Glastonbury

[irishfoxkev]

Thought The Killers were billiant in the surprise guest slot on Sunday afternnon.  ....second only to Radiohead for me. 

[RumbleFox]

I watched it and it was OK. And that is depressing.  It should be better than OK.  I don't want to slag off Ed or anyone else, all music has a place but my God where has the energy gone?  I wish new music scared me.  I wish I listened to it and it freaked me out and I hated it.  At least that would prove it was vital and that I am too old and shouldn't really be listening to it anymore but bland?  That is depressing.  It all seems so sanitised.  Where is the emotion?

 

Urgh, I probably am just old and don't get it but at least Elvis scared people.  So did Bo Diddley.  Otis Redding broke your heart.  Punk freaked people out.  Dance music was "noise" and Hip Hop was angry and vital.  Where's all that gone?  Or am I missing it?

 

X

[Miquel The Work Geordie]

7 hours ago, RumbleFox said:

I watched it and it was OK. And that is depressing.  It should be better than OK.  I don't want to slag off Ed or anyone else, all music has a place but my God where has the energy gone?  I wish new music scared me.  I wish I listened to it and it freaked me out and I hated it.  At least that would prove it was vital and that I am too old and shouldn't really be listening to it anymore but bland?  That is depressing.  It all seems so sanitised.  Where is the emotion?

 

Urgh, I probably am just old and don't get it but at least Elvis scared people.  So did Bo Diddley.  Otis Redding broke your heart.  Punk freaked people out.  Dance music was "noise" and Hip Hop was angry and vital.  Where's all that gone?  Or am I missing it?

 

X

 

Na you're right, Ed Sheeran is atrociously bland.

[Miquel The Work Geordie]

Watched some of Liam Gallagher's set because he seems to have split opinion and it was piss poor, almost embarrassing. At least with the High Flying Birds Noel is turning out some reasonable tunes and has a tight live act, his brother sounds like someone doing a bad impression of Liam Gallagher.

[foxxy]

On 24/06/2017 at 01:21, toddybad said:

Shitting hell that Radiohead set was ****ing amazing!

Yes loved it. One of the best ive seen at glasto.

[BrummieFOX]

On 6/28/2017 at 14:16, RumbleFox said:

I watched it and it was OK. And that is depressing.  It should be better than OK.  I don't want to slag off Ed or anyone else, all music has a place but my God where has the energy gone?  I wish new music scared me.  I wish I listened to it and it freaked me out and I hated it.  At least that would prove it was vital and that I am too old and shouldn't really be listening to it anymore but bland?  That is depressing.  It all seems so sanitised.  Where is the emotion?

 

Urgh, I probably am just old and don't get it but at least Elvis scared people.  So did Bo Diddley.  Otis Redding broke your heart.  Punk freaked people out.  Dance music was "noise" and Hip Hop was angry and vital.  Where's all that gone?  Or am I missing it?

 

X

I suppose that Grime is filling that gap at the moment. Being constantly likened to Punk in that sense and there was a lot of it at Glastonbury. 

[RumbleFox]

25 minutes ago, BrummieFOX said:

I suppose that Grime is filling that gap at the moment. Being constantly likened to Punk in that sense and there was a lot of it at Glastonbury. 

I am so out of touch but aye, probably right.  X

[purpleronnie]

How much did you watch Rumble?  There were tonnes of energetic, political drive and souful acts on at Glastonbury.  But they all can't be like that.  There's places for Mr Sheeran just like there's always been artists like him.

 

But I would add that the energy has disappeared from the crowd these days, back in the 90's it seem a much more wild festival, I guess the more successful it became the more corporate and tame it became.

[separator]

3 hours ago, purpleronnie said:

But I would add that the energy has disappeared from the crowd these days, back in the 90's it seem a much more wild festival, I guess the more successful it became the more corporate and tame it became.

Yep, same can be said for all festivals. Most offer VIP camping areas, showers, cocktail bars, tossers who would rather film a show on their phone than watch the performance,. I went to a few festivals in the late 90s and people queuing up for showers then had the piss taken out of them. Happy memories of smelling like an open grave soaked in shit lager come monday morning.

[Max Wall]

I'm going to go against the grain and say I thought Liam sung pretty well. The last couple of times I saw him with Oasis his voice seemed shot. Must be taking it a little easier on the Peruvian marching powder these days.

[The Fox Covert]

 A post-Glastonbury story which leaves a bad taste in the mouth:

The Independent reports

'Glastonbury Festival accused of exploiting hundreds of European workers on zero hours contracts'

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/hundreds-of-european-workers-fired-two-days-into-glastonbury-clean-up-a7818571.html

Cleaning up 1100 acres of farmland after the festival is a massive job, often taking anything up to a couple of months to complete before the land is restored to being a 'fairly' normal farm. Every single particle of litter must be cleared up. If a cow treads on a discarded tent peg and it goes right into the foot the animal may go permanently lame. 

An army of litter pickers is recruited to clear up the mess. The cost of the operation (which may include refuse collection by commercial contractors during the festival and the operation of the on-site recycling centre) is reported to run into seven figures. The average festival goer probably couldn't give a monkeys'. Thousands still leave their tent behind and if you told them that cleaning up the farm after they have gone home adds a fiver or so to the cost of their ticket the response is likely to be 'so what'.

When it is muddy during the festival the clean-up operation is much more difficult and takes a great deal longer. The worst-affected fields even have to be ploughed up, harrowed and reseeded before they will return to grass, especially the low-lying ones near the old railway line and the Other Stage.

This year it was dry. It is reported that after two days the bulk of the work was completed and the litter picking crew organisers dismissed 600 of the 700 workers. 

Some are reported to have come from Eastern Europe and Spain in the expectation of at least a couple of weeks work and will be heavily out of pocket as a result.

 

Hopefully the festival organisers will respond to the embarrassing and rank bad publicity, coming so soon after Corbyn took centre stage on the Pyramid, probably the first leader of a major political party ever to do so. 

 

The festival has responded positively to a lot of bad publicity over the years. The fence coming down and the gross overcrowding in 2000, pollution from lavatories spilling into the Whitelake and killing thousands of fish, the battle between the police and hippies (nowhere near as bad as it was reported and pretty inconsequential in comparison with what went on at the average football ground pre-Taylor). And the traffic congestion of last year, which reduced the whole county to total gridlock for a day. 

Probably the answer may come by getting an outfit together to sign people up for a number of big festivals. As they are no longer required by one, getting them more work and organising a bus load to join the clean up brigade at the next festival. By-the-by, they would have a good chance of work for several months rather than a couple of weeks. Over the summer the weather and ebb and flow of people signing up and leaving to do something else is likely to even itself out somewhat, and the workload can be spread out.

 

I am a little bit ITK, I live locally, have worked at the festival for years as a volunteer and get a 'free' ticket. I do know the litter picking supremo, a real local, not a blow in like myself. The first year I worked at the festival I was part of the refuse collection crew. In those days there were few commercial contractors and the bulk of the collection during the festival was done by a bunch of blokes with a flat bed trailer and an ancient tractor, chugging round the site and loading old oil drums full of rubbish on to the trailer. Some of the refuse was - and still is - unforgettably vile and you needed elbow-length industrial gloves so that you did not get accidentally pricked by somebody's discarded needle! The areas behind the big stages also had to be cleaned up. The bands are each allocated a large pen for their stuff and occasionally one or two would leave it in a state every bit as bad as the paying customers leave Big Ground and Oxlyers!

 

Football connection: not very much I am afraid.  Happily I don't think the shirts of the big four clubs are quite as prominent as they are on your average High St. If I were to do a headcount of shirts and banners I guess the most popular would be the blue and white quarters of the Gas, local but only a League 1 outfit.

 

[Captain...]

11 hours ago, The Fox Covert said:

 A post-Glastonbury story which leaves a bad taste in the mouth:

The Independent reports

'Glastonbury Festival accused of exploiting hundreds of European workers on zero hours contracts'

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/hundreds-of-european-workers-fired-two-days-into-glastonbury-clean-up-a7818571.html

Cleaning up 1100 acres of farmland after the festival is a massive job, often taking anything up to a couple of months to complete before the land is restored to being a 'fairly' normal farm. Every single particle of litter must be cleared up. If a cow treads on a discarded tent peg and it goes right into the foot the animal may go permanently lame. 

An army of litter pickers is recruited to clear up the mess. The cost of the operation (which may include refuse collection by commercial contractors during the festival and the operation of the on-site recycling centre) is reported to run into seven figures. The average festival goer probably couldn't give a monkeys'. Thousands still leave their tent behind and if you told them that cleaning up the farm after they have gone home adds a fiver or so to the cost of their ticket the response is likely to be 'so what'.

When it is muddy during the festival the clean-up operation is much more difficult and takes a great deal longer. The worst-affected fields even have to be ploughed up, harrowed and reseeded before they will return to grass, especially the low-lying ones near the old railway line and the Other Stage.

This year it was dry. It is reported that after two days the bulk of the work was completed and the litter picking crew organisers dismissed 600 of the 700 workers. 

Some are reported to have come from Eastern Europe and Spain in the expectation of at least a couple of weeks work and will be heavily out of pocket as a result.

 

Hopefully the festival organisers will respond to the embarrassing and rank bad publicity, coming so soon after Corbyn took centre stage on the Pyramid, probably the first leader of a major political party ever to do so. 

 

The festival has responded positively to a lot of bad publicity over the years. The fence coming down and the gross overcrowding in 2000, pollution from lavatories spilling into the Whitelake and killing thousands of fish, the battle between the police and hippies (nowhere near as bad as it was reported and pretty inconsequential in comparison with what went on at the average football ground pre-Taylor). And the traffic congestion of last year, which reduced the whole county to total gridlock for a day. 

Probably the answer may come by getting an outfit together to sign people up for a number of big festivals. As they are no longer required by one, getting them more work and organising a bus load to join the clean up brigade at the next festival. By-the-by, they would have a good chance of work for several months rather than a couple of weeks. Over the summer the weather and ebb and flow of people signing up and leaving to do something else is likely to even itself out somewhat, and the workload can be spread out.

 

I am a little bit ITK, I live locally, have worked at the festival for years as a volunteer and get a 'free' ticket. I do know the litter picking supremo, a real local, not a blow in like myself. The first year I worked at the festival I was part of the refuse collection crew. In those days there were few commercial contractors and the bulk of the collection during the festival was done by a bunch of blokes with a flat bed trailer and an ancient tractor, chugging round the site and loading old oil drums full of rubbish on to the trailer. Some of the refuse was - and still is - unforgettably vile and you needed elbow-length industrial gloves so that you did not get accidentally pricked by somebody's discarded needle! The areas behind the big stages also had to be cleaned up. The bands are each allocated a large pen for their stuff and occasionally one or two would leave it in a state every bit as bad as the paying customers leave Big Ground and Oxlyers!

 

Football connection: not very much I am afraid.  Happily I don't think the shirts of the big four clubs are quite as prominent as they are on your average High St. If I were to do a headcount of shirts and banners I guess the most popular would be the blue and white quarters of the Gas, local but only a League 1 outfit.

 

 

I was going to post about this the yesterday, it's tough because if there is no work what is the point of paying someone to do nothing, especially as it is Glastonbury where a sizeable amount of the profits go to charity, so savings here benefit worthwhile causes.

 

I  was there this year and, as I do every year, I made an effort to not leave any shit, including packing up my tent and all my bent tent pegs, the ground was rock hard, and it felt like a lot more people took their tents this year. Probably due to the weather, packing up a muddy tent in the rain with a hang over was not fun last year.

 

The reality is we need a flexible workforce and can't just pay people for not  doing anything, I like your idea of a multi festival clean up crew, young kids sign up for the summer get to go to the festivals and get paid to clean up, but that will most likely also lead to exploitation if not managed properly.

[The Fox Covert]

I wonder how many of you I have bumped into over the years!

I take your point about exploitation. One or two of the temporary employers are pretty bad. Won't mention names publicly but one of them is named after a famous English portrait artist. I have worked with many of their temporary employees and the story I consistently get from the younger ones is that they were misled about the job. They got it into their heads that there would be a few hours of easy work, and they could spend a lot of the weekend with their mates watching the festival. The reality is that a lot of the jobs behind the scenes are pretty grim. But they are nowhere near as soul-destroyingly bad, for example, as breaking your back working in a cabbage field in Lincolnshire.

At least the litter pickers get fed decently for free, as I did when I worked on site. When I was a bit younger, but the festival was still a big festival, it was pretty heartwarming to bump into Arabella Churchill on your rounds. She would go out of her way to pick out the new workers on her patch, and have time to tell you that you must make the time to pick up your meal tickets and get a really good slap-up feed at Goose Hall at the end of your (long) shift. And the next day you would bump into her again and she would remember you and ask you what they served up. I seem to remember talking about the bands and the Green fields and not remembering whether I actually managed to get a free meal. Not surprising considering that my day had started at quarter past five and ended about half three the following day when I was rescued by a friend who had found me fast asleep on my feet in the dance tent. You probably thought it is only horses that can sleep on their feet. Not quite true.

The problem I see that the festival has is that a lot of the people who have run the festival from the early days are now gone. In the place of these people the festival organisation is becoming steadily professionalised, but in the process the festival is steadily losing the magic factor that made it so special in the first place, and it runs the risk of becoming just another big festival. The fella who runs the clean up operation is a local lad who has been with the festival for a long time. Once he probably did organise the whole clean-up operation himself, but it is now a million pound job. He will have had quite a bit of hostile questioning from the press in the last couple of days and he is not the most articulate and confident type, I hope he has stood up to it OK.

In case you were wondering, I am also a temporary employee with scarcely more job security than the hundreds turned away from the festival site last week. I might earn a little more (in fact quite a lot more) but there is always the threat that temporary riches may be followed by a few months on the old King Cole, when your money runs out pretty quickly. I am still waiting for the wretchedly incompetent Tory wastrels on the local council to finish processing my application for council tax relief from the last fallow period, and I am now six weeks into the latest new 'temporary' job, more than a hundred miles from home!