In a welcome blast of sunshine between downpours, an excursion to the fringe stages on the southern slopes of the Glastonbury site provides a welcome relief from the liquid mud lakes and crowd crushes around the main arenas.
Thunder, lightning and heavy downpours over Glastonbury right now. Deep joy for the 125,000 people already onsite, with more arriving every hour. It seems the gods of rock are angry. And they are not the only ones making a racket.
"Glastonbury!" beams Debbie Harry. "Nowhere else like it!"
Just past midday on Friday in the Vale of Avalon, and the world’s largest voluntary refugee camp is already on the move.
For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of Belle and Sebastian songwriter Stuart Murdoch, God Help The Girl – his debut as a writer and director – will hold few real surprises.
“Welcome to an evening of country and eastern,” smiles Robert Plant as he gestures expansively round this fabled Paris venue, taking in not just the lively capacity crowd gathered here tonight but also to his latest musical collaborators, The Sensational Space Shifters.
It’s not a situation I could have predicted 20 years ago, I’ll admit, but there’s a point I reach quite often on Friday afternoons when all I really want to hear is The Grateful Dead. As default, I’ll cue up something from 1972 – the Wembley Empire Pool set from that year, say – mention it on Twitter, then receive a lot of static from my Dead friends who see me as something of a lightweight for clinging so conservatively to that year.
As an artist, Nick Cave has mastered many different disciplines – musician, novelist and screenwriter among them – but arguably his greatest accomplishment has been the on-going management of ‘Nick Cave’.
I must confess that, until very recently, I hadn’t really heard of Mike Cooper; more evidence, I guess, of the apparently boundless reserves of records from the early ‘70s still to be reissued (the Bob Carpenter album, due to be released on No Quarter in the autumn, is another great example I should write about soon).
Deep into 2001’s Southern Rock Opera , there’s a point where Patterson Hood produces a mission statement for the Drive-By Truckers – and for an enlightened generation of bands from below the Mason-Dixon line. “You think I'm dumb, maybe not too bright,” he sings, “You wonder how I sleep at night/Proud of the glory, stare down the shame/Duality of the southern thing.”
