29 Great moments from the 10th Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Empire Polo Club, Indio, California, April 17-19, 2009. 1. Fleet Foxes drawing a huge, mellow crowd, sweltering under woolly beanies on the Outdoor Stage, Saturday, playing ‘White Winter Hymnal’. Temperature: 98 degrees. 2. Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Coachella Stage Sunday, dressed as a disco ball, doing The Cramps’ ‘Human Fly’. 3. One minute, 32 seconds into the beautific maelstrom of My Bloody Valentine’s finale, ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 4. Drive By Truckers Shonna Tucker and Patterson Hood sharing a midsong slug of Jack on the Outdoor Stage, Saturday. 5. Franz Ferdinand recovering their mojo with ‘Take Me Out’, Main Stage, Friday. 6. Leonard Cohen considering us all “friends” and dancing us to the end of love, the Outdoor Stage, Friday. Shame about his cocktail jazz band. 7. Five minutes, 47 seconds into the howling storm of My Bloody Valentine’s finale, ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 8. Morrissey claiming he could smell flesh burning from the Coachella Stage, Friday, and opining, “I hope to God it’s human.” 9. Johnny Marr joining Paul Weller for ‘A Town Called Malice’, Outdoor Stage, Sunday. 10. Tinariwen’s magical Touareg hoedown in the Gobi Tent, Saturday. Only 100 degrees. The guys found it kinda chilly. 11. Mastadon doing ‘Crack The Skye’ in its entirety, Mojave Tent, Saturday headliner. 12. Morrissey staggering offstage in a swoon during ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ because the smell of “burning animals” was making him sick. 13. Paul McCartney’s segue of ‘A Day In The Life’ into ‘Give Peace A Chance’, Friday, Coachella Stage. 14. Macca again, doing George’s ‘Something’ on the ex-Beatle dude’s ukulele. 15. Eight minutes, 4 seconds into My Bloody Valentine’s seering finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Main Stage, Sunday. 16. That’ll be Paris Hilton grooving to The Killer’s Saturday Main Stage headlining opener, ‘Human’. 17. That’ll be The Cure playing on after curfew, having the lights around the polo ground turned up after three hours, adding extra illumination to ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, Coachella Stage headline, Sunday. 18. Ben Bridwell’s awesome overbite during Band Of Horses’ exquisite ‘Is There A Ghost?’, Outdoor Stage, Saturday. 19. Twelve minutes, 15 seconds into the dragonfly lobotomy of My Bloody Valentine’s finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 20. MIA paying her dues to Amy Winehouse who she replaced after Amy’s visa hassles. “They tried to make me do the Oscars. I said No No No!” 21. Bob Dylan And The Band circa Basement Tapes 2009 version aka Conor Oberst And The Mystic Valley Band, Outdoor Stage, Friday. 22. Fifteen minutes 10 seconds into the transcendental nausea of My Bloody Valentine’s finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 23. Public Enemy playing ‘It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back’ on its 20th anniversary, Outdoor Stage, Sunday. 24. Big, big brass boost to TV On The Radio’s ‘Young Liars’, Coachella Stage, Saturday. 25. Michael Franti & Spearhead tipping a Dread to Madness’ ‘Our House’, ACDC’s ‘Back In Black’ and Mungo Jerry’s ‘In The Summertime’, Coachella Stage, Saturday. 26. The Airbourne Toxic Event doing Terence Trent D’Arby’s ‘Wishing Well’, Coachella Stage, Friday. 27. Macca again. Explaining how ‘Blackbird’ was written in the 60s about the struggle for civil rights and deciding, with Obama in the White House, we’ve come a long way. 28. Blitzen Trapper getting their Dead country groove on Gobi Tent, Saturday. 29. Two days, three hours, 14 minutes and 3 seconds into My Bloody Valentine’s finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. Hey, gotta love tinnitus, right? Steve Sutherland

29 Great moments from the 10th Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, Empire Polo Club, Indio, California, April 17-19, 2009. 1. Fleet Foxes drawing a huge, mellow crowd, sweltering under woolly beanies on the Outdoor Stage, Saturday, playing ‘White Winter Hymnal’. Temperature: 98 degrees. 2. Karen O, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Coachella Stage Sunday, dressed as a disco ball, doing The Cramps’ ‘Human Fly’. 3. One minute, 32 seconds into the beautific maelstrom of My Bloody Valentine’s finale, ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 4. Drive By Truckers Shonna Tucker and Patterson Hood sharing a midsong slug of Jack on the Outdoor Stage, Saturday. 5. Franz Ferdinand recovering their mojo with ‘Take Me Out’, Main Stage, Friday. 6. Leonard Cohen considering us all “friends” and dancing us to the end of love, the Outdoor Stage, Friday. Shame about his cocktail jazz band. 7. Five minutes, 47 seconds into the howling storm of My Bloody Valentine’s finale, ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 8. Morrissey claiming he could smell flesh burning from the Coachella Stage, Friday, and opining, “I hope to God it’s human.” 9. Johnny Marr joining Paul Weller for ‘A Town Called Malice’, Outdoor Stage, Sunday. 10. Tinariwen’s magical Touareg hoedown in the Gobi Tent, Saturday. Only 100 degrees. The guys found it kinda chilly. 11. Mastadon doing ‘Crack The Skye’ in its entirety, Mojave Tent, Saturday headliner. 12. Morrissey staggering offstage in a swoon during ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ because the smell of “burning animals” was making him sick. 13. Paul McCartney’s segue of ‘A Day In The Life’ into ‘Give Peace A Chance’, Friday, Coachella Stage. 14. Macca again, doing George’s ‘Something’ on the ex-Beatle dude’s ukulele. 15. Eight minutes, 4 seconds into My Bloody Valentine’s seering finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Main Stage, Sunday. 16. That’ll be Paris Hilton grooving to The Killer’s Saturday Main Stage headlining opener, ‘Human’. 17. That’ll be The Cure playing on after curfew, having the lights around the polo ground turned up after three hours, adding extra illumination to ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, Coachella Stage headline, Sunday. 18. Ben Bridwell’s awesome overbite during Band Of Horses’ exquisite ‘Is There A Ghost?’, Outdoor Stage, Saturday. 19. Twelve minutes, 15 seconds into the dragonfly lobotomy of My Bloody Valentine’s finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 20. MIA paying her dues to Amy Winehouse who she replaced after Amy’s visa hassles. “They tried to make me do the Oscars. I said No No No!” 21. Bob Dylan And The Band circa Basement Tapes 2009 version aka Conor Oberst And The Mystic Valley Band, Outdoor Stage, Friday. 22. Fifteen minutes 10 seconds into the transcendental nausea of My Bloody Valentine’s finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. 23. Public Enemy playing ‘It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back’ on its 20th anniversary, Outdoor Stage, Sunday. 24. Big, big brass boost to TV On The Radio’s ‘Young Liars’, Coachella Stage, Saturday. 25. Michael Franti & Spearhead tipping a Dread to Madness’ ‘Our House’, ACDC’s ‘Back In Black’ and Mungo Jerry’s ‘In The Summertime’, Coachella Stage, Saturday. 26. The Airbourne Toxic Event doing Terence Trent D’Arby’s ‘Wishing Well’, Coachella Stage, Friday. 27. Macca again. Explaining how ‘Blackbird’ was written in the 60s about the struggle for civil rights and deciding, with Obama in the White House, we’ve come a long way. 28. Blitzen Trapper getting their Dead country groove on Gobi Tent, Saturday. 29. Two days, three hours, 14 minutes and 3 seconds into My Bloody Valentine’s finale ‘You Made Me Realise’, Coachella Stage, Sunday. Hey, gotta love tinnitus, right? Steve Sutherland

I first went to the Cannes Film Festival seven years ago; coincidentally, I’d just finished reading JG Ballard’s novel, Super-Cannes, about murder in an ultra-modern business park tucked away in the hills above town. On a morning unencumbered by meetings, film screenings or a hangover, I took a cab from my hotel in Grasse up to Sophia-Antipolis, one of Ballard’s models for the novel’s Eden-Olympia technopole. It struck me, as the cab drove round pristine asymmetrical lawns, past the white concrete and powder blue glass buildings, the bougainvilleas and cycads, that like the best science fiction writers, Ballard wasn’t really writing about the future. After all, seeing just how maddeningly perfect and polite Sophia-Antipolis is, you could easily imagine a character like Super-Cannes’ psychiatrist Wilder Penrose standing here next to one of the fountains, under the azure blue Mediterranean sun, explaining in perfectly reasonable and measured tones his theories about the imminent “Darwinian struggle between competing psychopathies.” Ballard’s great theme, which he brilliantly captured in novels like High Rise and Super-Cannes and the short story collection Vermillion Sands, explored what happens when madness descends on a privileged and apparently peaceful closed community. As bleak and dystopian as they were, the novels were not without a conspicuously puissant strain of black humour -– as Ballard opened High Rise, “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” Hilarious and horrible, equally. In his last two novels, Millennium People and Kingdom Come, Ballard turned his attention to middle England, where "The suburbs dream of violence.” Perhaps unfashionably, I actually prefer these books at back end of Ballard’s career to the quasi-surreal futuristic symphonies of his early novels. Having grown up in middle England, it’s not hard to imagine something nasty rustling in the privet hedges or maniacal schemes emerging over drinks in the tennis club. Ballard found a dark poetry in the modern landscape of shopping malls, airports and motorways; the consumerist drive. “Everything is for sale now,” he wrote. “Even the human soul has a barcode. We’re driven by bizarre consumer trends, weird surges in the entertainment culture, mass paranoias about new diseases that are really religious eruptions. How to get a grip on all this?” There was something extraordinarily pessimistic about Ballard’s novels. Skimming through his books last night, I noticed that the closing lines of his last novel Kingdom Come, about a shopping centre in a fictional commuter belt town, drew glum conclusions about the human condition: "One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream... In time, unless the same woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise." As for Ballard on film, I think Spielberg’s version of Empire Of The Sun -- Ballard’s memoir of internment in a Japanese PoW camp -– is my favourite, and arguably Spielberg’s finest film. It's a robust, old fashioned loss of innocence story -- ironic, perhaps, considering Ballard was more preoccupied with the future. There's many standout scenes in Spielberg's film, particularly sequence where Jim Graham (Christian Bale) and his fellow PoWs discover a hoard of looted goods -– cars, wardrobes, hatstands, you name it –- still and silent in the wilderness is extraordinarily surreal. As is what follows, when Jim witnesses what he believes to be the light of Miranda Richardson’s Mrs Victor dying and going to Heaven; a brilliant white flash in the distance that, it later transpires, is the blast from Hiroshima. These are incredible movie moments. You wonder what David Lean would have done. Crash, certainly, is an exceptional novel, Ballard’s most challenging, a “deviant thesis,” as he described it in his autobiography, Miracles Of Life. “I would openly propose a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash,” he wrote. “A fusion driven largely by the cult of celebrity. It seemed obvious that the deaths of famous people in car crashes resonated far more deeply than their deaths in plane crashes or hotel fires, as one could see from Kennedy’s death in his Dallas motorcade (a special kind of car crash), to the grim and ghastly death of Princess Diana in the Paris underpass.” It perhaps made sense that it was shot by David Cronenberg, who’d gamely turned his hand to another unfilmable novel, William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch. I think it’s an incredibly assured film, dark and intelligent and as perverse as the novel itself. That we've known of Ballard's impending death for a while -- his autobiography ended on the revelation that he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones -- doesn't make it any less of a shock. He was a brilliant writer, one of the best post-war English novelists with a wholly original take on the world.

“I’m pretty nervous tonight,” Nancy Wallace confesses to a packed Borderline. “I can see the whites of your eyes,” she tells the people in front of her, all of them staring in her direction, rapt as ecstatics, transported, hanging on her every word. There was really no need for Wallace to worry. Three songs into a brief set, drawn from both traditional sources and songs from her recent solo album, Old Stories, she has the audience quite mesmerised, to the extent that a hush falls over the crowd moments into her first number, one of those dark traditional ballads that end up with people in graves, unhappy lives all they’ve left behind, the kind of cheerless fatalism that makes you think of Thomas Hardy and consumptives coughing blood. The grim stuff doesn’t stop here fans of this kind of spectral trad-folk bleakness will doubtless be thrilled to discover. Even a song as superficially pretty as “Many Years” has a disfiguring undertow of loss and elsewhere the songs she sings puts you in mind of forlorn lasses, weeping at gravesides, the weather wet around them, boggy landscapes hung with mist, paupers limping by, children with rickets and stumps for teeth. She’s only on stage for about half an hour, but takes the audience in that time somewhere else entirely and then is gone herself. So now here’s William Elliott Whitmore, his banjo, tattoos and hoarse blues holler, the audience already rowdy and getting rowdier still as Elliott lifts a beer in salute, sits himself down in an ornate wooden chair that looks like the kind of thing you’d find on the back porch of a shack somewhere in the Mississippi Delta and starts bellowing, no other word for the noise he’s making, which is in turn accompanied by much thigh-slapping and noisy foot-stomping, Whitmore making the rowdy most of the limited resources he evidently prefers. The crowd are hooting for more before he’s even finished, surprisingly energised by Whitmore’s songs, most of which when they aren’t about dying seem to be about what happens next, as on “Digging My Grave”, one of many songs in his repertoire about glum death, the big light going out for keeps, the maggoty termination of things. There’s a rousing gospel roar to “Lift My Jug” that further enlivens his clearly besotted fans, some of whom are tempted to sing along, perhaps encouraged by the bottle of what from where I’m standing, which is too far away for a taste, looks like a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that Whitmore offers them. “Would anyone like a sip of this?” he asks, his voice like something malfunctioning badly under the beat-up bonnet of an old truck, not quite a death rattle but heading in the right direction. “Don’t put the cap back on it,” he further instructs. “Keep passing it.” The faithful at the front dutifully obey, although several numbers later, Elliott appears disappointed when the bottle’s handed back to him, not quite empty. Elliott plays the part of the blues hobo well enough, and certainly looks the part. But as with, say, Seasick Steve there’s a hint of pantomime here, a kind of mugging, an overdoing of gruff veracities that occasionally grates. The audience lap it up, though, can’t get enough of it in fact. And it’s difficult in the end not to be swept along by a run of songs like “Hell Or High Water”, “Johnny Law” and “Old Devils” – all from Whitmore’s recent Animals In The Dark album – which come towards the end of another fine Club Uncut night. We’ll be back here again, on May 11, for Pink Mountaintops. See you then.