Archives for June 2009

If you want to relive this year's festival or see what you missed you can watch extensive video highlights and enjoy some amazing photos on our Glastonbury website.

There's also been lots of superb Glastonbury coverage in other papers, mags and websites.

The NME writers' highs and lows expresses predictable disappointment with East 17 and Bjorn Again but enthuses over Ray Davies and Florence & the Machine. They also pestered artists and celebs backtsage to create this photo gallery, the highlight of which is a delighted Dominic West, aka McNulty in The Wire. The NME also took their video cameras with them. Their film of the site from a helicopter is well worth watching.

Most of the papers have reviews of the whole festival - some even managing to give a star rating to a three day event that features hundreds of acts. Peter Paphides in the Times (4 stars) praised Lady GaGa who "embodied that spirit of dirty disco fun at which Madonna once excelled".

Lady GaGa on the Other stage, Friday 26 June 2009

In the Telegraph (5 stars) their reviewer singled out "fast-rising Oxford band Stornoway" whose "blend of the Celtic, the English pastoral and a sprinkling of bluegrass was just the ticket for a full house that was entirely sprawled on meadow grass". The Independent's review reckons that it's "Damon Albarn's tearful wrestling with his own Glastonbury moment, that makes this year's festival great".

The Guardian's Alex Petridis rates Neil Young, Dizzee Rascal and La Roux as this year's "big winners" but the best bit of his article has nothing to do with music, it's the sub-editor's addendum: "In the article above we mistakenly stated that a banner said 'I love sausages', it actually said 'I love sausage'. This has been corrected."

Dizzee Rascal on the Pyramid stage, Saturday 27 June 2009

As Glastonbury's official newspaper the Guardian went all out in their festival coverage and all of it can be found via an interactive map of the site. For a flavour of the festival they've distilled it all into a nice 5-minute video.

Orange Music provided another great overview of the festival's sheer vastness and variety with their brilliant 100 Hours in a Field blog which is full of videos, presumbly filmed on a mobile phone, of fans, food vendors and performers in every far-flung corner of Worthy farm.

Finally, anyone at Glastonbury who tossed their empty cider cans, spent joints or falafel wrappers on Mr Eavis' fields should read the Telegraph's article about the 500-strong army of litter collectors who'll be spending the next two weeks cleaning up the site's 200+ tons of detritus. The Times also has a good non-music aftermath story about the traffic jams created by the exiting, irritable throng: "It seems that as soon as the festival is over some people are eager to go back to the rat race and forget peace and love. People are very polite while queueing for a burger but now they are pushing in and trying to get out down the sides."

Feel free to share links to any other great Glastonbury content you've seen in the comments below and do take time to enjoy the dozens of hours of videos on our site.

• Full BBC coverage of Glastonbury 2009

There are hundreds of food vendors at Glastonbury. This morning I heard Adam and Joe talking on 6 Music about some wondrous bacon rolls. I've been sticking to the grub available in the BBC Compound but the best named stall I've seen is called Greek Expectations.

These are a few of the foodie photos from the festival that have been posted to Twitpic.

@jimcumming: Time for some tea and toast I think

@ruduss: never thought I would have this kind of culinary experience in glastonbury

ruduss: Best food stall the fayre's fayre in greenfields I think. From ringwood school. keeping it local

Any favourite pun names for food stalls?

Yesterday I read that the Beastie Boys might be putting in a surprise Glastonbury appearance and now rumours are circulating that Justin Timberlake and Kanye West will join the Black Eyed Peas tonight for a Jacko extravaganza. On Thursday night the news of Michael Jackson's death was initially presumed to be part of Glastonbury's great game of Chinese whispers.

Glastonbury gossip is always a rich seam of "news". Before the festival started rumours circulated that Fleetwood Mac would be headlining and that Neil Young would add a Y to C, S & N.

Rumours that did come true included a Friday night appearance from Jack White's new band The Dead Weather and the Klaxons' special guest spot; though no one imagined that they'd be dressed as characters from Tim Burton films.

This year's surprises (so far) that no one predicted have been Jarvis Cocker becoming Spinal Tap's temporary bass player and Bruce Springsteen's guest spot with the Gaslight Anthem.

There's still plenty more to come. Have you heard any other rumours? Have you got great memories of previous special moments at Glastonbury? Let us know.

ADDENDUM: Rumour just in. Oasis to go head to head with Blur tonight - performing on the Park stage tonight!

• Full Glastonbury coverage

Before the festival started I wrote that New Jersey rockers The Gaslight Anthem would provide perfect arm-pumping, fist-raising practice for Bruce Springsteen's headline set tonight.

That was an underestimate. After playing three songs singer Brian Fallon introduced a special guest to the stage - none other than Mr Springsteen himself. Amid cries of "B-R-U-U-U-C-E!" they tore through album title track The 59 Sound. Bruce then enjoyed the rest of the band's set from the side of the stage.

You can watch the track in full now on the Glastonbury website.

• Gaslight Anthem perform with Bruce Springsteen

• Full Glastonbury coverage

Many viewers have left comments on the Glastonbury website asking why we are not showing all of Neil Young's set on the website or last night on television.

The BBC has spent the last couple of months talking to Neil's management about how much of his set we might be able to show on TV, radio and online over Glastonbury weekend.

Neil Young's career has been conducted on his own terms. Last night Neil's management agreed to let TV and radio broadcast five songs as they watched and listened to his performance. They believe in the live event and retaining its mystery and that of their artist. They have decided to make one song available online over the weekend to give a flavour of his set. That's Rockin' In The Free World and that's their decision.

You probably won't find too many Neil Young performances available freely on TV or online. He generally prefers the audience to find his albums and recently exposed much of his early work on the multi- DVD set, Archives Volume 1.

The BBC made a documentary with Neil last year, Don't Be Denied. It offers an insight into his career, its fierce independence and his insistence on running his music and his career on his own terms. Long may he run.

• Neil Young at Glastonbury
• Neil Young artist page

Mark Cooper is the Executive Producer of the BBC's Glastonbury coverage

With at least 23 official stages running more than 12 hours a day between them and countless informal venues, backstage gigs and impromptu performances, Glastonbury is a little like a pre-fab musical omniverse. It's no wonder its denizens lose their sense of reality. The long arm of the BBC gathers up some of the biggest names and serves them out across TV, radio and online, but despite the scale of our coverage it sometimes feels from here in the middle of the festival like we're only scratching the surface.

Thanks to the magic of the web, though, our fellow festival-goers can take us places where our cameras don't reach. Here's just a taste of some of the buzz on the ether around those names and places.

The Puppini Sisters seem to generate feelings both warm and fuzzy and hot and bothered:

• sir_lixalot: Watching the puppini sisters singing i will survive, in the field of avalon. Happy times :)
• Dogsdinner: Is there anything better than doo-wop smiths covers? The puppini sisters are something special.
• muffinphonic: watching puppini sisters, amazing! very talented and gorgeous! lesbianism awaits haha

There seems to be a correlation between unusually good mobile connections and a liking for both Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and The Specials:

• BeanedDream: I have a 3G connection @ Glasto! :) The Specials were awesome! As were Scroobius Pip!
• gdarmo: Greg's Glasto: Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip. Superb. Now The Specials! Class!
• andynuttall: Met Scroobius Pip and Dan le Sac after the best gig ever today. Still a little high from it now.

And Tinariwen drew particular acclaim (and a little dissent) for their mellow opener of today's Pyramid Stage:

• SpinnerTweet: Day 2 #glastonbury is a scorcher drying up the mud nicely. Beautiful desert blues from Tinariwen kicks us off
• SirPon: Gooooood moooorniiin Glastooo. Exquisite way 2 start: Tinariwen, from the south sahara. Plant, Albarn & Yorke are fans. Marvellous!!!
• outspaced: Tinariwen bringing their saharan grooves to the main stage in the sunshine. I say yes.
• skiskool: Tinariwen opening number - music to commit suicide by! They must've got lost on way to jazz world stage #glasto
• Currentmediauk: tinariwen playing pryamid, ppl loving it, very special

The broadsheets' love of Glastonbury does little to counter arguments that the festival has got a bit too middle-class in recent years but it does mean lots of really good writing. Here are some of the articles that the big papers have filed in the last few days.

In the Times Caitlin Moran admits to feeling guilty about the year she bailed from the festival early:

• Glasto, I deserted you and I still carry the shame

The Independent has gone Boss crazy with tons of articles whetting the appetite for tonight's headliner. The centrepiece is an article that places Springsteen in a grand tradition of American songwriting:

• American dreams: Bruce Springsteen

Charles Spencer, the Telegraph's drama correspondent and Glastonbury first-timer, writes amusingly about his first foray to the festival. He lasted a day:

• Glastonbury is just a bad trip

The Guardian is the festival's newspaper partner so there's no surprise that they have stacks of content on their website. My favourite was a piece posted earlier in the week that doesn't spare the blushes of our colleagues in television:

• Guide to festival telly-making

One thing I've noticed about Glastonbury so far is the number of covers being played.

Neil Young closed his blistering set last night with a magnificent version of The Beatles' A Day in the Life, and although the promised tributes to Michael Jackson have been scarce Gabriella Cilmi slipped some of Billie Jean into her hit Sweet About Me.

Neil Young on the Pyramid Stage

Other covers: White Lies paid tribute to tonight's headliner Bruce Springsteeen with a take on Dancing in the Dark; Supergrass spin-off The Hot Rats played an all-covers set including The Cure's Love Cats; more bizarrely Bjorn Again, the group most associated with Abba played Status Quo's Rockin' All Over the World.

Bruce Springsteen could release a double album of covers he plays regularly and I expect we'll hear many, many more from other bands today and tomorrow. What would you like to hear?

You can watch extended highlights of sets from the festival on the Glastonbury website and 6 Music are playing tracks recorded on site all weekend.

• Full Glastonbury coverage

Being a natural grump about these sort of things I generally find a sea of camera phones at concerts a clear breach of gig etiquette. At festivals however they are fantastic for capturing all the great moments that happen away from the stages.

These are a handful of photos people have uploaded via twitpic today.

musicradar: Tribute or cash in? mj t-shirt less than 24 hours later at glasto

glastofest: If in doubt, put on a pink tutu and dance

chrismou: It was the only hiking socks they had left, honest!

Previous Posts

• Stagewatch #1: Pyramid - Friday Morning



• Micahel Jackson Tributes

Over the course of the weekend I'll be trying to gauge Twitter reaction to the bands appearing on Glastonbury's various stages.

Abba tribute act Bjorn Again started procedings at 11am this morning on Glastonbury's main stage, the Pyramid, kicking off with Waterloo but also covering Status Quo's Rockin' All Over the World.

MusicRadar posted this photo:

More tweets on Bjorn Again

• wedderburned: why is the mama mia soundtrack on repeat and an unholy volume. Where is it coming from?



• benjamin_cook: Bjorn Again on the Pyramid Stage - what a way to start the day! Mud, mud, everywhere... but doing little to dampen our spirits.



• skiskool: Bjorn again, cover of rocking all over the world in false swedish accent from the aussies, somehow seemed to work, good kitsch fun



• theskink: They were great! I'm thinking about forming a Bjorn Again tribute act.

Next up was Gabriella Cilmi who has the distinction of being the first act to drop a Jacko tune into their set. The young Aussie divided opinion musically but certain gents have taken note of what she was (just about) wearing.

• dww84: Gabriella cilmi is the hottest cover singer at glasto.. All she's wearing is a pirate shirt...



• skiskool: So cilmi doing a cover of zep's whole lotta love... is she a rocker at heart or did the band say they wanted to do one they like?



• musosguide: After cutting past G Cilmi on Pyramid. Great voice, terrible songs



• simons_twit: Gabriella Cilmi very nearly had a dress on. I mean, literally. It was like a man's shirt.

darrenmckay posted this photo:

More tweets on Regina Spektor

• SpinnerTweet: Meanwhile over at Pyramid stage Regina Spektor is singing the awesome Flood song. We hope it's not a weather forecast...
• gulpmarketing: I'm tweeting in the rain - Regina Spektor you are 1 woman worth getting drenched for

• Full festival coverage at the BBC Glastonbury website
• All Glastonbury posts

If you'd have asked me yesterday I wouldn't have thought that the intersection of Michael Jackson fans and Glastonbury attendees on the great musical Venn diagram would be particularly large but our BBC News colleagues have reported "shock and disbelief" among the drenched hordes here.

Rumours of Jackson's death spread across the Glastonbury site last night and Emily Eavis announced on the official Glastonbury Twitter account that "There will be tributes all over the site all weekend. A truly great artist".

Any guesses at what those tributes might be? I reckon the E-Street Band could pull a pretty tasty Billie Jean out of the bag and I imagine that Jarvis Cocker, ever the showman, will pay his respects in his own particular way.

What are your suggestions?

• 6 Music Glastonbury Message Board

I've just got to the BBC compound on Worthy Farm. Thousands of people arrived last night to pitch their tents and make the most of the one day forecast for sunshine. Many of them used Twitter to share their Wednesday night and Thursday morning experineces; these are some of my favourites.

• schizdazzle: Apparently I was so out cold that I slept through a stampede of hare krishnas...
• Alphamoongirl: Just got up after a sleepless night. I'm camping on a bit of a slope. Maximo Park and Mamma Mia today!
• sourrain: woken up by some eejit screaming to his mates "there's room for 3 more tents!" right outside my tent. Good morning!
• caren69: Chilling in my tent after a lovely breakfast to the sound of people blowing up deflated airbeds!
• anamour: In a tent, contemplating yoghurt. Weather is overcast but the sun's breaking through!
• chrismou:https://twitpic.com/8ctrj - Breakfast!

If you are using Twitter and taking in Glastonbury either at the festival or at home use the hash-tag #glasto and we'll continue to highlight your tweets throughout the weekend.

• BBC Glastonbury 2009

Glastonbury has a reputation for being one of the less corporate of music festivals. Not for the Eavises sponsorship from burger joints, credit cards or hippy ice-cream makers. That said, there are still plenty of companies and organisations trying to promote their wares to the welly-booted throng descending on Pilton.

A survey of Twitter in the last two days has found these attempts to get ahead in advertising among all the speculation about the weather and Francis Rossi's grumpiness.

• St Tropez Tan gives us their "product tip for Glastonbury: Everyday Perfect Legs. Make sure that your legs are ready for those wellies!"
• The Royal National Institute for Deaf People's Don't Lose The Music campaign hopes we've got our earplugs with us.
• Bench are doing their best to get rid of their stock of camouflage wellies.
• Online retailer ASOS are giving away free sunglasses at the festival.
• And best of all TopToilets still have plenty of portaloos available for hire

If you are using Twitter to share your thoughts about Glastonbury use the hash-tag #glasto and we'll keep a friendly eye on you.

There are just three days to go until the Glastonbury festival begins. These are some of the headlines that have caught my eye in the build-up.

Bruce Springsteen has told Michael Eavis he wants to play a three-hour set on Saturday night.

That won't please Sean Lennon who has got a bit uppity about the ageing Glastonbury headliner. He is apparently "shocked" and "outraged" that the Boss is playing.

According to Angry Ape, Maximo Park are using their Facebook page to let fans tell them what they want to hear in their Glastonbury set.

For those who don't like to rough it, MyDeco has an essential guide to "glamping" (that's "glamorous camping").

Clash Music report that Billy Bragg will be presenting performances by ex-priosners who've been involved with the Jail Guitar Doors charity at the Joe Strummermemorial stone on Saturday night.

And finally... the Nursing Times reports that anyone between the ages of 15 and 24 can get a free chlamydia test at the festival.

If you've come across any other interesting Glastonbury stories leave a comment below.

I'm going to the Glastonbury Festival for the first time in my life next week. For most of the three days I'll be holed up in a Portakabin trying my best to share some of the excitement others are experiencing either at Worthy Farm or watching or listening at home.

Although I won't be seeing many bands I've still found myself looking longingly at the line-up, wondering who I would try to catch if I could.

There are lots of bands playing who I've seen before but among those I've yet to see live and really want to is California folkie Alela Diane (Sunday, Park Stage). The Park stage also hosts two great acts in a similar vein on Saturday night. M Ward, whose collaboration with Zooey Deschanel last year drew at first surprise and then delight, should get the crowd ready for one of the most acclaimed artists of last year, Bon Iver.

A new act that I've enjoyed hearing championed by Mark Lamarr recently is The Mummers. Their songs have accurately been described as evoking the soundtracks to Tim Burton films but it will be interesting to see how such theatricality translates to the stage.

My fondness for twang means that given half a chance I'd rush to see The Rockingbirds, The Broken Family Band and former Jayhawks Mark Olson and Gary Louris again.

Others that stand up for repeat viewing include Liverpool's masked crusaders The Wave Machines, Robyn Hitchcock and the mighty Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I've already seen New Jersey rockers The Gaslight Anthem a few times this year and they'll provide excellent arm raising practice for Bruce Springsteen's headline set on Saturday night.

Much has been made of this year's heritage headliners. I'd always been sceptical of Bruce Springsteen until I first saw him play live in the unglamorous surroundings of Crystal Palace Athletics stadium. That gig converted me and I'm sure he'll convince any non-believers who see him on the Pyramid Stage.

Similarly Neil Young is a titanic, if eccentric, force onstage and could teach bands half his age a few things they won't have learnt in the school of rock.

The American veterans still have to compete for the crowd's affections with our home-grown headliners. Band reunions are often met with cynicism but Blur's really does seem special and if the response to this week's warm-up gigs is an indicator then the Essex boys will have the assembled in the palms of their hands.

I've mentioned just a fraction of the line-up. Whether you're going to the festival, listening to 6 Music's extensive coverage or watching on TV, online or Red Button, who are you looking forward to?

• Glastonbury Webcam Repair Mission
• 6 Music DJs Glastonbury picks
• Newsbeat - Make sense of the Glastonbury line-up

Nigel Smith is Senior Content Producer at BBC Music Interactive

I was looking for an innovative way to look at the heroin problem in Wales. Who better to ask than John Cale, the Welshman behind the Velvet Underground's classic track Heroin? The surprise was he actually said yes.

It was a bit of a shock when John decided to take time out of his work at the Venice Biennale to do the programme. We were looking for a presenter with experience of drug use - and we tried him on the off-chance he'd be interested.

He was instantly enthusiastic, and moved heaven and Earth to make it happen. I think he was genuinely interested in the subject - and doing the programme gave him a first-hand insight into a side of his native Wales which he would otherwise probably never see.

The result, Heroin, Wales and Me, was screened as part of the Week In Week Out current affairs strand on BBC One Wales this week (it's still available on the BBC iPlayer)

You get a lot of different reactions when you tell people you're working with John Cale. Very often the response was "John who?" Even "The Velvet what?"

What was surprising about that was it came from heroin users and ex heroin users. After all, didn't the Velvet Underground write the soundtrack to shooting up!

I know drugs aren't glamorous and cool - but I did see Trainspotting. Somewhere in the back of my mind I assumed that people injected to the strains of Heroin or I'm Waiting for the Man. That there was some kind of pleasurable ritual to the whole thing.

The world I explored with John Cale was much darker. In the rundown post-industrial towns of South Wales, and the backstreets of Cardiff and Swansea, we came in contact with a the dark side of drug use. Teenagers shooting up because their mates do it, because there's nothing else to do, because they are blocking out the pain of an abusive past. Adults trapped in a downward spiral of drugs, crime, prison and more drugs.

You can't imagine many of them studying the best 1960s tracks to inject to - mostly they were too busy finding the cash for the drugs they craved.

John Cale's not a man to show his emotions lightly - but he was clearly disturbed by what he saw. The broken lives he witnessed in South Wales were a million miles from his experiences of drugs. Back in the days of the Velvets he saw them as an experiment - something to enhance the creative process he was engaged with in New York. And - he told me - they helped him stay up later and work longer.

He admits he "got in over his head" - cocaine and alcohol eventually got in the way of his work and he says he lost his sense of humour. He gave me footage of a concert in Germany in 1984 where he was clearly completely incapacitated by drugs - mumbling into a microphone with a piece of carpet held over his head.

Now he finds that kind of thing painful to watch - and he's ditched drugs and alcohol completely. Instead he works out in the gym - and runs marathons up the stairways of the skyscrapers in Los Angeles where he now lives.

• Heroin, Wales and Me

Nick Skinner is the director Wales, Heroin and Me featuring John Cale, first broadcast on BBC One (Wales) on 16 June 2009.

Friday's certainly music night on BBC Four. Next week we celebrate the return of Leonard Cohen to the world's stages with his acclaimed performance in London last year, a great Omnibus documentary from 1988 and a more recent archive doc What Leonard Cohen Did For Me.

As the channel's planning manager part of my job is to help create these themed evenings. It's very much a collaborative process. We talk with our commissioning teams across the BBC and they come back with ideas for programming - from landmark series on musical subgenres (our ongoing Britannia series on Jazz, Folk and Blues etc), to concert films, like the Leonard Cohen gig, that we've acquired the rights to.

There's no particular formula - whatever we think is interesting and has a good story to tell - it could be anything from record labels (so far Stiff, Island and Factory) to musical styles (be it Punk, Bluegrass or Motown) or individuals (we've done Cat Stevens, The Chieftains, Bruce Springsteen fairly recently). We then create a night of related material that (hopefully) keeps the audience engaged - though it's fair to say that we're less successful at that once we get past the 80s. I suppose the 80s just aren't not long enough ago to get nostalgic about quite yet. Or is it just that music was better in the 60s and 70s? You tell me!

We have some brilliant help, particularly from Mark Cooper and his team in BBC Music Entertainment, in creating new material from the archive. Our 'At the BBC' and Guitar Heroes for instance are a whole new way of re-purposing old material while opening it up to a new audience - and in a way that exposes them to music they might not necessarily choose to watch themselves.

For me it's more simple - I take the new programmes and use them as inspiration to truffle around in the archive looking for things that I haven't seen (at all, or for a long time). I'm like a kid in a sweet shop. It helps if you were an avid watcher of the Old Grey Whistle Test since the early 70s and worked on Top Of The Pops in the 80s - so understandably, I have a fairly eclectic mix of tastes - anything from Toscanini to blink-182.

Our hope and aim is to try and cover the whole canon of contemporary music with authoritative documentary, albeit over several years, and make BBC Four the home of intelligent, thoughtful and insightful music and put it in its historical and social context, but mixed with plenty of performance and great archive. Piece of cake!

Garrie Mallen is Planning Manager for BBC Four.

Last week, a crack team from BBC Audio & Music Interactive travelled to Worthy Farm in Pilton to remount the stricken Glastonbury webcam and fill our lungs with clean country air/the stench of cow ordure.

As the content producer for BBC Online's coverage of major music festivals, I look after our events sites alongside senior producer Tim Clarke. "Major music festivals" translates as Radio 1's Big Weekend, Reading and Leeds, the Electric Proms and of course, Glastonbury.

Tim and I spend a lot of the summer in Portakabins with developers, picture editors, infrastructure teams and video producers. A large chunk of the 6th, 7th and 8th floors of our office back in London collaborate to bring the audience on-demand performance video, photo galleries, backstage performances and interviews.

Glastonbury is unique in the amount of pre-festival interest it generates. To reflect this, since 2007 we've had a webcam positioned on Worthy Farm. Mounted on farm's engine shed, it takes snapshots of three panoramic views of the site every minute. Throughout June, the webcam charts the site's transformation from working dairy farm into the UK's largest music festival.

The webcam currently shows the iconic Pyramid stage as a steel skeleton, part-clad in metal sheeting. Soon you'll see the sound rig loaded in and the site swarm with bands, crew and about 140,000 punters.

Or that's the plan anyway. The Glasto webcam has had a rather chequered history. A few days before 2007's festival, a farm vehicle took out the camera's connection to the router. In 2008, the webcam was up running from May until the first day of the festival when an electrical surge spectacularly took out the entire festival's site communications and fried the webcam in the process.

Although the webcam is invaluable in the run-up to the festival, ironically this year we won't be relying on it as we have some ambitious video streaming plans which will kick in during over the weekend of the festival 24-28 June. Stay tuned.

Until then, see what's happening on site with the Glastonbury webcam and keep visiting for the Glastonbury 2009 site which will launch next week.