The British music festival season is in full so swing and so it is time for the first of many markontour reviews, starting with what remains the greatest of them all – Glastonbury. As usual the acts I saw will be scored based on what I scribbled down at the time and with a tendency to allocate extra stars to the new and unusual.
“I’m exactly the person I wanted to be” sang Amanda Palmer as she strummed a battered ukelele, prior to be joined on stage by her Dad, Jack Palmer. By the end of their incredible, powerful, and moving show at Le Poisson Rouge in New York this week, the audience as one was thinking “and what an extraordinary person Amanda Palmer has grown up to be”. Markontour is going to be in music-tip debt for quite some time to the two friends who took me to this incredible gig.
I can’t quite believe that I am writing a blog about the Hampton Court Flower Show. This is not markontour’s natural territory. But having failed on the promise to learn how to salsa that was the mainstay of my 40th birthday present to Ms markontour, I felt compelled to follow through with sharing an Xmas present of tickets to the aforementioned floral festival. I have to admit, I rather enjoyed it.
It’s not often that I’m pleased when my train or plane is delayed (and I write this while languishing in Luxembourg thanks to a re-routed flight), but had the 16.57 from St Pancras arrived on schedule then I would never have experienced The Sheffield Tap and life would be the lesser.
Melbourne is a music town and thus makes markontour feel very much at home. In particular, I love Brunswick, Melbourne’s Dalston/Greenpoint; I love its vibrant community radio; I love the free tramway service in the centre of town; I was surprised to find Theakston’s Old Peculiar costs $16 a pint. Most of all I love the chance to catch up with old friends from Nottingham days and that’s probably why there’s an even higher than usual markontour quota of references to bars and record shops in this very incomplete city guide!
Who’d have thought they could make wine in Wales? God’s own country is green and pleasant because of the frequency with which the atmosphere turns moist, a weather condition not usually associated with good terroir. Yet, hot on the heels of a truly tremendous valleys’ whiskey distillery at Penderyn, Cymru now also boasts the Sugarloaf Vineyard just outside of Abergavenny. Markontour had the pleasure of trying the tasting menu in the spring bank holiday sunshine.
I have already used an excerpt from the sleeve notes to Woody Guthrie’s ‘Poor Boy’, but having just had the chance to experience at first hand what Woody was singing about when he reminded his compatriots that ‘This Land Is Your Land’, and because Guthrie’s words are so darn good, I have decided to reproduce the whole thing..
Record Store Day, the annual celebration of musical discs, has a big red star by it on the markontour calendar. So I bounced out of bed this morning and listened to Mary Anne Hobbs read out tweeted dispatches from the early morning queues outside Britain’s remaining vinyl emporiums, while compiling a wishlist of the special releases about to go on sale.
The best bit of the Tate Britain’s compelling ‘Artists and Empire’ exhibition comes right at the end, in the ‘Legacies of Empire’ room. Here, Hew Locke’s clever guerilla art sees him adorn a statue of Bristol’s founding father, Edward Colston, in cheap plastic gold trinkets, a modern equivalent of the tat that imperial traders exchanged for slaves. For, as Locke explains in an accompanying Restoration, Colston and Bristol’s wealth was built on human trafficking.
Looking down on Sydney from one of its many skyscrapers, what is most striking is the sheer extent of the harbour. It seems to twist and turn forever in an endless melee of coves and bays. Having checked it out on Wikipedia, I note it is indeed “the world’s largest natural harbour”.
markontour 