90s was a reaction against Thatcherism, and New Labour managed to recruit the sympathies of Blur and Oasis. And the punk rock of the 70s was a reaction against just about everything smug, bourgeois, corporate and boring. Musicians have always been bad boys, and more recently bad girls, making for an interesting sociological study. Some of the punk bands were overtly political, notably the Clash, bless ‘em, and the overlooked Stiff Little Fingers from Belfast, raging about the tensions in Ulster. And of course most iconic of all, the Sex Pistols and their opposition to the Queen’s Jubilee and holidays in the sun. Anarchy for the UK never happened, never will, and looking at Glastonbury from my sofa, dinner plate on lap, I’m rather grateful for that.
Coralled, controlled and exploited for powerful corporate interests, music does nonetheless have a vibrant and youthful energy that’s a wonderful antidote to politicians and the News At Ten. The 70s saw the beginning of the theme tee shirt, when not only musical bands were emblazoned on white cotton, but also slogans and colourful designs. I remember one that suggested a subject or theme associated with a band or ideology I never understood, that may also have been just a simple declaration of interest: “Fuck art, let’s dance”, it said.
As a youngster, I was unequivocally in favour of CND. Nuclear weapons are threatening the world, they kill people in huge and obscene numbers, nuclear weapons = bad. I still think that. But I now understand the complex social and political reasons for armaments, as an example of adult awareness, and the fact that there are plenty of bad guys in the world and you sometimes need the ability to hit them very hard. I was naiive. I now understand how serious economic and political issues hang over entire societies and dictate to their people the quality of life they have, or don’t have. I understand how adult responsibilities smother the carefree idealisms of youth, the happy, sad, hormonal, defiant, sexy, yearning, troubled, rebellious energy of youth, as expressed in contemporary music. I enjoy Glastonbury, appreciating it as a Dionysiac safety valve in a socially, politically and economically constrained society. Not exactly Apollonian because the UK is not exactly classical or refined, but rough-diamond, various, eccentric, sophisticated, resolved, vibrant and experienced and mature; but certainly constrained. John Peel’s favourite tune was Teenage Kicks by the Undertones, and he said it made him cry. They played it at his funeral. Presumably, he was yearning for and remembering lovingly all the freshness of experience, the first sexual discoveries, the vibrant, creative potentials of youth – inescapably linked to musical culture, and what it says about it. Peel loved it all when he was young, and never stopped loving it. And there, perhaps, is a message: the adult world can be overwhelmingly complex and burdensome, and sometimes you need to remember the tee shirt: fuck art, let’s dance. And fuck Radio 1, let’s Glastonbury. Well, you Glastonbury, anyway; I’ll just watch approvingly.
Yay, Glastonbury. I would never, ever go to something like that, never have, but I am glad that thousands of people do and I like to check in while sitting on my sofa, dinner plate on lap.