It’s time for the annual trudge to a field to see what the boutique and family festival scene has to offer the thirtysomething with three kids. Over the years we’ve got better at the camping lark. The latest addition to the Moonbolt family set of festival essentials is a large metal blue trolley for pulling the rest of our detritus across the car park. (Festivals can get off to a really bad start if you have 100kg of equipment to manually carry half a mile across a field – and then put up a tent at the end of it.)
Frankly, this year is all rather exciting. We’re off to Camp Bestival in Lulworth – and it should be a cracker. The kids (Henry -9, William – 6 and Elizabeth – 2) are already busily preparing themselves for a weekend of tree hugging, face painting and various feral pursuits. A couple of years ago we lost the boys for 3 hours at the Green Man Festival, only for them to return wet, muddly, covered in bits of tree and proudly proclaiming that they had built a dam. (Lashings of ginger beer for afters, no doubt).
And that’s sort of the point of middle class music festivals – they offer you the chance to forget the rules and paranoia of suburban life. Yes, there’s always the ‘glamping’ set with their matching Cath Kidston air beds and oil cloths, and yes there’s always one family clad in pelts in a yurt, but for most of us it’s a chance to dust off the tent, drink beer, let the kids run around and – if you are lucky – see the odd band or two.
This year is going to be particularly special as I’ll get to introduce the kids to a couple of great loves on my life – Billy Bragg and The Fall. Sir Billy of Barking is even reading a children’s bedtime story in the kids area, I hear. It’s going to be brill.
Ronnie James Dio – never the best voice, had terrible hair, always ended up being third-choice lead singer. I feel really rather sad that he has died, aged 67, though. I owe him for one of the greatest music videos of all time. Enjoy.
Courtesy of the excellent Wax.fm blog, here is a preview of a new documentary about famous music artists and their record collections. The 1920s footage of the girls dancing to the gramophone is brilliant.
A bit of tinkering and some red-hot valves later and the Dansette is working. Time to finally play the aluminium disc I picked up at a charity shop. So what’s on it? Hold onto your hats – it’s a rollercoaster:
Not a confession of a serial killer or a coded pre-war message – just a couple of jolly lads talking about the Meadowside Campsite in Paignton. They had eggs for breakfast and it’s a Thursday. About as informative and useful as most Podcast and tweets then. I still love it, though.
The excellent Fishboy has compiled a Spotify playlist of rip-off records. In among the obvious (Elastica nicking from Wire – and just about everyone else), the famous (Nirvana’s steal from Killing Joke) and the horrendous (Coldplay destroying Kraftwerk), there are some real gems of musical thievery.
Perhaps my favourite is the remarkable similarity between the theme tune of 60s kids show The Banana Splits and Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. Tenuous, perhaps; brilliant, definitely.
As an inveterate collector of vinyl I tend to spend a lot of my time in charity shops browsing through the 50p bins. Most often all that is on offer is James Last, Mrs Mills, The Black & White Minstrel Show and about 5 copies of This is Stereo.
There are some favourite shops that always come up trumps (the Cancer Research shop in Cheam has the best selection of mint classical LPs). But sometimes you come across a real treasure – my best was a pristeen copy of I Only Have Eyes for You by the Flamingos on 7-inch which I bought for 10p and sold when broke for £70.
I’ve been sitting on one of these finds for a few weeks now – a Voice Record – the sort of thing that used to be freely availably in railways, cafes and on seaside piers during the 30s and 40s. The way these worked was you would put in your 6d – or whatever it cost – speak into a tube and your message would be recorded directly onto a soft aluminium disc. I guess it was a very early form of AudioBoo or podcasting.
The disc I found was in Leatherhead (Red Cross Shop, I think) and cost me 50p. It has definitely been recorded onto, but I don’t have a 78rpm record player handy with a light enough arm.
So what’s on it? A message to a lover recorded after a Brief Encounter in a railway station? An Badlands-style explaination of a crime spree? Or just a voice postcard from a holidaying family? I don’t know, but can’t wait to find out.
After lunch I’m off to my in-laws to pick up an old Dansette I have stored in their loft, which should have a light enough arm to play the record without scoring the metal. Watch this space.
Is that Rain & Snow sampled liberally on that Yeasayer single? Guess the popular beat combos have run out of 80s electronic bands to nick from. (I heard the bass line to Joe Jackson’s Stepping Out on the backing track to an RnB tune the other day.)
I just hope Bert Jansch is getting some money for this as the Yeasayer version sounds incredibly like Pentangle’s.
