Robert Sharp

Another photo from the summer festivals. That’s my self portrait in the reflection.

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I hear today that WOMAD will not be at the Reading Rivermead Centre in 2007:

we have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the festival has now outgrown the available land at the Rivermead site … WOMAD implemented substantial changes to the festival site in 2006. However, despite these improvements, a perception of overcrowding remains.

Persoanlly, I did not find it too crowded, and always found a place to sit or stand to watch the acts. But in any case, isn’t a bit of bustle part of the fun of festivals? The alternative is a lengthy trek between music tents… which would at least be consistent with the nomadic theme which characterises this particular event.

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Watching the Spanish Harlem Orchestra at the Open Air Stage, WOMAD 2006.

As per Clive’s recommendation, I’m off to WOMAD this weekend. Unfortunately, its started with a disappointment. I was supposed to be interviewing the Zimbabwean virtuoso Thomas Mapfumo, but I’ve just discovered that has had to cancel his performance… because he couldn’t get a visa!

Nothing positive can come of this decision. This is the flip-side of the immigration debate. No porus borders here. By keeping people out, we risk isolating ourselves from outside influence, and our culture is all the poorer for it.

Update

The visa problems were not an admin error. According to WOMAD and Mapfumo’s label, Real World Records, the British Embassy have said that they are “not satisfied that he intends to leave the UK” after the festival. This is strange, since the notoriously paranoid US Department of Homeland Security have issued Mapfumo with documents allowing him to leave, and re-enter the United States, where he is seeking political asylum.

Other WOMAD acts have had similar problems. Nine members of the Mozambique mariba outfit Djaaka were refused entry into the UK earlier this week. They were actually in transit through Gatwick airport, en route to a gig in Italy, but ended up being deported back to Mozambique. Mauritainian diva Dimi Mint Abba has asked her family and manager to support her act, afer her band were denied travel visas on the basis that they could not prove they earned a sufficent income in Mauritania.

Let us hope these artists pen a song or two about these experiences. It would be great if all this red tape inspired, rather than stifled creativity.

You know your brain is fried when you cannot even muster a meta-blogging post, about how you cannot summon the energy to have an opinion about the issues of the day.

[photopress:fnd027_sutherland_gav.jpg,full,alignright]Thank goodness, then, that I’m off to be entertained at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club, where promising local band FOUND are launching their album. They’ve already been on MTV with their single Mulokian, and if their next release Static 68 doesn’t get some TV play time, I’ll be annoyed - I spent 3 hours on a concrete floor filming a timelapse for the video.

Visit FOUND at MySpace, listen to their hilarious podcast, or enter their fantastic colouring in competition. I know I will.

My dear mother makes a point of baking a cake to me on my birthday, and posting it to wherever I happen to be in the world. Not for her a simple Victoria sponge sandwich or fruit cake: The gateaux must carry some bespoke decoration. In her time she’s managed cake crosswords, football club crests, a variety of public transport vehicles, and a three-dimensional representation of Marlinspike Hall, Captain Haddock’s ancestral home, with chocolate button roof slates (this was circa 1989, before the advent of the many cake building technologies we now take for granted).

However, I have yet to see anything quite so post-modern, as the offering I received this year.

Yes! A rendering in icing of an electronic page, which itself metaphors paper. Thank goodness I don’t have Google AdWords on the site at the moment.

I have to say I’m disappointed no-one has entered anything in the comments, but I guess my mother didn’t have time to whip-up any RSS biscuits.

Working with icing is no mean feat. I refer you to an amusing interview with the anarchic Todd Trainer, drummer with the seminal Shellac, leader of the bizarre Brick Layer Cake, and something of an icing artist:

Yeah. Icing has definitely always been a part of the visual aspect of Brick Layer Cake. All four records have had icing on the covers, both front and back covers - literally all the artwork that has ever appeared on my records is icing, so that’s a theme, an aesthetic theme … Icing is a rather limited medium - I shouldn’t say “limited”. It’s an unforgiving medium to work with, because you only get once chance to really do it right.

Revisiting old songs and exploring new ways to sing them is something of a Will Oldham/Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy trademark. Three of his last four album releases have been covers of pre-existing songs. Summer in the Southeast is a live album, The Brave and the Bold is a collaboration with Tortoise, consisting of 10 cover songs, while in Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, Oldham and friends perform updates of music he composed earlier in his career.

It was a delight to see another iteration of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy last night, this time performing with the folk band Harem Scarem. Hearing tunes I know quite well re-arranged to fit with Harem Scarem’s fantastic female harmonies became another reason to enjoy Oldham’s music. In performing with four other voices, a couple of violins, a flute, an accordion, a banjo, a guitar and an enthusiastic drummer, it is clear that everything has been carefully rehearsed. Nevertheless, he meanders around the beat (and indeed the notes) of each song, as if he is experimenting, trying out a new version. The sheen of uniqueness and immediacy remains.