Nottingham’s new tourism campaign in London is the finest advertising I have ever seen.

Dear fellow Londoners,

I imagine, like me, you’ve already spent much of 2013 gazing at the bare summer months in your calendar app, painfully aware of how most years this season passes unfilled, each of us lonely and imprisoned in our respective dwelling-houses. Perhaps also like me then, you sensed a great weight lift from your shoulders recently, as posters went up across our city’s transport network (two spotted so far!) showcasing events forthcoming not here, but up the country a little bit, in my home county of Nottinghamshire.

Please, at this juncture, take a moment to admire the above poster. The more astute observers amongst you will by now have realised that it appears to be advertising some manner of medium sized outdoor concert. And so let us linger in order to further admire the impeccable timing of this poster campaign. For as only the canniest of Nottingham’s marketing brains will have noticed, London has been cruelly starved of medium sized music events in recent years. Quality entertainers simply don’t gravitate to this city. The situation has become quite dire, with people being spotted wandering around various London parks, listening to Smooth Radio, and trying to imagine a way of seeing such hits performed by the people that wrote them.

But puzzle no longer, wandering citizens of England’s capital! A plucky city in the North has rushed to our aid. The less cool-headed Londoner might slap their head in embarrassment, that none of their own had hit upon such a winning event formula. Although I know it will take a degree of swallowing our pride to depart our city for Nottinghamshire, I hope my fellow Londoners will be as commendably mature as I am, and join me on that journey.

If that seems impossible, and you tire of gazing North with your thinly veiled jealousy, let us instead examine our advertisement in question with the appropriately mature admiration that it deserves. Alongside the totemic headliners the London music industry have been kicking and screaming in its attempts to book for years – Blondie and Paloma Faith – we see a number of other borderline arrogant claims. Aside from the brash assertion to hold 12 of some fantastical creation called ‘music venues’ (presumably 11 now), one also notes that apparently, (and please fellow Londoner, steady yourself before reading on) Nottingham has given birth to “one top album artist”.

Well, I can only assume you are also in stunned silence. The only course of action remaining appears to be damage limitation, and so I issue a critical warning to my fellow capital dwellers, not yet versed in the beauty of England’s green and pleasant county: book those train tickets early. Once summer finally rolls around St. Pancras will verge on riotous scenes for the hordes of culture starved capital-dwellers fighting for a place on a train to get to a city where a person has produced a successful album. Let alone a person as admirably refined as Jake Bugg.

In closing, I can only enter a plea to the Gatekeepers of Nottingham: act with greater delicacy in future! Be sensitive to our already blindly jealous eyes! Did NBC advertise their US presidential election coverage across Syria? London life is a daily struggle as it is. I just ask for our plight not to be rubbed in our faces. Many, many thanks, and obviously, see you in June.

This blogpost was originally posted here.

Glastonbury 2013 review for Drowned in Sound

The full version of Drowned in Sound's Glastonbury review is here. Below are just the sections I wrote.

It’s a wonder Julio Bashmore didn’t get the guy near us to airhorn all over his original recordings as well. It could only improve the deep house pleasures of Au Seve, in my opinion. This is a real party crowd though, and otherwise they’re reacting to every well honed 2013 beat and occasional cheeky 80’s disco classic with appropriately considered joy. Apart from maybe the guy that climbs right to the top of the neighbouring Cubehenge. The group that pull off a perfectly orchestrated go-low across our part of the tent however, you’re fine. Julio laps all this up, and his spurs for getting a party started are well and truly earned.

Slightly more subdued are the crowd at Alt-J. Not a peep can be heard during acapella moments like Ripe & Ruin, which is the perfect outcome, of course. There’s a lot of mutual appreciation at play here, crowd and band willing each other on. Not that the couples near DiS need any further encouragement to slow dance during their still great Kylie/Dr. Dre mashup. On a stage where the sound had been getting blown around everywhere for the Hives earlier in the day, Alt-J’s innovative compositions are (with the exception of a limp Dissolve Me) replicated wonderfully here.

As Foals finish there’s just 15 minutes to hot foot it over to West Holts in order to see Chic ft. Nile Rogers. A perfectly reasonable task, if it wasn’t for the reported 30,000 people who have got there before you. After two songs the sound just isn’t connecting for the people only just inside the field.

Fortunately, there’s time to grab a drink and still make it up to see the whole of The Horrors set at the Park stage (or as I take to calling it, the BBC 6 Music stage). Seeing The Horrors is an idea that nobody else has pursued on site. Despite thanking the sparse crowd for showing up, they seem indifferent that we have. As the band openly acknowledge, there’s a lot of great alternatives to watching them right now. They then set about doggedly ensuring those fans that have shown up get get treated with mistrust. It’s by no means a fiasco, it could be more favourably described as a solid set. But it feels  pedestrian. There’s no effort to forge a connection.

Two new trends spotted at Glastonbury 2013. Good trend: the two guys in the West Holts field disguised as one big pile of rubbish, which spring up and chase anyone that places litter on them. Bad trend: guys urinating against the inside fence of urinals, rather than just waiting another 15 seconds for a urinal to become free. Thanks, guys. In turn you helped turn entrances to toilets into thick muddy urine puddles, that other guys would then step into in order to continue to urinate against the same fence. You are bizarre and disgusting xx

I can’t imagine there’s many people on site wrestling with whether to see Chase & Status or Fuck Buttons headline the Saturday night. In the end, career-best new single Lost & Not Found - seemingly purpose written for Glastonbury - is the deciding factor. Chase & Status’s music is brutally effective in this environment. Over 70 minutes the efficiency at which they keep achieving maximum crowd euphoria is dizzying. The stage design is slick too, one assumes they lost money on the production.

Speaking of production values, special note has to be given to the spider robot creators Arcadia this year. Promoted from the fringes of the site to an attention-grabbing spot by the Other stage, it’s a triumph of scrap metal, pyrotechnics, light projections, circus performers and big name DJs, plus considerable quantities of smoke and lasers, mean it must surely rank among the most remarkable DJ gigs in the world, yet it only stands at a few events each year.

For a certain Sunday mid-afternoon set at the John Peel tent, the chap next to us spends 70% of the performance with his fingers wedged in his ears. It’s James Blake, who this writer has recently changed his mind about because his second album is a bit less, to use the technical term, wanky, isn’t it? It isn’t even until the following afternoon when we remember the early description of him as being like Ross from Friends when he gets his keyboard out.

The tent’s bass, then, has been turned up to ‘somewhat painful’. What they lack in visual stimulus is made up for by the music, which is commanding enough. The swelling, intensifying nature of his songs, particularly during The Wilhelm Scream, overpowers the crowd. It’s a triumph. We would have liked to have heard Take A Fall For Me though, James. It is good.

Yeah so, I’m uncertain about how exciting watching The XX headline the Other stage will be. This is music at its best when you close your eyes, and whilst previous tours have proved they can replicate their recorded output live, the question remains as to why anybody would bother showing up to see/listen to it, and whether or not it is deserving of a headline slot on the Other stage.

On the other hand, maybe the sound innovation that even Jamie Smith in isolation has been responsible for since 2009 makes them more than deserving of this slot. In a summer that’s seen them tour Europe with their own music festival it’s surprising to hear them so genuinely overwhelmed by the occasion tonight. Lead single and set closer Angels, which to this writer always sounded limp and indistinctive on the record actually comes into its own in a field, and things all get a bit overwhelming during this and Shelter, meaning the set carries a genuine emotional punch.

Whilst all this is going on however, I’m getting texts from up at the Park stage. The last set of the night, Cat Power, finishes her show, but the crowd then starts to get busier. There are rumours a secret headliner will step up. Who could it be? Crowds have been showing up to TBA slots all weekend to see if the Daft Punk/Bowie/Atoms for Peace/National/Hot Chip rumours will come true. Eventually an announcement comes: there’s no gig, please leave. Admittedly this could have been communicated 20-odd minutes earlier, but the degree to which the rumour mill took power over the festival this year all started to feel faintly toxic.

This is probably in no small part due to previous years. In 2011, Glastonbury got secret gigs from Radiohead and Pulp. In 2013, it got Beady Eye. It’s understandable that this was done for reasonable health and safety concerns, but it was also bound to feel anticlimactic to those that enjoy the thrill of such chases. There’s no reason why Glastonbury can’t take its cue from Latitude 2009, and put superstars on the main stage in the middle of the afternoon where everyone can see them.