littled.net

Just got back from Latitude 2008. Here are my festival highs:

• Elbow and Sigur Rós on the Obelisk arena on Saturday night. Utterly amazing
• Grinderman on Sunday. What can you say, just brilliant
• Some other bands, notably Gravenhurst and Truckers of Husk
• The Literature tent. What a great idea. Especially when it features Robin Ince and Ros Noble doing a “John Peel-off”
• Joanna Newsom. Previously I wasn’t that convinced by her but thought she was  spellbinding, even when she kept forgetting the lyrics to one of her songs she was so nervous. Bless her.
• The beer. Not just crap Carling but proper real ales: Hector’s Pure and Scarecrow. Nice one.
• Those refundable cups at the beer tents: what a great idea. Meant the site wasn’t a sea of broken plastic or paper cups
• Making an effort to be green

And lows:

• Julian Cope coming on late and only playing three songs
• Franz Ferdinand. Yawn. So, so boring
• Parents taking up four acres of space in the arenas with all their chairs, wheelbarrows, blankets and tents, and then talking all the way through the sets anyway. Bah!
• Not being able to get anywhere near the comedy tent for most of the festival.
• The size of the programme — like carrying a paperback book around with you

For a once keen gig goer, gigs have become more like buses for me of late; nothing for ages then an embarrassment of riches. Not like London buses ever approach anything like riches, although they are frequently quite an embarrassment.

Anyway,  after the wonders of Gong at the Meltdown festival I went to see the astounding Yndi Halda at the Barbican on the following Friday. They were supporting Ólafur Arnalds who I’d never heard of before — an Icelandic chap who does that kind of electronica / modern composition thing. I didn’t think Yndi Halda’s set really got going until the second half and it ended with in complete meltdown with ‘Illuminate my heart my darling’. The new stuff was pretty interesting with lyrics and all.

So, following that off to My Bloody Valentine at the Roundhouse on the Monday. I knew their reputation for noise terror and this was confirmed by others  who went to see them on the previous nights so I wore my earplugs all the way through in a true rock and roll style. Glad I did, especially for the noise-drone apocalypse at the end. It was so loud it warped time, so I have no idea how long it was — fifteen, twenty minutes?  I have never seen an audience so keen to leave the auditorium and was probably the only gig where a dedicated fanbase didn’t call for an encore.

What I didn’t manage to do was to get to any of the Radiohead gigs in Victoria Park. I have no idea how I managed to miss these being announced but I did. Odd, seeing as I get RSS alerts from Dead Air Space but I obviously just chose to ignore them. As I write this I’m listening to “Radiohead From the Basement” which just confirms for me, rather unfortunately seeing as I missed their gigs, that they are simply the best band ever and “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” is well on its way to being my favourite Radiohead song.

“From the Basement” is well worth checking out: songs from ‘In Rainbows’ and its mini-album sequel played live in Nigel Godrich’s studio. I was particularly impressed with Thom Yorke’s drumming on “Bangers and Mash”. Two drummers? One of them a singer? Hmm, watch out, it could all go a bit Seconds Out if you’re not careful. Anyway, it shows them still at the top of their game. How many other bands have remained so good fifteen or so years into their career and developed with every album?

This weekend I saw the wonderful Gong playing at Massive Attack’s Meltdown festival in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. What started as a nostalgic indulgence of my misspent teenage years listening to early 70s prog and psyc ended up with me totally transfixed by a band led by a 70 year old man in a red-sequined dress.

It wasn’t a bad line up considering that that all the original drummers (Rashid Hourai, Pip Pyle and Pierre Moerlin) are now dead, as is the sadly missed Bloomdido Bad de Grasse himself, Didier Malherbe. However we did get Steve Hillage, Miquette Giraudy, Gilli Smyth and Mike Howlett; the latter in a particularly fetching monk’s cowl which was later removed with some difficulty by a roadie. Despite some notable absences in personnel, the sound was all present and correct: walls of glissando guitar, a rhythm section so tight you couldn’t slide a sheet of A4 between it, scary chromatic riffs and even scarier pixie costumes.

The set was amazing and took in most of the classic period, err, classics, starting with Fohat… and ending with You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever. We even got “Light in the Sky” off of Hillage’s Motivation Radio which prompted the red-sequined dress affair.

Anyway, it all took me back to more innocent days when the term PHP meant so much more to me than the name of a web programming language. That’s Pot Head Pixie for the uninitiated. My path to Gong went via lots of other prog and psyc bands: Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd / Barrett, Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, Caravan. This was between the years of 15 and 18 when I should have been listening to the Smiths, shambly indie music and Madchester. When I was at Kent University I even visited the homes of Richard Sinclair and Hugh Hopper. That’s dedication for you. I didn’t manage to get Richard Sinclair to one of my band’s gigs though, even though we did play a version of “In the Land of Grey and Pink”. Ungrateful so-and-so.

The Independent recently ran an interview with Daevid Allen which reminded me just how loveable Gong are and how exciting that time round the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s was, both politically and musically. I particularly like the bit about how Allen tried to sneak back from France into the UK for a gig after he’d been refused entry:

“I came through in a van with a photo of the Buddha on my passport,” he recalls.       

There’s more to say about Gong and indeed lots of other bands I used to love and I plan to return to them. For now though, check out this footage of Gong on YouTube playing “Fohat digs holes in space” from 1972. Camembert Electrique is quite the bad-trip album (”finger on the trigger and your body burning up!”) but this is just plain frightening.