There’s a game some people like to play whenever Coachella unveils the lineup of that year’s festival. You can work out your “musical age” by subtracting from 80 the number of names you recognise on the poster.
Based on the 2025 poster, my musical age is 46. But if I were to calculate it based on the number of acts I’d be interested in watching… hmm!
See for yourself:
The higher your “musical age”, the more you might relate to what follows.
Reminder: NAGCHAMPA = New Age Grammy Challenge: Healing Assessments of Musicians Perceived as Awful.
Following my foolhardy metal quest, I feel like I need some quiet and visionary music as badly as I sometimes need a cup of tea and a flapjack.
It’s been five years. But if you remember, I’m studying every album that ever won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album, in an attempt to understand what makes New Age Music so New Age. The closest I came to a definition was this: New Age Music is applied ambient music. Or, it’s spiritual ambience. It’s music that aims to make you feel better, and succeeds.
But while my back was turned, the Grammy guys broadened the scope of this awards. Since 2023, the category has been “Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album”.
“Ambient” I get, but “chant”? Will there be chanting? Was there always chanting?
I swear, I had no idea that the 2025 Grammy Awards were taking place as I wrote this thing. The BBC didn’t even include the New Age category in their roundup of the winners. It looks like it went to Wouter Kellerman, Eru Matsumoto, and Chandrika Tandon’s Triveni. A worthy winner? We’ll see, when I finally get to 2025 in this project, some 16 years from now.
Because we’ve only just made it to 1994 here, and it’s Paul Winter’s time to shine.
Why “Download”? Because at the time, people thought that downloading was killing music. So to label a music festival against such a force of evil was a daring move, presumably. Because that’s what metal’s all about: SHOCK. But it raises the question: If the Download Festival were started in 2023 rather than 2003, would they have called it the Streaming Festival?
I’ve only been once, and even then I only went for one day. It was 2019, and the opportunity to see Tool and Smashing Pumpkins on the same day was too good to miss. It was a beautiful day. Everyone was friendly, and everyone was there for the music. I saw more devil horns than smartphones held aloft, and the bars had the Iron Maiden Trooper ale on tap.
Also, Download has a mascot: The Download Dog. He started life looking like an unfortunate victim of experiments in canine ESP. Over the years, he’s also appeared as a sort of FrankenDog, as a snarling pink puppy, and as a skeleton. When he makes public appearances, though, he’s a giant red naked bodybuilder with studded bracelets who, despite his leer and his bulging muscles, looks to be quite cuddly.
All festivals should have a mascot. The Glastonbury Wizard. The Reading Bookworm. The Latitude Accountant. In fact, every business and brand in the land should have a mascot. They help, in a way.
So I’m down with The Download Festival. And that’s why I decided to listen to every band and artist that ever played Download Festival. What else am I going to do with my Spotify subscription?
Every year, as the August Bank Holiday weekend approaches, the Shiiine On Festival shares an old Reading & Leeds lineup to their Instagram.
Something like this:
You can imagine the comments. Some just offer a single word. “Classic,” or similar. Some share fond memories. This is often something along the lines of, “I can’t remember much but I’m told I had a good time”. They were drunk, you see.
But others say something along the lines of “what happened?”
And you get similar comments whenever Reading and Leeds post lineup updates to their own social media profiles. “What happened?”
What happened, indeed?
Mostly these would feature a recording of a live performance. But sometimes they were collections of music videos, or even specially-made “behind the music” documentaries. The best music DVDs contained a combination of the above.
Each DVD is a time capsule of an era that was very similar to our own, but also profoundly different. This is the era just before the mass adoption of smartphones, and before social media made everyone and everything significantly worse.
I recently got back from my third trip to the Liverpool Psych Fest!
You can read all about it on FCK LDN.
Well, not all about it. I didn’t write about absolutely everything, because that would have taken ages, and nobody pays me for this.
I know, you’re right. They should.
As per, I had a fantastic time, and as per, I’m already looking forward to next year’s event.
And what’s more, I’m already formulating a wishlist of the acts I want them to book next year!
Here’s what I’d like to see at Liverpool Psych Fest 2017, and beyond.
I have a lot of favourite songs. Some songs are my favourite because they remind me of certain times, places, and people. Others are my favourites because, over time, they’ve sunk under my skin and revealed themselves to be glittering caverns of unfathomable wonder.
Some songs, though, are my favourite songs because, the first time I heard them, I was stunned. Jaw hitting the floor, shaking my head in awe, stunned. Floored, like Brian Wilson, who claims that the first time he heard Be My Baby by The Ronettes, he fell over.
Some songs tend to lose their lustre after a few thousand listens. Not these. For me, they were incredible on the first listen, and they remain favourites because they have never lost their power to stun.
Read on.
Earlier this week I got back from my sixth Glastonbury Festival.
The annual Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts is a big deal for me. As I explain over on FCK LDN, I love the darn thing so much that I’ve started to feel strangely Christmassy about the whole ruddy ordeal.
Now, I’ve already done the emotional gushing over there, so I’ll use this space to list the five best things I saw at Glastonbury 2014.
With the benefit of hindsight, I should perhaps have used my own personal blog to share the above personal ruminations, instead writing this here “review” for FCK LDN. But this gloomy place has been dormant for months now, and it could do with a bit of cheering up.
So here we go. Live on Lord Gloom, a list of the five best things at Glastonbury 2014. They’re in ascending order! I think.
Lord Gloom 