Festival of Cheap Talk

You know that feeling you sometimes get when you wake up in the middle of the night, hot, sweaty, extremely anxious and your bed having the trade mark resonance of a Dutch Oven? That’s how I felt the other night when I woke up and realised the hot and sweaty months of summer are well and truly upon us

Anyway, before you ask, I hadn’t shit the bed, it was something more terrible – I realised its music festival season! Great!

These days people don’t really need to go to festivals such as Glastonbury, Isle of White and the ‘V’s’ as ITV and BBC pretty much have every base covered when it comes to their coverage

But the really shit thing about the coverage these two channels and many others have of these events are the endless amounts of arse licking the interviewers do to the musicians they have on their show

An example of this was me watching the NME channel the other day at the Download Festival. The cameras were backstage and they were interviewing Taylor Hawkins from Foo Fighters. He was sat there in his typical rock star pose, slouched in his chair, Aviator shades on, beer in hand (plastic cup, of course) talking about how he got there (flight), what he had for tea (sandwich), how long he slept on the plane for (five hours), where he got his wellies from (some hippy guy gave him them), who he was gonna ‘hang with’ (the list was too long, but let’s just say his feet must have been really sorry after all the names he dropped).

Anyway, by this time, in between serious fits of yawning, he relentlessly (what most Americans do) went on and on and on and on and I thought to myself what a load of fucking utter rubbish! Who really wants to know all this shit apart from celebrity obsessives and other rock stars? I eventually came to the one conclusion that was all rock stars are utterly boring self-absorbed bastards who are about as exciting as listening to an Athlete album!

But, going back to the intrepid roving reporter. There’s something that bugs me about them and the way they stick their microphones where they shouldn’t and it’s the pure look of star struck dumbness that comes over them while their subjects are telling them about what they had for dinner, who they met on the plane, who they’d like t o shag, etc, etc, etc!!!

Personally, I don’t get it; it’s like a real life version of Face book with a set of boring, friendly generic questions constantly reeled out time after time guaranteed not to offend. Dull dull fucking dull!!!

Now before you all start calling me a grumpy bastard (again) I would like to point out that not all British Music festivals are shit. Glastonbury, thanks to the father and daughter partnership of the Eavis family, has independently maintained their festival for over forty years without it being over taken by the massive corporations such as the V’s and T in the Park for example. You have to take your hat off to them for that

But that’s not my ‘beef’; my beef is with the constant shit that the TV companies do whilst covering these events

I firmly believe the producers of these programmes that order their presenters to mix it in the mud for a few days with the ‘stars’ they have to chase are told to over-sensationalize them to the point that many people/fans see these musicians as some sort of god-like figures

It’s nothing short of pathetic and another example of fame being all about smoke and mirrors

Until the summers over, I suggest you either attend one of these music festivals or turn off the telly and go and live in a tent until the autumn

Leave the willies in the shed though!

Mol