A Little Bit on the Primitive Side

The Battle of the Cut.  The two biggest shows of the summer on the same street at the same time.  Old Vic vs Young Vic. Tennessee Williams vs Arthur Miller.  The Crucible vs A Streetcar Named Desire.

For my money, there was no competition.  

Maybe I'm just a Philistine but I just didn't get The Crucible.  Without watching it during the McCarthy era, it just seemed to be overblown, backward-peasant voyeurism.  It played like Game of Thrones filler but without the special effects.  Or the sense of fun. 

Streetcar wins.  That is all.  

The Ian Hunter Museum

I went to the Ian Hunter Museum - or the Hunterian as it styles itself - now I don't know all that much about Mott the Hoople but it's fair to say that some of the early stuff wasn't quite so pop. A sloth foetus in a jar. A sliced up dogs head. A presentation about the reproductive organs of sparrows. A skeleton where the muscles have turned to bone...

You can sort of see why they didn't go mainstream until they did a Bowie song.

Silly Season

Aah, I remember festival season as a whippersnapper Dead keen on music and trying to see everyone. When two bands that you wanted to see clashed you chose and stuck with it for fear of missing even a bit of one. I'd hardly drink anything to make sure I didn't miss anything.

Now I'm not sure what has happened. I guess I don't take festivals as seriously. I seem to have become one of those people that goes to a festival to escape from reality, to wander about getting distracted by shiny things rather than trying to see as many bands as possible in a day - I used to hate those people. Or maybe I just don't like music. 

Standon Calling was this weekend. And as ever I had a great time. But I'm not certain that I saw any bands. Well not the whole way through, by the third song they'd normally been dismissed as sounding like a not-as-good Toots and the Maytals / Longpigs / Freakpower and I'd wandered off to try to get a hit of something genuinely new. Or watch some Mexican wrestling. Or Rockaoke.

Bands that I did enjoy:
Interiors - terrible name. Kind of like Belle and Sebastien.
Imperial Leisure - not certain if that's a terrible name or not. Sound like Audiobullys.
The Cuban Brothers - you know the Cuban Brothers, you saw them at bestival that year, more vaudeville than band.

And Beans on Toast. What kind of festival gives Beans on Toast an hour set on the main stage? A ridiculous one. And what a set. He won the crowd over early on. Bigg Jeff sang along to Who is Bigg Jeff. He did all the 'hits' - I was surprised that MDMAmazing was an actual singalong with an actual amount of actual people seeming to know all the actual words to a fairly obscure and quite wordy folk song. But I guess that that's the Standon Calling way.