Just to be clear, there’s no football news this morning, in case anyone thinks I’m ignoring anything. There’s nothing to ignore.
I stayed up late last night watching Glastonbury. Part of me wishing I was young enough to cope with the crowds, another part of me quite happy that I don’t have to cope with crowds.
My reviews to follow.
Rick Astley / Blossoms: His voice sounds somewhat incongruous to The Smiths’ songs, but then he’s not a massive prick like Morrissey, so that works in his favour. He also just seems like a very nice man – his interview with the BBC afterwards was really lovely – and holy cow, he has got extremely impressive hair. He said he was 57 and I thought to myself, it’s a bit unfair how much hair he has. I say this as someone who has much less hair than he used to, but look, he won the genetic lottery as well as the Stock, Aitken and Waterman lottery.
Good guy, very good singer, but I think I’m a better dancer.
8/10.
The Pretenders: Chrissie Hynde looks basically the same now as she did back then. Then being 30 years ago, which is the last time I thought about The Pretenders. Her voice is very distinct, and she does a weird mouth wobble at times, but hey, it works for her. She brought on Johnny Marr, who is not a massive prick, and he brought some very jangly guitar excellence to proceedings.
7/10 (because ‘Don’t get me wrong’ was one of those songs that was so massively overplayed when it was out I grew to loathe it).
Manic Street Preachers: Honestly, when they came on stage, I was like ‘Who is this lead singer dude?’. He looks like some random middle-aged chap. If he had stood beside in the aisle at B&Q I would never have recognised him as the front man of The Manics, as we gave each that nod you give when you’re looking at tools you don’t really know how to use but probably need to keep up the pretence of being an actual man.
I would never have considered myself a big fan of theirs, but they were very good. They had a good beat.
8/10
Guns N’ Roses: Sorry to any fans of theirs but this was garbage. W Axl Rose sounded completely shit, Slash looked like someone had put ‘Make the Slashiest Slash you can make’ into one of those AI image generators, and the vocals were so terrible so I turned it off.
2/10
Leftfield: Leftism is one of my favourite records of all time. I listened to it going around in the car a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still hearing little sounds in the tunes that are new to me. Imagine the stuff I heard way back then, when my consciousness was altered by … erm … helpful psychoactive plant based products and necessary vitamins stamped with the logo of a Japanese car maker.
They still have it.
9.99999/10
Fatboy Slim: Neither fat nor slim, Norman Cook’s DJ set actually mad me a bit sad. Not sad because it was bad. Sad because I wished I was 30 years younger, and in a field in Somerset. Not a random field. The one he was playing in.
As someone who spent a lot of time as a DJ, you have to acknowledge a master of the craft. Genuinely amazing.
10/10
That’s as much as I saw. I’m probably gonna spend the morning on the BBC YouTube. Have a good one folks.
