Archive for June, 2008

I came back from Sonar at the beginning of this week and let me be the first to say that it was, without a shadow of a doubt, the single shite-est festival it has ever been my misfortune to attend. But first a word about Spaniards; your average Spaniard is not a man of style, grace or elan. They favour the dreadlock/mullet style hairdo for some fucking reason, love dogs on strings and filthy black clothes. I do not understand this as I think I read somewhere that Madrid is a fashion capital. Not to the Spanish, it’s not. I’ve been to Barcelona at non-festival times too, so don’t just blame the vile Glastonbury style atmos, it always looks like just outside a Levellers gig.

Back to the festival. It was not so much a festival as two poorly organised all-nighters that happened to be on concurrent days, not that the acts themselves were bad, Anti-Pop Consortium, SebastiAn, Roisin Murphy, Krazy Baldhead, Diplo, Justice, Boys Noize, Shackleton, Mary Ann Hobbs, the list, quite literally, goes on (they also had the bewilderingly popular Madness [I'm fucked if I'm supplying them with a link] in the largest arena, Sonarclub [which leads me on to something else inexplicable, the arenas were called Sonarclub, Sonarpark, Sonarpub and Sonarlab and it was Sonarpark and Sonarclub which had rooves. Surely the least you can expect from a park is that it is outside? And I would want a roof on my pub or lab. Especially the lab, anything could go wrong with that sort of caviler approach to construction.] which was utterly rammed. I am aware that they used to be slightly relevant but have you seen those hateful adverts with Suggs in pretending to have his nonfriends around to dinner at his awful knocked-through house? Ugh.) it’s just that it did NOT feel like a festival. It felt like some description of cunt convention.

To buy a drink there was an unduly complex procedure where you had to go to one end of the bar and buy a ticket specific to the type of drink you wanted, then go to the other end of the bar and trade these tickets in for whatever drink it was you wanted. I have been to both Primavera Sound and Benicassim where they have a similar system except, and here’s the crucial part, you could buy any number of tickets from a seperate booth which could then be traded in for any drink as each ticket had the same value. I understand why they do this, it is clearly a security thing, it prevents sticky fingers, but as on more than one occasion the same person served my drink as served my tickets, here it is about as much use as Anne Frank’s drum kit.

Yes, the artist were good but artists alone do not make a festival, you need atmosphere and excitement too. This had none of those. On the whole, I would rather have dinner at Sugg’s house.

You will probably already have heard the frustratingly brilliant ‘Oceanwalk’ from that Clarks shoe advert that has been on TV recently, if not go here and check it out… back now? Good. Brilliant isn’t it? Yes, yes it is, I will accept no other answer. Straight away you can download the live album ‘Young Capitalist’s Starter Kit for precisely nothing at all from his myspace … Done that yet? Good. Now this is where it gets more awkward. As far as I am aware none of his albums are available for purchase in the sovereign isle where this drivel is based so you have two options which are:

1) Navigate yourself to another page on the internet and buy them from America (we all live in a global village now, you know.)

2) Go to your local record shop* and buy all the Buck65 (who to be honest, is better) albums that you can find.

While I have nothing against downloading illegally per se I think that in this instance the dude deserves the money. The first one I would suggest you buy is “You And Yer Good Ideas”. Now go forth and consume.

While we are on the subject of white hip-hop check out C.R. Avery. More a spoken word artist that strictly Hip-Hop and completely genius. Go, quickly, now! Or here.

*A record shop, for those of you who don’t know, used to be somewhere like HMV or Virgin/Zavvi/Whatever they are calling themselves now before they became DVD emporiums, with a few CD compilations scattered at the back. Oh what glorious days they were! Being able to go in to one of these shops and see albums and singles**, being able to browse and being able to discuss purchases with helpful and knowledgeable staff. Nowadays the staff seem to be hired because they turned up for the interview. I know this because I used to work in one of these CD Supermarkets.

** A single used to be a CD/7″/10″/12″ that had two or three songs on, usually the one you paid your £1.99 for and two other new and original songs. Not a “Radio Edit” (i.e. Shit version) of the song you wanted and a ringtone.