Cornbury, or Poshstock as it’s sometimes known, is like a mini Knebworth, held in the bucolic grounds of a very big house in the Cotswold country 20 miles from Oxford. There’s champagne by the bottle in the VIP bar and past Cornbury Fests have proved celeb heaven with Prince Harry, Kate Moss (she’s a local) and Jeremy Clarkson all stumping up in 2006.
No famous faces ligging here so far today but we’ll keep ‘em peeled.
Here’s how it’s panning out so far:
I am, I must confess, a bit unclear about what exactly is meant by the very hip term blog house. I've a hunch that it refers to dance music whose success is driven by online theorists rather than exposure in clubs. But to be honest, I've a bit of a dilettante attitude to the dance scene these days: much as I try to keep up to speed with as much music as I can, I think I'm missing a lot of this stuff.
A few years ago, I spent an afternoon in Camden interviewing a mildly psychedelic indie band called Simian whose first record had been pretty good. To be honest, it was a rather frustrating experience: the singer was quite interesting, if detached, but he didn't get a chance to say much because the drummer just wouldn't shut up. With hindsight, the weird power structure made sense. The singer hasn't done much since, while the drummer - James Ford - has become a dark force in British music, producing Arctic Monkeys and Klaxons and making hip little dance records as Simian Mobile Disco with his old bandmate Jas Shaw.
HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO
March 26 to April 1, 1997
MTV fire a string of onscreen presenters, after US ratings drop by 20 per cent. The station's facelift, which it claims will result in the screening of about 20 extra hours of videos a week, with a stronger emphasis on indie, electronica and dance artists, is also believed to have been prompted by a hugely critical music biz poll. The survey, by the Record Industry Association of America, suggests that MTV has become "surprisingly irrelevant" to consumers.
