The rogue's gallery - and thinking about 2018 festivals

I had so much fun putting the first of these together that I was looking for any excuse to do something similar. A cold, wet day spent doing household chores and backing up the computer prompted me to look at more of the pictures of music that I have taken over the last decade or so. In turn this has inclined me to think about some festival plans for 2018.

There is no obvious place to start this but it has reminded me of several artists that I have seen live but not thought about more recently.

Cate Le Bon, Garden stage, End Of The Road 2014.

There is no obvious end to this either. Festivals became something I was curious about.  Therefore I had to go and see why there was so much fuss made about them. That finally happened in July 2007 with a trip to Latitude.
Photography was something that came with that because it seemed a convenient way to remind me what I had seen live. It was thus but it only partly served to overcome my lack of note-taking and the fact that the great majority of acts that I saw were ones that I had never even heard-of, let alone heard live or otherwise at the start of the respective set. Rather importantly I had a great time that weekend despite more than a few misgivings about the venture of solo festival attendance the nearer I got to actually having to deal with it.

In time it, both festivals and photography, turned out to be a greater deal than that. It is certain that the Garden stage at End Of The Road Festival is extremely influential in this.

The same stage three years later...

Julia Jacklin returned. She had played the Tipi stage at End Of The Road 2016. 3 September 2017.

What was this all about?  There's nothing like a band going off on a whim. Particularly if the result is leaving your drummer lost, head-in-hands. It's even better when it unfolds in front of you.

Hinds, Far Out stage, Green Man Festival, 18 August 2017.

Welcome to live music. This is why it is so much fun. Sometimes I scare myself, if only retrospectively. I made a complete dog's breakfast of taking pictures of Holly Macve when she played the Sunday opening slot on The Garden stage at End Of The Road 2016. I got another chance... and possibly I did a little better this time.

Holly Macve - Mountain stage, Green Man Festival, 20 August 2017.

I'm sure that there will be some more trips back down memory lane as I consider festival options for 2018.

Ten years of writing - and some thoughts on music

Having finally got something of the festive feeling, and also read the suggestion from one of my fellow bloggers that writing a blog displays a certain vanity, I thought I might indulge myself a little.
First things first and a very simple luxury - make a tartiflette and sit in front of a real fire to eat it, accompanied by some wine and recorded music.
This specific idea for this post actually came about as the result of a Spotify advertising link - “What did your 2014 sound like?”
My thought was "Why did my 2014 sound like it did?"

One thing I must say about 2014 is that without doubt I have listened to more music, both live and recorded, than in any previous year. I can't put numbers to that but, trust me, it is true and by some considerable margin. I'm not sure that eight years of writing a blog has done much, whether positive or negative, for my vanity. What it has certainly done is provide me with huge satisfaction and at times a sanctuary from the everyday and the mundane. Not just the writing that is, although it has; the live and recorded music that I have heard and all the people that I have met along the way and the ones that I anticipate meeting in the future. One thing is certain; it is both absorbing and time-consuming. It is also absolutely fascinating. I have spent a great deal of time mulling (perhaps I should have done that with the wine too) over the music of 2014 this last month or so. I suppose with good reason that my 2014 has been dominated by acoustic-folk-Americana-roots. I can see that trend continuing in 2015 but that's not all that I like by any means.

The first time I wrote about music in the public domain was some amazon.co.uk reviews in 2005. I was reminded of this the other day while reading reviews and suddenly finding myself confronted by one of my own - that for the LP 'Old World Underground Where Are You Now?' (2003) by Metric.
That I suppose, and then the desire for freedom to write just what I wanted, led to this blog starting in September 2006 if only by accident rather than design. In 2007 this led to my going to festivals although it had been on my mind for a while. This was hastened by the new-found need to have original material to write about. Then came photography to go with it because festivals are as much about watching as listening. This bare-bones timeline says nothing at all about the music that accompanied it .
This got me thinking about how my current tastes in music have evolved to the point at which they are now. That is proving a tricky thing to do and harder to explain, not least because of the self-analysis that it predicates.

This evening I decided to listen to absolutely any LPs that I thought inspired my, or the purchase of which was inspired by my, decision to start (and then continue) going to festivals back in 2007. Whilst my liking for acoustic folk goes way further back it would seem, on reflection, to have had nothing to do with this particular decision. It seems to have been largely indie-driven; my choice of Latitude Festival 2007 as a starting point was specifically because Arcade Fire was headlining the Sunday. One thing yesterday's playlist demonstrated was that I still like much of what attracted me then and not all of this indie in the period 2007-9 was indie-rock; that appellation doesn't apply to New Young Pony Club or Polly Scattergood, both of which I first became aware of by seeing them play live at Latitude Festivals. I then bought the LPs and indeed have continued to do so. Both have disco as a pulsing heart - the twisted nature of 'Bunny Club' (Polly Scattergood) and 'Ice Cream' (NYPC) have both stood the test of time I think. 

To use a geological analogy, the growth of my music collection in the last ten years has been a largely sedimentary (rather than volcanic) epoch. It does, however, include a couple of fault planes within it. The most obvious of these is connected with my decision to go to End Of The Road Festival for the first time in 2009. This decision was certainly responsible for stirring my interest in Americana and roots and (while I don't much care for the descriptor) 'alt-country' too.
This fed-back into a revived interest in UK folk music (both traditional and new) that served to fill the gaps in live music between festivals.  That is when things became really interesting. It gave me the idea to go looking for new music myself, be that local in origin or further afield, rather than just wait for it to come to a venue that I was at.

EOTR 2013 - its not just about the live music...

The main reason I go to festivals is almost certainly quite apparent; it is to listen to music live and also to take photographs of that. It is not the whole story however, and this issue was thrown into sharper context at EOTR when I was asked how (festivals aside) I came across new music to listen to...
The truth is that I hadn't really thought about that in the "business-like" sense that this question implied I might. That was something of a shock. My first thoughts were "it just happens" and then "much of it finds me", but neither is a satisfactory answer to the question, although to me it might appear to be that way.
Indeed this is the point when it occurred to me that this is exactly how I had seen it. The truer answer, in so far as I have thought it through, is this. Listen, talk to people (I'm good at talking - like I need to say that - but I can listen too) about everything and anything they have to say, remember stuff and the apparent links between them. Then just go explore...
This is no real answer either, if only because of its generality, but I'll attempt a little more detail in a forthcoming post.
The other thing is to watch not just the acts but their audiences and indeed the festival milieu in general. At festivals such as EOTR you have already selected yourself to be part of a somewhat like-minded subset of the population, even the festival-going population! By that last comment I'm thinking that the EOTR subset of festival goers would be rather different to that at, for example, Leeds/Reading and it would be interesting, at least to me, to know more about that kind of social phenomenon. I expect it either has been, or currently is, the topic of several Ph.D. theses or research papers.
I'll leave that to someone else, as it all sounds like hard work, but please feel free to send me links to any such research because I'd love to read someone else's thoughts.

Here instead are images from EOTR 2013 that don't actually include any artists performing but are of other aspects instead. There are five such images, presented in the the order that they were taken between Thursday evening and Saturday evening. The caption with each is just a snapshot on my thought at the time that I took it. That has reminded me of another issue - always take a pencil and paper - a combination that can survive wet conditions although this was not a necessity on this occasion.

'Home for the next few days'

'The shadow audience at the Garden Stage'

'Sunshine always makes things better'

'Waiting for Warpaint'

'Watching Joe Gideon and The Shark'

You can add your own thoughts too [all comments to this blog are moderated by me - so at the very least you know I have read them] and start a cloud-thesis...