Glastonbury 2009: Part two
With nobody that we were particularly bothered about seeing until Spinal Tap at 14:50, we decided to have something of a chill-out morning, sitting around the tent polishing off our extensive food shopping and generally enjoying the sunshine. Finding the queue for the showers to be at least an hour and a half long, we decided to give our bodies as thorough a clean as the teeth cleaning taps would allow. Our plans for a chilled out morning went awry as our neighbours popped over to demand that we go and drink cider with them backstage, which we happily caved in to.
Spinal Tap came on and we had a decent position near the Pyramid Stage, where we watched them turn it up to 11. They were really good fun, the rendition of ‘big bottom’ featuring Jarvis Cocker a high point in their set. Up next was Dizzee Rascal, who must be the only act in Britain that is universally enjoyed by everyone, no matter what kind of music they like. I saw him at Reading Festival a few years back and he was as loved there as he was here. Only back then he didn’t have a weapon like ‘bonkers’ to unleash on an audience ready and waiting to pogo.
Having decided that today would be spent getting completely trashed, as Ross would be driving back Sunday evening and thus unable to drink the next day, we headed back to the VIP bar for more cider and then back to the tent to collect the last of the beer for consumption during Kasabian. As well as cook a gourmet meal of a tin of beans on the barbeque. Yes we took the lids off. Yes we took the labels off. Since you didn’t ask. By the time Kasabian finished their excellent set, we were well on the way to drunksville. Next up were the White Lies in the John Peel tent, whose set we had mostly missed the day before. They were excellent. We met a couple of girls that were just as interested in getting off their faces as we were and we headed back to the bar.
We then went to see The Boss or what was left of his set, at least. I remember almost nothing of his set, although I’m told it was quite long. The rest of the evening was spent wandering around campsites drinking sambuca from a water bottle before heading to a very strange little bar with a rabbit hole inside. The next thing I remember, I was back in my tent.
Sunday, bloody Sunday and my word were we hungover. Not even seeing Carol Vorderman as we loaded up the car with our filthy, stinking clothes could awaken us from our slumber. We decided to take it easy and enjoy a nice cooked breakfast for a change for finally heading out to watch the Yeah Yeah Yeahs who were gloriously mental, with the lead singer wearing a fantastic hat and the bans ending their set by smashing the set up.
Next up were Bat for Lashes, featuring regular guest of my flat Charlotte Hatherley. I only stayed for a couple of songs as I wanted to see ladyhawke as well, but they sounded pretty good and it was cool to see Charlotte doing her thing. Ladyhawke seemed charmingly innocent and pleased to just have the opportunity to entertain us. It helped that she was bloody great as well. We then saw The Wombats before the grand finale of our weekend.
Blur were incredible. I have never enjoyed a set as much as I did theirs in my life. They played hit after hit after hit and absolutely owned the pyramid stage. Damon was electric and didn’t stop running about the place the whole time. The crowd responded brilliantly to every song and, bizarrely, it became something of a singalong performance. When song 2 blared out, it felt as though we would be pogoing to the moon. Tim Jonze at guardian.co.uk says more than I have space for.
It was a superb weekend and my thanks to all involved. I hadn’t been to Glastonbury before, but I’ll definitely be going back again. I leave you with this one photograph, taken on my phone, that sums up my experience better than these hundreds of words ever could.
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Glastonbury 2009: My experience
Having found out that I’d won VIP tickets for the Glastonbury festival on Monday afternoon, I needed to organise myself sharpish and throw some clothes together in time for Wednesday morning. Which, of course, I did on Wednesday morning, dragging bagfulls of clothes, toiletries and sleeping mats down to Reading, via a days work at Kings Place, and onto Glastonbury with my good pal Ross. The plan being to leave around 6pm, we eventually set off at half 9, nipping in to Asda on the way to spend £80 on beer, food, lager, water, cider and disposable barbeques. We arrived at the campsite at 1am, taking a long detour around the South-West due to Ross’ lack of directions or a map to get us there, and pitched up our tent in pitch-black darkness with a can of lager permanently attached to one hand, a look we would become accustomed to over the weekend.
We woke up early on Thursday morning due to the suffocating heat of our very old, not quite waterproof tent. Our weekly shop had us penned into tight sleeping lanes and not all of it had stayed in bags. In fact, I’d already warmed up the croissants for breakfast by virtue of rolling onto them in the middle of the night. Tasty! Observing our surroundings, we decided to meet people by helping them to set up their tents and we did so by rescuing two absolutely useless dames in the form of Ali and Katherine, whose palace of a tent was proving far too complex for them to construct. In a matter of moments (ahem) we had it up and it looked a little something like this:
We spent the rest of the day celebrating this success in the VIP bar with copious amounts of cider, an area that was great for chilling out in over the weekend. It was here that Lip from Shameless came over and greeted us as though in the presence of an old friend, or someone that he wanted to meet at least. This threw us both somewhat, as we recognised him, but couldn’t work out where from. After some small talk, it began to dawn on us the reason that we recognised him and on him that we were in fact, nobodies. Both parties sharpishly headed back to their ciders, before drowning our sorrows in them when we heard the terrible news about Michael Jackson.
Friday marked the start of the music and the continuation of the rain. It had absolutely hammered down on Thursday afternoon with thunderstorms in the evening and we were glad to have bought wellies the day before. We eventually braved it out of our tents and towards the music, where our first band of the festival was The Rakes, whose lead singer professed his pleasure in Michael Jackson’s death, which was met with shock from their crowd. Next up were The Maccabees. Their show provided one of the highlights of my weekend, as the rainclouds cleared and the sun came pouring through, to be met by huge cheers from every single Glastonbury reveller. It helped that the band were bloody brilliant too.
We headed over to the Pyramid stage next for N*E*R*D who had decided that the timeslot didn’t apply to them as despite being last-minute additions, the entire 200,000 people had paid their ‘100 dollars’ to see them. Despite this misguided, arrogant attitute, the crowd got behind them when they were kicked off and it provided a bizarre moment as Pharrell Williams continued to sing defiantly despite the sound having been cut. Due to this, we missed the beginning of the White Lies and didn’t get to experience their set as we would have liked. Following them were the Friendly Fires, who were great and their lead-singer proved to be quite the dancer. He moved the way I do after ten pints of cider in a seedy nightclub. The way I do in my head at least.
We saw Lada Gaga’s toned backside stride around the stage with her fire-starting nipples before heading back to the bar to stock up on the alcohol in preparation for bloc party, who I am a massive fan of and they surpassed all expectations with a great set. Heading back to the campsite tired, drunk and happy we lit a campfire, which Ross passed out in front of while I sang very loudly and out-of-tune all the songs I had heard that day.
All of my Glastonbury photos can be found here.
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Glastonbury 2009
As of tomorrow, I will be spending a very long, very drunken weekend at the Glastonbury Festival, having won a pair of VIP tickets in a competition at work. Yesterday. Evening. As you can imagine, this has left me feeling more than a little unprepared.
Currently, I don’t have a tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, wellies, coat or bag to actually take the items I don’t have in. So I’ll be sleeping on the grass/mud in shorts and a t-shirt all weekend at this rate. Which should be fun.
So the plan is that I throw some clothes and other items of the handy packing list into as many bags as I can find, lug them into work with me, then lug them to Reading, where I meet my friend and we load the car with as much useful junk as I can find strewn about my parent’s house before setting off. Via Asda. For a sleeping bag presumably.
Seriously though, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve never been before, least of all in the VIP section, and on Monday morning I had only a week of earlies followed by a quiet weekend to look forward to. This is much better. If a damn site less organised.
I’ll be taking as many pictures as my poxy cameraphone allows over the weekend and adding them to whatever memories I might have left when I return exhausted, hungover and happy on Monday.
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Tags: camping at glastonbury, glastonbury 2009, packing list for glastonbury, VIP glastonbury
The ‘no-electricity’ party
So last night I accompanied my housemate to a Disconnected, where they claim to disconnect the venue from the mains and have a power cut party in the dark. Bring your own torches we were told. No flash, no gash as your typical toilet attendant may proffer (thankfully they didn’t.) This was to be the final fundraiser before the boys and girls behind this project head to Uganda to run a bike-powered cinema for two weeks. Greener than Les Dennis watching Britain’s Got Talent. A environmentally-sound evening. Complete with my bicycle lights as torches…
Inkeeping with the smug no-emissions attitude, we got on the bikes ourselves and headed down to Shoreditch, only to be told that they weren’t ready for us yet, despite us arriving some time after the party was due to start. No matter, we went to the off-license and bought some beer to drink in the park in a fully licensed outlet that is happy for you to bring your own booze. On heading back some 45 minutes later, we found that we were still the first non-organisers there. And there was no music. And they still had some items plugged into the mains. At least they had a tandem. My flatmate and I had a go, being the cool hip guys that we are, only to find that it wasn’t yet connected to the dynamo. Oh. Another beer then.
Eventually others begain to stream into the abandoned warehouse and the mains were unplugged. A mystically powered projector showed a film of bicycles being, well, cycled and a man played a set of drums made out of bicycle parts. Have you spotted the trend yet? The dynamos were connected to the bikes and we all had a go. Having been cycling around London all day, I was less than up for this game, but hey, peer pressure is a wonderful thing.
Finding a balloon, we had a little game of keepy-ups and experimented with my cameraphone, the torches and the luminous balloon. This kept us entertained for some time while the music cut out (nobody could be bothered to cycle once the novelty had worn off) and produced some interesting results:
The final straw of the evening came when the organisers started shouting at us to get back against the wall, as if about to conduct a bank job on a bunch of penniless ravers. They had a show for us they said. We’d prefer some music, we responded, but alas, the show must go on. After they finally squished us against the back wall, out came an Asian girl dressed in what appeared to be a school uniform. I’m not sure the word ‘dance’ is really appropriate here, but I think that was what we were meant to be witnessing. After a couple of minutes I gave up, grabbed my bike and headed on home.
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Tags: disconnected, no electricity party, party in the dark, pitchblack rave, shoreditch club night, shoreditch disconnected, torch party
As an opinionated fan of Reading F.C that doesn’t wish to clutter up my more regular blog with the constant goings on of my football club, I have set up a new blog where I can witter on about that all day. If you’re interested, caress this lovely link with your mouse and click.
It’s called The Reading Fan and currently has just the one post, a look at the potential successors to Steve Coppell’s throne.
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Tags: new reading manager, reading fc, steve coppell successor, The Reading Fan
The Championship has been nothing if not a strange division this season. For long periods of the year, it seemed as though every club was doing their utmost not to achieve promotion to the Premier League, but only one club has sustained any kind of form and they are the ones who this afternoon celebrate their promotion to the promised land. That team are Mick McCarthy’s Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Ebanks-Blake’s solitary strike against Queens Park Rangers this afternoon means that Wolves have been officially promoted back to the top division, having dropped down to the Championship in 2004. It is testament to Mick McCarthy’s good work at the club that they find themselves back their, after a large restructuring to their club following relegation.
Thier position at the summit of the league this season disguises the fact that Wolves, like a number of their rivals, suffered a mid-season wobble. In January they won only once in the league. In February, they failed to win a single game, gaining only two points from a possible 15 and it looked increasingly as though the chasing pack of Birmingham and Reading could and probably should have caught them. McCarthy though was fortunate that his competition were finding the second half of the season just as difficult as themselves.
It is to the former Republic of Ireland managers credit then that he managed to turn his team’s fortunes around as successfully as he did. Since the beginning of March, Wolves have gained 21 out of a total of 27 possible points, which represents title-winning form in any division, especially one as inconsistent as the Championship.
Wolves fans have seen a lot of action this season too. Their team are the leagues top scorers, both home and away, and their strikers are a major factor behind the position that they find themselves in. Championship player of the year, Sylvan Ebanks-Blake has found the back of the net 25 times this season, more than anybody else in the league. His strike partner, Chris Iwelumo, may have provided the miss of the season for Scotland, where he missed the target from less than two yards out, but has hit the target 14 times in the league.
Their form on the road too has been impressive. Although they have beaten seven times on their travels, they have come out on top thirteen times, more than any other team. Their unwillingness to draw suggests that McCarthy would rather go for the win away from home than settle for a point and it is a dangerous strategy that has served them well. Their recent away form has seen them win 4 games out of 6. The remaining pair of games, unsurprisingly, resulted in Wolves being beaten.
This is why Wolves deserve their place in the top division. They have simply been the best team in the division and I say this as a Reading fan, the only team to have done the double over them this season. Wolves have not been unbeatable by any means this season, but their overall consistency means that their promotion is well-deserved.
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Tags: ebanks-blake, premier league, promotion, wolverhamption wanderers, wolves
The Language of Rape
On Sunday evening, Match of the Day 2 saw stand-in pundit Alan Pardew controversially compare a passage of play to a rape scene. Analysing a piece of play where Chelsea’s Michael Essien used his strength to hold off a challenge from his opponent, Pardew said: “He’s timed it perfectly. He’s a strong boy. He knocks him off – he absolutely rapes him.” Unsurprisingly, this has caused some concern.
To make matters worse, no attempt was made during the show to apologise for the comparison and neither co-presenter even acknowledged it, although both Alan Hansen and Adrian Chiles appeared less than comfortable when the camera panned back to them. Pardew has since apologised for any offence caused by his comments, but it is unlikely that he will be seen on the Match of the Day couch again any time soon.
Women’s Groups have roundly condemned the scenes. Lee Eggleston, the chairwoman of Rape Crisis England and Wales, described Pardew’s actions as “completely inappropriate”. She said: “That something as serious as sexual assault has been misused to describe football is appalling. He has trivialised and undermined the seriousness of rape and anyone who has suffered sexual violence will rightly be angry.”
She is quite correct too. Rape is such an emotive term and it carries such negative connotations that it seems obscene to use it to describe a sporting scene. Rape is a horrific crime; there is no argument to deny that. What makes this particular use seem even worse is that the two meanings are not even so different. Pardew used it to describe a footballer using physical strength to get the better of his opponent, eerily similar to its more common definition.
Thankfully, 35 Match of the Day viewers also agreed with her, registering their formal complaints. It has been confirmed that no on-screen apology was offered as the team assumed that Pardew had said ‘rakes.’ This would have been a much more appropriate term, not just in terms of political correctness, but also to actually describe the action on-screen.
Yet it seems that the use of the word ‘rape’ in this whole new context is not restricted to former football managers and could even be a common occurrence in sporting environments. Urban Dictionary has the following alternative definition for the term:
To utterly defeat another person in any form of competitive activities.
Impressively, this is the second entry for ‘rape’ on this website, having received more votes than ‘To force someone to ingage (sic) in unwanted sexual activities’ which would seem a far more accepted definition of the word. Using this evidence then, the use of the term makes complete sense, if not exactly an appropriate comment for BBC television.
To make matters worse, the comments come just days after John Worboys was convicted for a string of sexual attacks on women that he picked up in his black cab. Only days ago, Joan Smith argued that rape is not taken seriously enough, citing the fact that only 6% of rape complaints result in a conviction in this country. Rape Crisis England and Wales think that this trivialises the matter even further.
The transformation of language is no new phenomenon though. Negative words have frequently been turned around and used in a positive manner. Bad regularly means good. Even the word ‘murder’ is frequently used in musical terms. I tend to murder a different song every morning and I don’t mean in the iconic Pyscho shower scene sense of the word.
However, this is different to the murder comparison. Pardew uses the word in an approving tone. It is not only acceptable to rape somebody, it is seen as aspirational. It’s a particularly nasty usage. You can almost imagine hoards of supporters on the sidelines screaming “Go on, rape him.” As far as I’m aware, they don’t already. I’ve been fortunate enough not to have witnessed it at any of the football matches I have attended at least.
What can be done about it though? We are not language police, after all. There is little that can be done to stop it being used out of the public eye, between friends and social groups. What we can do, however, is stop people like Pardew from using it on our screens. The media coverage has shown that it is not acceptable. Now we need to stop it becoming commonplace.
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Tags: alan pardew rape, bbc complaints, football language, match of the day, rape alternative definitions, rape definition
Match of the Day 2 saw some controversial punditing from former West Ham and Charlton manager Alan Pardew today, as he likened a piece of play to a rape scene. Analysing the Chelsea tie against Manchester City, Pardew said: “Ched Evans is a strong boy, he knocks him off.” Alan Hansen, sitting alongside him, interjects saying “he mauls him” to which Pardew replys “he absolutely rapes him.”
No attempt was made during the show to apologise for the comparison and neither co-presenter acknowledged it, although they appeared less than comfortable when the camera panned back onto them. I expect that this won’t be the last you’ll hear of this, although it could be the last time you’ll see Alan Pardew on the MOTD couch for a while.
[Quote has been changed after it was brought to my attention that I'd scrawled it down incorrectly.]
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Tags: alan pardew, ched evans, match of the day, michael essien, motd2 rape, pardew rape, rape
Why I was wrong about Twitter
Around a month ago, I penned a blog post entitled Why I just don’t get Twitter and, well, since then I’ve been emphatically proved wrong in writing the microblogging site off. What I’ve come to realise is that the reason I hadn’t fallen in love with Twitter, as many social media addicts have done, is because I hadn’t embraced it in the same way they do.
Before, I used Twitter intermittently and not in a particularly interesting way. Whilst following all the right people, I didn’t really engage with any of them or tweet anything that would really spark off a conversation. Hence, I missed out on much of the social conversation aspect of Twitter, which is one of its of the primary advantages. I hadn’t used it for crowdsourcing opinion or added much to ongoing discussions. In short, I was missing out.
As is almost always the case, it didn’t take long for this blog post to come back and bite me on the backside. Exactly a week later, I twittered an idea that I had had about creating an account for the guardian.co.uk community, which would highlight the best comments that the moderation team read during our shifts. Jason Cobb replied almost immediately that he thought it would make “wonderful reading” while, later, Janine Gibson, editor of guardian.co.uk, replied “it’s a great idea.” For me, this is where I began to realise just how useful Twitter could be. Not just because of the idea that I had to utilise it, but also that I had been able to gather opinions on it and find that other people also found it to be a good idea. It had given me the confidence to pitch it to colleagues at work, not that I needed to though, as my direct manager had already tweeted to register her approval.
The blog post has proved to be a turning point for my Twitter activity. I’ve been posting much more regularly and using it more efficiently. It speaks volumes, to me at least, that I had three pages of @replies when I wrote that blog post, having been on Twitter for 11 months. I now have nearly six. I’ve used Twitter to crowdsource names for the Guardian Community account, to help me fix a hacked hotmail account and to share interesting articles that I’ve found. It has helped me to network much more effectively than any other method that I’ve tried and I have a quite extensive list of contacts now, many of whom I know only through Twitter.
Now, almost a month to the day that I posted about Twitter, GuardianVoices has been born. The idea that I came up with reached fruition this afternoon and, to be honest, I’m pretty chuffed with it. It has given me the opportunity to be creative and to prove that I have good ideas. For this reason, I’m determined to make it a success.
So, to sum up, I was wrong. Although Twitter does have its limitations, it is, essentially, what you make of it. If you don’t use it to full potential, then you won’t get the rewards from it. If you do, then you may just get something out of it.
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Tags: guardian twitter, guardian voices, todd nash, todd nash twitter, twitter
Recent Entries
- Glastonbury 2009: Part two
- Glastonbury 2009: My experience
- Glastonbury 2009
- The ‘no-electricity’ party
- Adding another blog to the collection
- Wolves Promotion to the Premier League is Well Deserved
- The Language of Rape
- Alan Pardew sparks MOTD2 rape controversy.
- Journalists need to start taking more notice of their communities
- Why I was wrong about Twitter
- Journalism Today back after long absence
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Journalists need to start taking more notice of their communities
During Meg Pickard’s Social Media briefing today, she discussed how journalists could use the comments posted on newspaper websites as a potential source for new stories or interesting angles on a current story and it made me wonder, why is this practice so underused in journalism? Having spent the time and effort to build up a community filled with intelligent people with local knowledge and often specific expertise, why do newspapers seem not to make the most of this easily accessible, cheap and willing resource?
It took me back to my studies, where I would often use local messageboards and comment sections to look for potential leads, with mixed success. Often, I would find little of use, but occasionally I would find an interesting comment that I could follow up. I was once able to scoop the Birmingham Mail with a story about how police were failing to crack down on the trading of illegal goods across the region. I discovered this story in a forum post on the Birmingham Mail’s own website.
So it would seem that there is potential for news stories to come out of user activity on newspaper websites. Yet, as far as I know, it is not a particularly well-utlised area. Time is clearly an issue here. How many journalists have time to scroll through all of their comments to search for something that could well resemble a needle in a haystack? It was commented that, ironically, freelancers may make better use of this resource as their need for that next story is greater than their staff member counterparts.
If time is the issue, then why not have other staff members do it for you? As commented before, the moderation team at guardian.co.uk now has a Twitter feed @GuardianVoices which highlights good individual comments and interesting debate. Could they be used as a tool to collect potential leads? After all, moderators will already be reading the majority of content of the publication they work for. However, it would require a rather different mindset to look out for story leads compared to the more usual role of finding and removing offensive content.
The idea, I think, is a good one, but requires a more concerted effort than merely scrolling through comments. ‘What do you want to talk about?’ threads are often used to garner ideas and often work quite well. They certainly aid interactivity, giving the user the opportunity to present their ideas and, potentially, have them reported by a professional journalist. Also, a number of blog posts ask for user opinions about a particular subject, or for ideas to fill a new series, which is a semi-effective of utilising the community.
I can’t help but feel though, that lots of potential ideas are being missed. Increased interactivity with users builds trust, which in turn produces a higher class of debate and, with it, more opportunities for follow-up articles. Since commenting became the norm on newspaper websites, community conversations have been inspired by the journalists articles. Perhaps it is now time for the journalists to take inspiration from their communities as well.
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Tags: comments, community, journalism, newspaper, social media, story leads, todd nash