Category Archives: Festivals

‘Groovy, groovy, groovy’: listening to Woodstock 50 years on – all 38 discs

Posted on by

It was a blueprint for Live Aid and every mega-festival since. We survey a new archive box set – in full – to uncover the real story of these ‘three days of peace and music’

A few weeks back, my Twitter feed was suddenly clogged with misty-eyed reminiscences of Live Aid. It is now generally regarded as a white saviour festival of mostly dreadful music. Still, there’s much nostalgic love for Tony Hadley’s leather trench coat, and Queen’s alarming “no time for losers” philosophy. I lived through it; I remembered how a bunch of craven, ageing rock stars fell over themselves to reboot their careers. OK, I was 21, and cynical, but I was there for it, watching it all unfold on TV. I understand it.Woodstock – which celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend – was a primitive blueprint for Live Aid, and every mega-festival since. Its cultural weight has risen and fallen over the decades – depending on who you talk to, it was either the pinnacle of 1960s counterculture or the rain-sodden end of a dream. I was four years old. The soundtrack album would be in friends’ houses in the 70s, and the movie seemed to be on TV every year, so I’m part of a generation that thinks it knows Woodstock without having been there. But the movie is incomplete and out of sequence – some of the story is as fictionalised as Bohemian Rhapsody.

Out this month is a 50th anniversary archive box set – all 38 CDs of it – which presents the festival in something approximating real time. Folk-blues singer Richie Havens, who opened the event while almost every other act was stuck in traffic, would later claim he “played for nearly three hours … I sang every song I knew!” We now know he only played for 45 minutes. This is an audio vérité documentary, right down to the on-stage announcements: “Eric Klinnenberg, please call home … Dennis Dache, please call your wife … Karen from Poughkeepsie, please meet Harold at the stand with the blood pills …” I listened to all 38 discs in sequence, over three days.

Continue reading...

For one night only: how Edinburgh’s standups spend their day off

Posted on by

For performers, the fringe is a delirium-inducing month of nonstop work. They get just one day off throughout August – so they have to use it wisely…

I love my show and when you have a day off, the next day is a bit lacklustre. But I do need it because I am a queen and I deserve a rest. I’m of the “living your best life” mantra and I don’t just talk it, I walk it. I’ll have a long spa day – massage, mani, pedi, eyebrows – go for the sexiest dinner in this nice hotel on the bridge with all my girls, then get cocktails. I’m single, but I’m like Lady Gaga – she doesn’t sleep with guys when she’s writing her album because men steal her creative energy. But on my day off, I’m allowed.

Continue reading...

Edinburgh festival performers refuse sterling payments due to Brexit

Posted on by

Artists ask to be paid in euros and dollars as pound continues to fall amid no-deal risk

Increasing numbers of artists are asking to be paid in dollars and euros instead of sterling because of Brexit uncertainty, the director of the Edinburgh international festival has said.

The three-week arts festival opened on Friday and includes 293 performances by 2,600 artists from 40 countries. Speaking during its opening weekend, Fergus Linehan, who has been its director since 2015, said many performers had refused to be paid in sterling.

Continue reading...

Switzerland’s wine festival – in pictures

Posted on by

The Swiss town of Vevey has staged a once-in-a-generation celebration of its winemakers, with fancy dress, alpine horns, cows and dancers kicking off a festival that dates back to the 18th century. The three-week Fête des Vignerons, which began in 1797, is held roughly every 20 years and on Thursday 5,500 locals donned costumes, wigs and makeup to take part in the gala opening

Continue reading...

‘People think I’m very odd’: how Ibrahim Mahama brought Ghana’s past to Manchester

Posted on by

From second-hand train seats to old school cupboards, the artist has transported discarded objects from his west African homeland to create a ‘parliament of ghosts’

‘We’re haunted all the time by ghosts of the past,” says Ibrahim Mahama as we sit on dirty old plastic second-class Ghana Railways carriage seats in Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Even these seats from an abandoned railway? “Especially these,” he says, smiling.

Mahama, a junkyard utopian whose art involves recycling stuff that’s lost its purpose, bought up rows and rows of these seats. He packed them into shipping containers and sent them on a 5,000-mile trip, from his west African homeland to the Whitworth, along with some school cupboards no longer fit for purpose, exercise books of children now grown up, and the minutes of Ghanaian parliamentary debates now deemed obsolete.

Continue reading...

Nico in Manchester: ‘She loved the architecture – and the heroin’

Posted on by

She had been a top model, then sang with the Velvet Underground, and in 1981 Nico moved to Manchester. Her friends there share their touching, alarming memories of ‘a true bohemian’

An imperious blond German ex-model with a voice once described as like “a body falling through a window”, Nico was already extraordinary by the time she leant her vocals to songs including Femme Fatale and All Tomorrow’s Parties on the Velvet Underground’s classic first album, produced by Andy Warhol.

Soon after that, she embarked on a solo career, and made records, such as The Marble Index, that were even darker, with despairing lyrics and a wheezing harmonium accompanying Nico’s Teutonic tones. By this time, she was no longer blond – she disdained her traffic-stopping looks – and was addicted to heroin.

Continue reading...

Revelry and rebellion: is this the greenest Glastonbury yet?

Posted on by

David Attenborough and the climate crisis take centre stage, while single-use plastic is banned for the first time. But have the festival’s environmental efforts gone far enough?

Twelve years ago, Sheryl Crow was laughed at for suggesting that green-minded people should use only a single square of toilet paper every time they go to the loo (or two to three sheets for “pesky situations”). Well, we’re not laughing now, are we?

On the day before the hottest day of the year so far (temperatures at Glastonbury hit 30C, elsewhere in the UK 35C), Crow knocks out hit after hit on the Pyramid stage under a giant globe, Glastonbury’s reminder that we’ve only got one planet, and dedicates Soak Up the Sun to Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist and school striker. Thunberg’s spirit is embedded in Worthy Farm this year. There are murals of her face with the slogan: “What would Greta do?”

Continue reading...

‘We’ve still got queues, but this year for water not wellies’

Posted on by

Festival shuts down showers and offers extra shady areas, while sales of ice-cream soar

Long queues at taps and shower closures were seen across the Glastonbury site as the festival dealt with its hottest day as temperatures rose to 30C on Saturday.

Showers were closed across the site as a precautionary measure to preserve water as temperatures soared and the festival’s management coped with the demands of 200,000 people requiring drinking water in challenging conditions.

Continue reading...

Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig: ‘Rock music is dead, so it’s more joyful to me’

Posted on by

As his band gear up for Glastonbury, the singer talks about his Jewish politics and how there are musicians far more privileged than him

If you have never been to Glastonbury, you will always get people telling you that “it’s just got a different vibe to other festivals, man”. Even platinum-selling musicians. “It’s like being in some weird medieval village,” says Ezra Koenig, frontman of Vampire Weekend, who had played Glastonbury three times with the band before going as a punter in 2014, when it finally clicked. “I stayed up all night and understood: this is very special. I can’t think of many festivals where there are old hippies who do their thing and keep to themselves, and keep that spirit of the 60s alive with arts and crafts. And there’s all the secret stuff you find in the woods, the various raves, little mini pubs everywhere ... Everybody’s walking through the mud and there’s a real communal energy to it. Probably a lot of them are on drugs, too.”

His band are playing their biggest-ever slot at this year’s festival, Sunday night on the Pyramid stage just before the Cure’s headline performance. They released their fourth – and best – album Father of the Bride in May, and like the previous two, it went to No 1 in the US and Top 3 in the UK. It came six years after the last one, Modern Vampires of the City, with Koenig having taken creative control after fellow songwriter Rostam Batmanglij left the band.

Continue reading...

Glastonbury organiser says some men refuse to deal with her

Posted on by

Emily Eavis says there are male execs in music industry who insist on speaking to her father

The Glastonbury festival organiser, Emily Eavis, has said some men in the music industry still refuse to deal with her despite her taking over responsibility from her father for overseeing the lineup.

Speaking days before the start of this year’s event, Eavis, 40, who has been booking acts at Glastonbury for half her life, said she was often the only woman in meetings with music moguls.

Continue reading...

Novelist Pat Barker hits out at ‘fashionable’ diversity schemes

Posted on by

Prize-winning author says she distrusts post-Brexit interest in regional and working-class voices

The Man Booker prize-winning author Pat Barker says she “distrusts” London publishing’s recent burst in diversity initiatives, calling the rise in interest in regional and working-class voices a “fashionable” move motivated by fear after the Brexit referendum.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Sunday, the Durham author said she had observed an increased appetite for authors based outside London, or from working-class and minority ethnic backgrounds, over the last three years.

Continue reading...

Women are happier without children or a spouse, says happiness expert

Posted on by

Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan says traditional markers of success no longer apply

We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest sub-group in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.

Continue reading...

It Must Be Heaven review – Palestine’s holy fool lives the dream

Posted on by

The latest satire-fable from Elia Suleiman is as droll as ever, but while there’s a kernel of seriousness here it too often lapses into elusive mannerism

The Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman, dishevelled yet dapper at all times and never without his hat, saunters across continents in this new movie, fixing the amusingly surreal tableau scenes he comes across with a mildly perplexed gaze. He doesn’t talk and smiles just once, when a tiny little bird (a digital creation) flies into his hotel room and drinks water from a cup while is working at his laptop. Suleiman is the holy fool who is no fool.

The premise for this film that he is playing himself: travelling abroad from Nazareth, coming first to Paris and then to New York, trying to speak to producers about getting his latest film made. (In real life, he must surely be more diplomatic and persuasive than his alter ego here, the Suleiman who maintains an enigmatically satirical silence in the face of one producer’s obtuse idiocy.) Everywhere he looks, often in eerily deserted streets – surely Suleiman was shooting on very early summer mornings – he finds scenes of choreographed absurdism, gently but pointedly ridiculing the pomposity of uniformed officialdom. The title itself sounds like some lost Talking Heads track describing a place where things happen in a dream.

Continue reading...

Matthias & Maxime review – Xavier Dolan’s heartfelt tale of male longing

Posted on by

Two friends’ playful kiss rekindles suppressed feelings in a film swept along by rattling dialogue and simmering tensions

Xavier Dolan’s unstoppably garrulous, sweet-natured new movie is a coming-of-age film, or possibly an approaching-thirtysomethinghood film. Or perhaps it’s a portrait of a bunch of friends for whom things would never be the same again after that summer. It is not exactly a sexual awakening tale because the sexuality in question never really went to sleep. But it is a love story.

Related: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood review - Tarantino's dazzling LA redemption song

Continue reading...

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood review – Tarantino’s dazzling LA redemption song

Posted on by

With Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt playing a TV actor and stuntman who cross paths with the Manson cult, Tarantino has created outrageous, disorientating entertainment

Quentin Tarantino’s exploitation black-comedy thriller Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood finds a pulp-fictionally redemptive take on the Manson nightmare in late-60s California: a B-movie loser’s state of grace.

It’s shocking, gripping, dazzlingly shot in the celluloid-primary colours of sky blue and sunset gold: colours with the warmth that Mama Cass sang about. The Los Angeles of 1969 is recovered with all Tarantino’s habitual intensity and delirious, hysterical connoisseurship of pop culture detail. But there’s something new here: not just erotic cinephilia, but TV-philia, an intense awareness of the small screen background to everyone’s lives. Opinions are going to divide about this film’s startling and spectacularly provocative ending, which Tarantino is concerned to keep secret and which I have no intention of revealing here. But certainly any ostensible error of taste is nothing like, say, those in the much admired Inglourious Basterds. And maybe worrying about taste is to miss the point of this bizarre Jacobean horror fantasy.

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers – and conversely, of course, to shudder at the horror and cruelty and its hallucinatory aftermath.

Our first non-hero is Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a failing cowboy actor and alcoholic going to seed in the autumn of his career and in moments of bad temper beginning to resemble Jack Black. His best friend – pathetically, his only friend – is Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in his Ocean’s-Eleven mode of easygoing competence and imperturbability. Cliff is Rick’s stunt double and has an awful secret in his life: a grisly event for which he may or may not be guilty. Cliff has to drive Rick everywhere because he has lost his licence, and he is Rick’s best pal, assistant, factotum, and the person who has to straighten Rick when he bursts into boozy tears of self-pity.

Continue reading...

Cannes festival in row after director and baby blocked from Palais entry

Posted on by

British film-maker claims she was denied access to Marché du Film, then told to pay fee for baby and wait two days for it to be processed

The Cannes film festival has been criticised for its treatment of mothers and babies after a female director claimed she and her child were prevented from entering the festival site.

British director Greta Bellamacina, whose film Hurt By Paradise is screening in the market section of the festival, said the festival had displayed an “outrageous” attitude after she attempted to enter the festival with her four-month son.

Continue reading...

Teknival: 30 suffer hypothermia after snow hits French music festival

Posted on by

Red Cross steps in after temperatures drop below zero at unauthorised electronic music festival

About 30 people have been treated for hypothermia at an outdoor techno music festival in France after unexpected snowfall left many sheltering under survival blankets distributed by the Red Cross.

About 10,000 people attended the unauthorised Teknival 2019 festival in the central Creuse region at the weekend, where temperatures dropped to -3C over Saturday night.

Continue reading...