Taking Stock of Glastonbury

Written by: David Harrison

June 29, 2008 · Filed Under Allegedly, Live, Review · Comment 

Jack Penates and friends rubbishLets take stock of the 5 days in that Beavis’ guys field this week:

Found

  • Some new friends
  • One orange torch
  • One big smelly but well fitting coat
  • A Tent (there were a few available)
  • Someone called Shuan gave me £60 to buy/steal my megaphone then buggered off without it.
  • Someone gave me £50 for helping them up on stage

Lost or Stolen

  • One Bakerlight Handset that had been rewired as a headphone for mixing made by my missus she is very very angry about it.
  • One Mini-KP Kaospad a bunch of leeds and rechargeable batteries
  • Maybe a very tasty bunch of CD’s (not sure yet, a bit too scared to look)
  • One hat with horns like the devil or a cow
  • One set of oversize shades I bought on holiday
  • Dignity on Dancefloor

This is the reason why I didn’t want to go - it costs so much to go to Glastonbury, both personally and financially. In time effort, hard cash, and your best party kit that gets stolen. I always end up losing out. If you found the retro phone handset/kaospad or CD’s, please get in touch will give you hard cash.

TOP ACTS

  • Manu Chao
    Where have you been all my life, we wanted ‘Bongo Bong’ though.
  • Black Mountain
    Ah someone booked a rock band! Aces! Call out the beardo’s! Loved the end of their set - “We are going to play one more’. Cue enchanting 15 minute pink floydesque physcadelica. With some very pacey stage managers.
  • Neil Diamond
    What happened to ‘Girl You’ll be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’? We don’t care about the god songs on the new album. May I also suggest learning the name of where you are: “hellooo Glastonberry”.
  • The Banjo Circus
    The smallest Banjo Circus in the world ever! Made me believe I can do acrobatics. And remind me why redheads are the boss.
  • Trash City
    The random trance of trash city – imagine finding a flaming mad max baddie headquarters at 4am full of crazy midlanders. Could of done with some Lionel Richie though throw a random smack in the middle of it. Nice to meet a 60 year old raver though.
  • Newton Faulkner
    Until recently thought that white guys in dreads only should be allowed to a) sell falafels b) do the lighting rigging, I will now add c) Sing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to a billion teenage girls with a load of acoustic guitar gimmicks to that list

TOP GRIPES

  1. Glastonbury is full of bullshit and double standards: it’s like getting out of a prison to get in, messages of peace love tidy up and happiness. But all the punters leave it like a dump - disgusting.
  2. Music seems to be painfully music-industry indie-based, not that much experimental music on the main stages. Doesn’t really support the genuine alternative scene in that respect. Feels like a marketing exercise in the same people making the big bucks and getting the exposure.
  3. The big band areas of burger bars and gurning idiots that really need a mirror put in their faces.
  4. Now combine 1 to 3 and you have Jack Penate and friends - (allegedly - legal Ed). They were camped near us. They were rude, self-important on coke (seemingly) and some other camper spotted a lovely crackpipe. They left their camp really dirty and didn’t tidy up anything. Probably got paid a relative fortune and treated everyone around them and the farm with total disrespect. This is the mindset of possibly every fouth camp that didn’t tidy up, got wankered, took drugs and then left everything in a field. Spoilt twats deserved a kicking and offered them it too. Not surprising they snuck off in the morning, one of them even walked off while in his tent so ashamed on his comedown.

Maybe it is time to call it a Day – the Message isn’t working

It is more of an issue now then a spare ticket being sold here and there, of course it is reflection of a wider throwaway culture. But in the build up to Glastonbury I think the touting talk/Jay Z talk/Tent Peg talk all come back to one thing. Respect for everyone on site and that disposable culture can’t be maintained. I would find it hard to justify putting on the festival if I owned it. Why not just have a smaller more sustainable festival?

You can’t organise it and then have some very token gestures on charity donations. There was a sign somewhere that said ‘not just a marketing gimmick’ - but I think Glastonbury’s green credentials are the biggest marketing green gimmick of all time.

How about not having 200,000 burn rubber, fire, petrol, use plane miles, and have endless lines of cars coming to a field? Surely that would be the most effective manner to ‘all do our little bit’, or ‘be kind to the farm’. Maybe I am being grouchy and I have had a lot of great times at Glastonbury, but with every year it seems more hypocritical even having the festival on at all.

So if you have to have another one - this is a festival with almost 200k people every year, about a quarter of them working. So cooking food, sucking poo, performing on stage, making a Wickerman…it seems possibly a third are just there to get ‘tarded up on drugs, steal shit, and then leave it all behind when they pop off back to suburbia. Maybe the festival needs to become a tad more militant?

If everyone was involved, then would they respect what you do more? How about Burning Man’s theme, lets ban money on site, let’s take away the bars, let’s take away the burger vans, let’s take away the headliners and the expensive hitters. Let’s all get involved, get up there on a Wednesday and make some reason to barter for food/drink/entertainment. Let’s ban petrol generators and electricity on site. Let’s all get involved to make it work. Let’s have a production train or two taking the kit off and on site. Let’s make the BBC take down their glittery production. “Get into the festival or don’t turn up” should apply from top to bottom.

Whatever happens, something has to change as the state of the site was unacceptable to do it like this again.

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Seconday Ticketing - Touts gone wild

Written by: David Harrison

May 27, 2008 · Filed Under Blather, Industry · Comment 

The days of that yellow-toothed bloke shouting ‘BUY AND SELL TICKETS!’ outside gigs haven’t gone yet, but there is a lot more profitable way to do it these days. The last two years have seen the growth of a tout market that has become so big, it is considerably larger then some of the companies that actually put on the shows it is touting for. This ‘tout market’ has even got a proper ‘legit’ name these days - Secondary Ticketing.

Secondary Ticketing was apparently worth up to £200m in 2007, with the primary ticket market at £790m over the same period. Could that be possible? In two years, could the more respectable side of the tout market have swelled to be worth a quarter of the old, legit ticket-selling industry?

In a meeting last week, I found myself in a room where Viagogo, Seatwave, Getmein, etc, were all represented. Interestingly, they are all Americans. I can’t help but think along the lines of ‘Americans coming over here, with their convienent user-friendly technology and free market ethics’ in order to exploit our own greed.

It would seem most UK promoters have slept through the development of this industry - it is more then their jobs’ worth to deal with them. Now it would seem this strategy may have been to their peril. As it becomes established, and worth so much, it becomes a lot harder to legislate against, plus now some of the bigger artists are thinking – ‘maybe we can make a load more money here’…

So should the government ban secondary ticket selling? In that aforementioned room, where the great and the good in the industry allegedly came to try to come to some kind of consensus, it couldn’t seem further away. This conference was a mess of claims and counter-claims, but sifting through everyone’s opinion there are essentially 3 outcomes.

  1. Allow concert tickets to be sold again but for only 10% more the original price
  2. Allow concert tickets to be sold again but with a tithe going back to the artists
  3. Allow concert tickets to be sold again – i.e do nothing at all.

The last time the government sat down at talked about this, they all went ‘errm , do you think? Is that the time… I have to rush…’ and went for option 3. Now in 2008, they are umming and ahhing over a law that requires buyers of paintings to pay a tribute to the original artist…and in the end will probably once again go for something like option 3 - and do nothing solid again until the industry really is in a mess.

Meanwhile, those Americans with their technology and free trade ethics, are making more money than I care to imagine from the UK’s exploding live industry and festival scene. They have even made an industry association to keep practices nice http://www.asta-uk.org/

Some other Americans, Live Nation and AEG Live, have noticed they can mark up a £20 gig ticket, by bundling it with some cheap champagne and a five-fingered shuffle for corporate clients. While some booking agents are seeing the potential for higher show revenues are asking promoters give the secondary sales auction sites a direct allocation of tickets after all if touts can tout then artists can tout a lot better.

The UK Government itself is unlikely to actually do anything until there is some particular disaster, say - a Sun campaign to show that terrorist money is being laundered through ticket touts, or other such sensationalist nonsense. But since that is about as likely to happen as Wolverine winning the next general election, nothing looks set to happen in the near future.

So what is happening with Concert Ticketing, will it be the new frontier for an artist pay package? Not much in the way of leglisation, that’s for sure. So while the artist/agent and ticket tout get inventive I think the customers might wonder why their tickets costs are going through the roof.

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The Cure: gimmicking the number 13

Written by: Hugh Platt

May 2, 2008 · Filed Under Blather · 1 Comment 

RobertSmith250The Cure have a great back catalogue. At their shows earlier in the year they literally excited Music Towers so much we forgot to write a review. Now they’ve decided it’s about time they add to their already-stupidly-impressive songsheet with a new album, due out on September 13. Did you see that? September 13. It’s their thirteenth studio album as well, so the band have decided that on the 13th of every month between now and the release of the album, they’re going to release a new single. Wowsers. The first single, ‘The Only One’, is out on May 13, with ‘Freakshow’ being the title of June’s release. No news as yet on July and August’s songs, but we imagine they will be just as special.

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