Glastonbury from the armchair

I’ve never been to Glastonbury.  I keep saying “one day” but the sheer size of the thing puts me off to be honest.  Most years I spend a sizeable part of the last weekend in June drinking beer and watching the spectacle from the comfort of my armchair and this was no exception.

Friday saw Florence and the Machine headline, what little I saw of this was pretty good.  I’m not a fan but Flo has loads of energy and put on a good show.  Motorhead were on earlier in the day, I saw them at a festival back in the 80’s and they sounded the same as they always have.  Lemmy looks terrible but what else would you expect?  I caught a bit of proper R&B soul from a fella called Leon Bridges and really enjoyed it.  Mary J. Blige also played but fell into the trap of performing vocal gymnastics while her backing vocalists sang her songs, piss poor show.  I also enjoyed clips from The Vaccines, Libertines, Mark Ronson, Rudimental (always good live), SBTRKT and a tiny bit of Hot Chip.  By the end of the night I’d over indulged in Adnams Broadside.

There was lots of good stuff on Saturday too.  George Clinton’s Funkadelic show looked great fun.  I’m warming to the shouty anarchy of Sleaford Mods, collaborating with Leftfield has to be good.  Burt Bacharach played on the Pyramid stage.  “Who?” asked the family but within minutes we were all singing along.  Paloma Faith is a great performer with a powerful voice and put on a good show.  Pharrel Williams is a great producer but a bit of a knob, the show was fun though.  Headliner was Kanye West.  I like some of his early music but I’m put off by his arrogant persona.  I watched his show with an open mind, hoping to be converted but I wasn’t; more about this in a bit. 

On Sunday evening we watched one of my daughter’s current favourites but Charli XCX didn’t really impress any of us.  A tiny bit of Lionel Ritchie was more than enough.  A couple of songs from Alt J was one too many. Leanne La Havas was OK.  We saw Paul Weller at Latitude a few years ago and he was bloody good too.  Tonight he showed energy, passion and power, proper soulful rock music played by a legend of British music.  My 15 year old Maddie commented; “That old bloke was pretty good dad…” KW take note.  The headliner on Sunday was another group of British musical legends, The Who.  A gig from a band celebrating its fiftieth anniversary could go either way but this one didn’t disappoint.  The band belted out hit after hit, sounded superb and were worthy headliners at Worthy farm.  Highlight for me was ‘Baba O’Reilly which saw the purple princess and I dancing in the living room.  The Adnams Ghost ship was slipping down nicely and our armchair festival finished on a high.

Finally a few more words about the Saturday night headliner, Kanye West.  It’s hard to find the words to describe how I felt about this performance, he was embarrassingly bad.  It started with a low lighting rig making the stage seem small and claustrophobic and KW scowling, no sign of any band.  I thought it would get better, it didn’t.  By the end of the show I was watching only to see how bad it could get.  My Facebook was unanimous, KW was crap.  One friend described watching the show as “like driving past a car crash”.  I’m not a hip hop hater, I have plenty of rap music in my collection and I was blown away watching Jay-Z on the same stage a few years ago. 

KW has seriously lost the plot.  He believes his own hype and really thinks he’s something special.  He doesn’t live in the real world but dwells in one of obscene wealth, alongside his talentless reality star wife, surrounded by people blowing smoke up their backsides.  Kanye West you are an over rated, arrogant, narcissistic wanker.  Take your fake, plastic, fat arsed wife and fuck off due West back across the Atlantic forever. 

And breathe… It’s good to rant.