I’ve been thinking these past couple of days about the dubious furore that has been brewing around Jay-Z’s headline slot at Glastonbury, thanks in part to Noel Gallagher weighing in on the subject last week. There are a lot of issues about non-exclusivity, festival overkill, pervading fear of mud and so on that have impacted on Glasto ticket sales this year, which I can’t really be bothered to rehash here. What does interest me, though, is the perceived unsuitability of Jay-Z as a headliner of the festival. If he isn’t right for Glastonbury, then what is?
I’ve just finished reading the second bunch of extracts from Mark E Smith’s autobiography in this morning’s Guardian, and I must confess to being a bit disappointed. I guess “Renegade: The Lives And Tales Of Mark E Smith” could have gone two ways: a dense and profoundly untrustworthy surrealist tract that followed on from those vividly impenetrable things he used to write for NME as Roman Totale back in the ‘80s; or a massively extended Smith rant, the contents of which we’ll be generally familiar with after three decades of admittedly entertaining interviews.
A couple of interesting books turned up in this morning’s post. Mark Kozelek sent me his collected lyrics, “Nights Of Passed Over”, which also comes with a CD of live and rare recordings, a nice complement to the excellent Sun Kil Moon album which I blogged about last week.
