Edinburgh Diary part three

Edinburgh sunrise

On my last Sunday I was invited to an open mic in the garden at the Pear Tree, where I got up to try out my stand-up routine, such as it is. Having been rehearsing it during my many drunken walks home late at night, it was mostly fresh in the memory, and I mostly pulled it off. The crew I was drinking with loved it, as did one Cammy Sinclair in the crowd, who straightaway got me two gigs for that night, both at decent venues. One of the gigs was at a small comedy showcase and the other was with him and the well-known Phil Kay, on their Cammy and Phil’s Late Night Nonsense show. We sat boozing in the afternoon sun and he told me that “your problem will be when you get successful, you’ll have trouble keeping up the devil-may-care attitude.” I told him that was a problem I was prepared to put up with.

Edinburgh Diary part two

Read part one here

The next night I was inveigled to come along to see Camille O’Sullivan, and I stumped up £18 for a ticket on the grounds that with so many good reviews she must have something. Famous for her interpretations of songs by Nick Cave, Jacques Brel and Tom Waits, her posters featured a six-star review from Time Out, plus a heap of five star reviews from other worthy publications; inevitably I found the show disappointing, partly because my expectations, such as they were, were way off the mark, but mainly because I just did not get it. I’d hoped for someone to update cabaret, but she spent too much time giggling at herself to maintain any sort of spell over me at least, although the rest of the crowd, for what it’s worth, loved her.

Edinburgh Diary part one

I went to the Edinburgh festival because I was offered a job playing accordion for a singer in her cabaret show. The band consisted of me, Sandy the bassist, who got me the job, and her boyfriend Luke, who played the drums. The singer, Gus, turned out to be the daughter of cabaret-comic Kit Hesketh-Harvey, of Kit and the Widow fame, and we spent a few days at their rather pleasant abode in Norfolk rehearsing. The set consisted of a couple of rock covers (Black Keys and Dead Weather), some French chanson (Francoise Hardy and Piaf), some covers of songs Amy Winehouse had covered, and some of Kit’s songs from a show he’d written about Rasputin, which were not really comic enough for him to do in his own show, and were decidedly odd even in our show. The rehearsals, and even into the run, were frequently livened up by father-daughter bickering over how she should present his material.

Rocket Festival, Alamaha de Granada

Excuse the dusty writing style, I thought I might flog this piece, but no joy

Some years ago many of the luminaries of Britain’s free festival scene decamped for Europe. Their reasoning was two-fold: practical, since the weather, which consistantly turns British festival gatherings into Somme-style endurances, is much better on the continent; but also practical, since the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill had given the police a new dynamism in combating the scourge of young people enjoying themselves. The continent promised more tolerance for the travelling free festival scene, and Spiral Tribe and others paraded their “teknival” around for western and central Europe for a good few years. For various reasons, however, that scene has not endured, but the spirit has had a huge impact on its adherents. And so it came about that a few years further down the line some of those same people should decide to set up a festival in the mould of Glastonbury in the dusty hills of Andalucia near Granada.

The three-day Rocket Festival began in 2005 and attempts, according to the website to be a “celebration of life and alternative culture. A meeting of minds for fun and music in a beautiful, rural and sun drenched site in the south of Spain.” Punters are promised “much more than just a concert … a three day celebration of life through music performance and art; a whirlwind weekend of delicious assaults on all the senses.” A fusion of the English festival energy with Spanish sensibilities and a chance to escape the breath-crushing rigmarole of the British licensing system.

So, for example, the line up ran through the night and into the morning. This was the first festival I’ve been to where it was possible to find out exactly who would be playing at 8.30 on Sunday morning on one of six or so different areas. The list of DJs and bands just carried on through the night, into the morning and on again into the afternoon. Of course, away from the main stage, the programme didn’t bear any resemblance to what was actually going on, but there really was no let up at the most of the stages between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

Across the site were sculptures and installations, many built by Glastonbury favourites the Mutoid Waste Company, some of whom have decamped to Italy and who excelled themselves this time with their automated robot pole-dancing CCTV stormtroopers - which were even better than they sound. Elsewhere were billboards of graffiti art, a kids area with climbing nets that were swarming with kids, and a healing area featuring sincere-looking men sitting on blankets.

The line-up was patchy, but included nuggets of gold: Dalston heroes Bad Manners pitched up on Saturday night, Buster Bloodvessel and the boys solid but unspectacular. Mr Bloodvessel’s well reported illness has obviously taken its toll on his vitality, and he led proceedings more nonchalantly than one brought up on stories of his excesses might have expected. Turntablists JFB, alongside beatboxer Beardyman, took full advantage of a packed dance tent to show off their skills, and left the Nextmen, who played the next night, looking lacklustre. Coldcut blew away the main stage, and were the talk of the town for their live video-mixing show. From Spain there seemed at first to be quite a few angry rock bands but that was rectified when flamenco-blues band Los Delinquentes, and Barcelona-based Muchachito Bomo Infierno, with their bright, upbeat, modern rhumba, electrified the crowds. [Full disclosure: I didnt actually see Los Delinquentes and Muchachito Bomo, or Coldcut, because I was too busy tripping my bollocks off while looking after a terrified cuddly toy, but I was trying to appear professional]

The spectacular festival site, with a backdrop of epic Andalucian mountains, was compact, and it was possible to circle the whole site within ten minutes. It was doubtful whether the Spanish truly got the whole idea behind the festival. They didn’t turn up until late on Saturday and then left again sometime on Sunday morning, so the heaving main night was bookended by two of very thin crowds of English people milling around. But why should the Spanish, who are quite used to all night fiestas in the streets of their hometowns, want to lug themselves to a fenced off area in the middle of nowhere, pay good money and then camp in a dusty outcrop with a load of English people?

But thin though the crowd was, Sunday night did hold one golden moment: Zurrapa, a traditional but youthful flamenco group, took to the stage in the Cantina Galactica with a gang of fierce solo dancers and proceeded to show us jaded losers the all-too-rare sight of tradition safely treasured in the hands of the young.

Big Chill, Eastnor Castle

A three-day music festival, widely derided as a "posh glastonbury" which is, however, notably popular amongst people for whom that sounds like a good idea. Set in beautiful surroundings, the overly eclectic line-up and exceedingly "tight demographic" of the punters led me to initially dub it The Big Nil; such cynicism couldnt, however, survive the overwhelming hospitality of a load of slightly trendy yuppies in a field. The blazing sun helped a great deal, and the absence of any of a festival's usual problems - crowding, mud, Bristol hoodlums selling shit hash - along with with a suprising lack of pressure to enjoy yourself combined to provide a pleasant enough time, as long as you werent expecting anything particularly good. The music, in particular, was shite.

Calling it a festival is rather like calling the nails in a coffin the dearly departed. This event has none of the openess of a real festival; Glastonbury has year on year battened down its hatches but it has never dreamed of the punter/performer separation that the Big Chill and its ilk achieves. At a festival worthy of the name, people bring themselves and make the festival themselves, instead of buying tickets, attending and passively being entertained. The tragic English licensing laws dont help, bringing a curtain down on proceedings just when they might be expected to get interesting, but the nub of the problem is in this consumer culture which manifests itself in an artificial and unnecessary gulf between performer and audience. In a real festival the crowd are the performers, even if only a few actually make in onto a stage. This openess and freedom this entails is completely absent at this event, which was veering as close to Glyndeborne as to Glastonbury. The only thing to do was to eat the Mexican mushrooms that everyone seems to be growing in their airing cupboards lately and wonder around the magnificent surroundings, as far away as possible from the tragic range of uninspired "artistes" they'd got in on the cheap.

It wasnt Glastonbury, but then nowadays, nor is Glastonbury.