I am a completist, so here are the two last festival items I went to:
Russell Brand
This was a fun show at the Assembly Rooms on Friday night. I'm surprised it still wasn't sold out an hour beforehand: he is the bloke rom one of the Big Brother tie-in programmes (one that I have never seen: Big Brother's Last Laugh? Last Word? Smoething like that). He was, initially, stilted and awkward, and sounded very scripted. When a couple of rather ugly women near the front started chatting incessantly, however, he got into a confrontation with them, and that seemed to "unlock" him somehow. The rest of the show was very funny - occasionally hilarious - self-deprecating and anecdotal humour.
The Pixies
First things first: how sweetly did this picture turn out?
I've wanted to see the Pixies in concert for, oh, 16 or 17 years now? While they were not earth-shattering - perhaps not even as good as the equally-awaited Wedding Present - they were excellent nonetheless.
The first band - My Latest Novel - were just as good as the Teenage Fanclub who followed them. Better, if anything. But then they're from Greenock, which explains a generally superior air of intellect, grace and power. I was pretty sure the Teenage Fanclub would be crap: they had a cd on the cover of the Scotland on Sunday a month or two back, and it was dreadful. Sure enough, they were positively dreary. They've become all grown up and mature and adult-oriented. Sumt lacrimae rerum: tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.
Idlewild were better when I saw them in February, but then that was their album launch party, so it was their crowd. And they really work well in that smaller type of venue. Still, they did not bad: I enjoyed it, and they have some good sing-a-long stuff.
I thought that the Pixies were great: they were experimental in bits, playing radically different versions of some songs - they played two versions of Wave of Mutilation, for example: one the single version, the other slow and dark and dangerous.
But there were a lot of us there, and opinions varied: Lee, Edwina and I loved it, whereas Penny and some others thought they were disappointing. If someone was just there for the hits, they'd have been a bit let down, I think.
The title of this post comes from the fact that, from behind and above, the crowd was awash with blue glowing lights, as people held up their mobile phones to record, photograph and video.