on being weird: suburban ambience

on being weird: suburban ambience

Two years ago I moved into a detached private residence on the south east side of the town. It offered a quiet, suburban sort of life, free of the claustrophobia that can be found in the rows and rows of terraced housing that permeate through the centre. Moving there provided a odd sense of worth, because as we were just four young men straight out of university we weren’t used to such homely accommodation. We really had transcended our position, or at least our pay grades. Fortunately we took care to speak to the owners eloquently and with propriety so as to market ourselves as right for their property. From there my own personal view of that time is one of mixed feelings; of restless energy inhabiting new freedom, new geographic landscape finding surfacing curiosity, exploration of sound and ambience coming up against strange, oscillating atmospheres, softly moving against the minute hand of the wall clock. In retrospect it feels like life never moved on, that we didn’t grow and started to lose ourselves, but all the time that clock kept ticking before us. It was probably my own unique position that enhanced this view. Of being in work but with no responsibility, only to pay the bills at the end of the month and to keep myself alive so that my band could carry on in perpetuity neither ascending nor descending, just being.

on being weird: Glastonbury as a journey: part one.

on being weird: Glastonbury as a journey: part one.

I guess it was a bad idea to arrive at the 40th Glastonbury Festival on Saturday afternoon, midway through the week and a day and a half into the official set-listing. This was the result of having little money at the time the tickets went on sale and being promised entry through some nefarious juncture, coalescing in my mind as a perfect opportunity too good to miss. Unfortunately as these things are want to do, it went a little tits up, meaning entry could only be gained on the aforementioned Saturday afternoon. Official Glastonbury guidelines will tell you that entry to the car park can only be made with an official ticket with which you then buy a car park permit, but through trickery, quick witted-ness, and general confusion we managed to elicit a parking space – rather less Derren Brown and more through accident, the second official believing that we had secured a permit from the first. As we left the car the sun had reached an oppressive high of 24 degrees centigrade causing violent ruptures of sweat to pockmark my white t-shirt with reservoirs of damp as we made our journey from the edge of the Blue car park to Pedestrian Gate C.

on being weird: before glastonbury

on being weird: before glastonbury

Staring out from the Stone Circle, as many of you will do this coming week, watching the sun alight from the night-sky and witnessing the people bustle about as if in some medieval market town, each one a merchant of sorts,  selling alcohol, drugs, their music or their thoughts, it dawns on you that the whole festival is bound in an supreme collective spirit. Each person like the tiniest atom contributing to the organism that is the festival as a whole. It was with this simple metaphor that a friend of mine, sitting on that same Stone Circle a year ago this week, was possessed of an idea just wildly arcane enough for Eavis to take note and make it real.

on being weird: wetness

on being weird: wetness

Contemporary romantics have been rediscovering the epic song of nature as of late, well our whole culture has taken a shine to it ever since the all too perfect marriage of Planet Earth and Sigur Ros. But then Iceland has often been attached to the epic, how could they not dwelling in that mountainous and glacial region sitting just outside the Arctic Circle? Within such easy reach of great tracts of visually arresting imagery the epic must come easy to them, just as London produces a wealth of urban music relaying the mix of decadence and depravity of city-living. The environment surrounds them and turns their gaze upon it, it is simply a natural reaction to their own landscape. The localisation of the epic causes further contemplation. When the Romantic poet Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley in 1816 it was the localisation of the epic, or to put it another way the soul gazing deep into the infinite, that caused him to write his poem Mont Blanc, below is an excerpt:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears,-still snowy and serene-

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven