…and back to the V Festival. I’ve mentioned a couple of early highlights from day one, but while the Ordinary Boys and Dizzee Rascal were brilliant, they weren’t the very best.

Exhilarated by the Ordinary Boys, we arrived at the JJB Arena in time to capture Natasha Bedingfield (this year’s bubblegum pop) on the camera phone, but thankfully not in time to hear any of her set. The arena is always a good place to hang out though, and while we’d seen them two years before and they ain’t changed much, Goldfrapp were great value in a retro sort of way. Katharine was reminded of the Osmonds’ Crazy Horses only for these crazy dancing horses to take the stage. Then there was that Dizzee Rascal set I’ve already mentioned.

So last year were Scissor Sisters. Whereas in 2004 they overflowed what was the NME stage, with nothing new to report, this set was a little stale and the main stage felt too comfortable. This made slipping off for the end of Ian Brown in the JJB Arena quite magical. We could have snuck in, but instead spied his performance from just outside the tent where the sound and view of the stage were near perfect. Here we heard a series of Stone Roses classics that will never go stale and went home humming: ‘I don’t have to sell my soul / He’s already in me’.

This year’s second – now Channel 4 – stage heroes were undoubtedly the Kaiser Chiefs. No other band can create so much excitement at the moment. This time there was no room for skanking, the retro dance of choice being an energetic pogo and I predict a riot produced suitably ironic throwing of beer cans and good humoured pushing and shoving. And whereas last year V was a bit all over the place, not seeming to know who should be on which stage, having The Bravery effectively support them could not have worked better, thanks to a similarly aggressive old style punk performance complete with crowd surfing and catching ones spit in ones mouth after gobbing high.

All this as part of a day that began with our just missing the ever so soft and gentle Magic Numbers, but in time for little KT Tunstall, who likes to jump around and has a smoky sexiness. I enjoyed jigging about with her, but in the end she’s still a country singer and I’ll never be into that.

I don’t remember much about The Zutons except that they brought out the Scousers in the crowd. Less forgettable were Oasis, whose taking the stage feels like a real event. It’s the extreme confidence – not arrogance – and posturing that does it. Everything about them is commanding and they control the audience without conceding anything to it. And when they’d finished it was the turn of Texas to close the JJB Arena. I remember Sharleen leaving the stage in tears after a disastrous set supporting Bowie at Cardiff Arms Park in 1987. This time they were okay.

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What with the V Festival and a wedding tomorrow (oh no, today), we’ve been on holiday this week (and so I’m blogging at what for me is an odd hour). However, rotten weather’s kept us from getting out so much so we spent an enjoyable afternoon watching Lost. It’s ever so American, if you know what I mean, so it’s perhaps fitting that Channel 4 has inserted so many extra ad breaks (not a defence I expect Ofcom will accept). Nevertheless, I think it’s only right and proper that Lost should be America’s most successfully launched TV export. Everything is big. Everything is fun. Everything’s fantastic and fantastical.

Everyone has a Big Secret. Today we discovered the evil-looking-guy-who’s-befriended-the-kid-who’s-lost-his-dog’s Big Secret is that he couldn’t walk before the plane crash. He used to be a friendless geek in a wheelchair whose female friend turned out to be on the other end of sex line. Now he’s leading expeditions into the jungle to hunt wild boar: ‘You three distract the mother… I’ll jump a piglet from behind and cut its throat!’

I love it! How can you not love it?

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It’s time to rush out to Mancunian newsstands as City Life (Manchester’s Guardian Media Group published Time Out) has a three page spread on the city’s bloggers written by yours truly. It’s a little odd for a PR man like myself to venture into freelance journalism: people normally go the other way. Journalism’s not as lucrative, but it is so much easier.

I can’t reproduce the article here as the internet rights have been bought on behalf of Manchester Online. Frustratingly, this site (which is mostly Manchester Evening News content) takes the odd City Life review, but none of the features.

Anyway. Interviewing Manchester’s bloggers was interesting. You’ll hear how football fanzines are moving online (Bitter and Blue, Manchester Buccaneers and United Rant), the city’s literary heritage is being mapped (North West Passages) and that Airport Exile is putting a twist on the workplace diary genre pioneered by Call Centre Confidential. On top of that there’s sex toys and graffiti from Spinneyhead, air guitar performed in the feminist style, a broken heart and the inevitable geek.

Phew! Between us all, we knocked a Pixies interview and a Tribal Gathering preview down the pecking order to be the first feature flashed on the cover.

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So we’d sat through a bit of Joss Stone, but V Festival 2005 began proper with Ordinary Boys: ‘I expected to see middle aged couples picnicking’. And they would have if the stewards had let our chairs in. Nevertheless, some serious skanking took place that awoke the Channel 4 stage.

The snipe comes from the V Festival not quite fitting in with everyone else. Having taken its sponsors name, press coverage can be catty and everyone else seems to have a Radio 1 stage, which V’s obvious association with Virgin Radio rules out. In truth, it carries no more advertising than anyone else and has a better line-up than many.

Back to the Ordinary Boys. Great fun, but if you’re going to cover the Ramones and Buzzcocks, you should expect some of your fans to be sporting the odd grey hair and middle-aged spread.

Skanking turned into a bit of theme, emerging in a more contemporary form from Dizzee Rascal. We’d not been planning to see him through to the end, due to a clash with Franz Ferdinand, but from his signature tune on it was impossible to tear yourself away. When we did get to Franz Ferdinand they were their usual competent, but uninspiring selves. I feel I should like them and perhaps that’s the problem. They know too well which buttons to press, so when they press them it lacks real feeling.

One of the great attractions of festivals is the breadth of music represented and the idea that you’ll see artists you wouldn’t normally go out of your way for. In addition to Joss Stone, Ordinary Boys, Dizzee Rascal and Franz Ferdinand we saw Scissor Sisters, The Zutons, Oasis, KT Tunstall, The Bravery, Kaiser Chiefs, Texas, Goldfrapp and Ian Brown.

And that’s all a bit much one post, so I’ll continue next time…

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Pacifist geeks get guns, feel better for it, but are ultimately corrupted by their weapons’ ‘true nature’. Or should that be their own true nature. Either way Dear Wendy makes for an intelligent exploration of social exclusion and the attractiveness of cults, while a superb ’60s soundtrack proves its creators’ Dogme days are long gone.
An enjoyable 8 out of 10.
Director: Thomas Vinterberg……Writer: Lars von Trier……Staring: Jamie Bell……Bill Pullman
War of the Worlds……Frida

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It’s a busy time for John Harris, the music journalist with the best claim to the title ‘official chronicler of Britpop’ (he may even have named the genre). This week he’s been leading BBC Four’s celebration ten years on from the Oasis Vs Blur thing and previewing the same in the Guardian.

John Harris has provoked much discussion, which might fall on deaf ears as the latest rumination on his own website is the best of 2002. Jonathan Shipley over at Assistant gets it about right, interestingly evoking XTC, a band for which Harris has much respect. And John Harris is an insightful commentator with whom – as fully paid-up member of the chattering classes – I agree more often than not when he’s on Newsnight Review.

But, despite laying claim to a whole genre, he’s an unfortunate music journalist, forced to more or less admit that Britpop burned out too quick. It was something he shied away from in his TV documentary, perhaps because it was a celebration of Britpop. For me the whole thing was summed up by the ex-Labour Party researcher who introduced Blur to Tony Blair, Darren Kalynuk. He described a scene where Alistair Campaign, with Blair in the room, asked Damon Albarn if he’d ever call Tony a w**ker and he said he wouldn’t. As soon as Labour won in 1997, Britpop was over. They were part of the establishment and had thrown away any claim to speak for the inevitably frustrated and idealistic generation.

W**ker was a good choice of slur, because w**ker is exactly what Albarn is (now listening to Blur’s Parklife). The whole thing was far too clever for its own good, filled with self-conscious irony and created to some postmodernist manual. Which brings us to the legacy: which John Harris admits is conservative, reactionary and laddish: perhaps the opposite of everything its creators strived for. Postmodernism passed too many people by and they simply didn’t get the irony. So the biggest Britpop hits – Blur’s Girls & Boys, Pulp’s Common People – where essentially cross-over hits often taken at face value.

So spare a thought for John Harris. An intelligent insightful journalist, doomed to be wasted on a Britpop, a pretentious and ultimately empty musical genre.
Populist leaders……KT Tunstall, Suddenly I See

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And I do mean bad as in the opposite of good. In the name of blog research, I’ve just listened to James Blunt’s Back to Bedlam so you don’t have to. Okay, I only really bothered with free thirty second samples of each track, but that was more than enough. It’s clearly sh*te. But there he is at number one for five weeks in a row. ‘I’ve seen peace… I’ve seen pain… resting on the shoulders of your name,’ he nonsensically warbles on one of the more melancholy tracks that lets you know the album’s nearing its end and its nearly time to slash your wrists.

And then there’s that Daniel Powter running close behind in a bid to prove things can get worse.

Yet somehow it feels like the ’80s all over again: a trend I first picked up last May. It’s a good that records stay at number one for a few weeks. Music – even sh*te music – is the soundtrack to life and summer 2005’s defined by James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. More interestingly this revival of the music chart’s relevance coincides with a revival of Adult Orientated Rock (AOR). So a word of caution and a confession: first time around I was taken in. My first music purchase was Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required and I owned Dire Straights Brothers in Arms. The thing is everyone owned those records, they sold in record breaking numbers.

Today every granny who works in a charity shop knows they’re not worth putting on the shelf. Tomorrow, they’ll be turning away James and Daniel and you’ll be denying ownership. So do the right thing. Buy Kaiser Chiefs.

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The Independent’s rapidly positioned itself as the left-wing underdog of broadsheet newspapers, a title the Guardian previously held without dispute.

But there’s one piece of Guardian territory you’d expect them to steer well clear of: that of the typologically challenged ‘Grauniad’. But no. Instead the Independent’s brought typos into the new millennium, misspelling its own name in the descriptions of its RSS feeds, as the Bloglines screen grab shows.

It’s like a right-wing newspaper not being able to spell ‘sponging’. Perhaps they should stick with Indy.

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A new group of Tory MPs is rapidly emerging in the battle for that party’s soul. They’re the youngish fogies and they’ve written to the Spectator, the party house journal, whinging about decadent Britain. They argue that Muslims who dislike some British lifestyles may be right. Matthew Turner takes the cheap (but fair) shot of pointing out that the Spectator is no bastion of conservative morals, but it goes deeper than that.

Britain is far from being a decadent place with its morals in decline, but neither are its people naturally conservative (with a small c) as Conservatives have always claimed. We are naturally liberal and tolerant of others’ lifestyles, just so long as they don’t impact on us too much. That attitude is very unreligious. After all, religion is all about morals that often preclude a great many lifestyles and religions often impose a duty to proselytise.

The radicals’ primary failing, be they Christian, Muslim or whatever, is that they follow the logic of their faith through. Religious moderates behave in a way that suggests they don’t really believe all that stuff. They appear happy to stand by as people condemn themselves to eternal damnation by following the wrong path. Faith is in crisis because few really believe and those that do are regarded as lunatics. That scares conservatives whose values are based in Christianity and so are just like those of radical Muslims.

Yet the amount of freedom people enjoy may be measured by the variety of lifestyles from which they may choose. The decline of faith increases our lifestyle choices and should be celebrated. With just one life to live, hedonism is the way we should go and, side effects aside, I’m delighted to see Britain leading the way.

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Years ago summer holidays began with the cry, ‘Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?’ Relive it over here with a title sequence dating back to 1988. I remember an earlier, far more aggressive version, at the end of which my grandmother would switch off the television and I’d spend the day riding the tube. Aged fourteen, the family moved to Wales and I discovered some kids really don’t have something less boring to do.

I digress. This is a blogpost to change your life: ‘Why don’t you just switch off your television set PC, stop reading blogs and go out and do something less boring instead?’

Eleven-year-old i-to-i fills gap years, career breaks et cetera with volunteer placements to 27 countries. They’ve sent volunteers to Sri Lanka to assist with emergency tsunami relief efforts, to South Africa to rehabilitate sick penguins, to create a de-addiction camp for street children in India, to release turtle hatchings in Costa Rica. Volunteer placements go from four to 24 weeks. You get the idea.

And they offer online TEFL courses after which you can find yourself teaching English as a foreign language in all sorts of places. Indeed, you can learn how to teach English as a foreign language in all sorts of places and then work that gap year travelling the world.

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