Glastonbury 2011 sells out in 4 hours

[Rob Hall]

Thanks for that Pete, it's very much appreciated.

[Hugh Weldon]

Seconded Rob. I think this is very much worth debating further - too late and too tired now I'm afraid. The Milliband thread which upset Adam so much the other day touched on it too.

I think it's both a generational thing and something where plenty of hard evidence can be found to support a pretty objective historical analysis, but I'll try and say more over the weekend.

[Des]

Pete's really rather good isn't he?

[Hugh Weldon]

Indeed. I hope he won't mind me mentioning that he recorded this splendid tune for Charlie's Oval label.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4OsRUqgFJo

[Pete Fowler]

(On the digression)

Hugh, I'm not sure if I find that flattering or deeply embarrassing! I'd no idea that was on YouTube, though I should have guessed...and I've just sussed it was an American upload, which is predictable. There was this absurd point in my life when Robert Christgau, then working on Village Voice, picked up on this B side of my one and only Oval single (I was a one miss wonder) and praised it to the skies....he came to interview me, up here in Macclesfield, after a cursory telephone call from Charlie, and announced himself on my doorstep thus: 'Hi, Pete, I'm Robert Christgau, right now I'm the most important rock critic in the States...'.

It was a hoot. Our kids, then tiny and basically uncontrolled, ran around the house screeching about the important visitor; and I, getting some notes together for the classes I was teaching the next morning, basically wondered what the hell was going on.

Charlie had got me good musicians, though - Pete Wingfield on keyboards, Dave Mattacks and Graham Lyle....

I should say 'thanks', Hugh - because I'll certainly pass the link on to our kids.

[Dominic]

I found the Christgau piece:
http://www.furious.com/perfect/andyfairweatherlow.html
The link in the article which should lead to Pete's own site doesn't work though.

How did you know, Hugh? Especially as there's this much more visible Pete Fowler: http://monsterism.net/
(And I'm fairly sure that I worked under a Pete Fowler at HMV in the late 80s.)

[Hugh Weldon]

Dominic

How did you know, Hugh?

Just luck and curiosity. I somehow found the Christgau piece and then thought to myself 'I wonder if the song's on youtube', not really expecting to find anything, as with that Supercharge song last week. Of course I'm curious to know now what the A-side was like.

On the wider topic, there are still things to be idealistic about. It's just that it's no longer possible to put your hopes in the organised working class. But the frustrating thing is finding these days more things to say no to than yes to - which leads me to feel quite absolutist in terms of that X factor discussion for example. Brilliant example of what the situs used to call recuperation, if you ask me. But the paradigm has changed. I found myself agreeing, last week, with that teacher speaking at the Tory conference.

Jonathan is right about the wider context though I think. What happens to the warmed up oil dependent planet.

[AndyM]

But the frustrating thing is finding these days more things to say no to than yes to - which leads me to feel quite absolutist in terms of that X factor discussion for example. Brilliant example of what the situs used to call recuperation, if you ask me.

A plausible point, but not (to me) a persuasive one. TXF is a talent show, and as such a revival of a media genre that predates contemporary pop. Its return, in such a huge gobbling-monster guise, might indeed suggest that some of the more vaulting change-the-world ambitions of 60s/70s pop culture have been circumvented and we're all being suckered back into some Tommy Steele era of compliant, docile artists ruled over by svengali quasi-crooks. A lot of truth in that.

But equally, the possibility of real talent emerging through the talent show genre is never completely off the agenda. (No 'Opportunity Knocks', no Les Dawson.) And TXF still intrigues me (and I think Howard, though he may want to contradict me) as phenomenon, narrative and spectacle. You can watch it, enjoy it and be appalled it simultaneously.

As for recuperation, it's a notion that to a certain extent can only work if you subscribe to a notion of mainstream audiences as gullible dolts. And although there are numerous examples of that characterisation holding water, as a broad principle it seems to me to be politically reactionary. Not as reactionary as Frankfurt School bollocks, of course, but then what is ?

[will vine]

There's nothing they want to take away from you when they can repackage it and sell it back to you for a huge profit. Glastonbury was the alternative. What's the alternative now?

Who'll be the cheesecakes at Glastonbury this year? The Wurzels?

btw- excellent feat of typing Des.

[AndyM]

Glastonbury was the alternative. What's the alternative now?

Glastonbury was, at best, an alternative, which excluded far more people than it ever included. It's now found its rightful place as the fractionally more daring parallel to the Henley Regatta (but with far worse toilets).

Lots of alternatives out there, as this Forum shows. Let's not descend into a predictable wail about the death of the hippie dream, pur-lease.

[Pete Fowler]

Not as reactionary as Frankfurt School bollocks, of course, but then what is ?

More than a little unfair on the Frankfurt School: after all, these guys went to hell and back. I know what you mean, Andy; and I can look back now and be aghast that so many of us fell for some of those writers – but Marcuse had some observations that hold true. It’s just that he went off the rails – anyone else here see him speak at the Round House conference in ’68? Ronnie Laing’s ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ event? – when he suddenly identified a bunch of students and love-in’ers as the panacea…..celebrity corrupts, as always! But he’s hardly Felix Dennis…or Jagger…

Lots of alternatives out there, as this Forum shows. Let's not descend into a predictable wail about the death of the hippie dream, pur-lease.

Is anyone here adopting that position? I remember calling it the bucolic plague in some piece in ’69; but then I don’t know the history of this forum in the manner that most here do.

On the wider topic, there are still things to be idealistic about. It's just that it's no longer possible to put your hopes in the organised working class.

True. But – hate to raise his name again – Marcuse said that in the 60s. But we do have a real problem here; it’s been there for decades, but it’s very much louder these days. It’s the reality that Enoch Powell noted and Thatcher exploited (was there ever a more brilliantly terrible political move than the sale of council houses on the cheap?) – that an awful lot of people out there are reactionary to the core of their bones. And the veneer that separates a liberal democratic state from a Hobbesian Nightmare is paper-thin, almost certainly incapable of surviving a depression on the 1930s scale.

The Internet has blown a lid off the silos of social realities. I’ve often thought of logging a month’s worth of comments from the Daily Mail forums, or charting the Tea Party threads, or Liberty Central’s....because people have really learned the awesome power of shouting loud; to me, the ultimate realisation of Goebbels' mantras can be seen, day by day, in the utter crushing of the Global Warming scientists by what I’m damned sure is a conspiracy run in the shadows by the oil billionaires in the States. This campaign has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of a David Bellamy embittered by his treatment at the BBC; or a Christopher Booker still atoning for what he must see as his disgraceful sins in helping establish Private Eye in the early 1960s.

People actually believe in the opposite of a truth. Orwell must be running over to the Webbs and the Shaws up there, with Yeats, as ever, still staring at Ben Bulben from his now even loftier heights.

Sure, I’m open to the charge of elitism, or snobbery, or of just being damned patronising. But then I guess we all have different shades in our take on the old aphorism:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Abraham Lincoln said that.

I can be in your nightmare if you can be in mine.

I said that.

[Ted]

People actually believe in the opposite of a truth. .

The term Gary Younge used in The Guardian today was "bespoke reality". If you don't like real reality the media will run something up to suit your tastes.

[AndyM]

OK, I'll give you Marcuse, Pete. He's redeemable. But Adorno brings me out in a rash - how an escapee from Nazi racism could write the racist guff he wrote about jazz still strikes me as one of the most bizarre contradictions.