Oh happy day!

You might be surprised, given the Eeyore-ish tone of Plashing Vole (and the dystopian nature of the world at the moment), that I'm in a thoroughly good mood. 

'Why so happy?', I hear you ask?

Well, the weekend was good. I went to hear the CBSO and CBSO Chorus under Andris Nelsons perform Beethoven's 8th and 9th Symphonies. The 8th is pretty, the 9th is the one you can all hum and perhaps even sing. Because it was the CBSO and Chorus, it was beyond magnificent: they really are amongst the very best in the world. I don't think this was their greatest performance, but that's only because I saw them perform the Britten War Requiem recently and came away thinking that I'll never see a more consummate performance of that or any other piece. 

After that, I had the pleasure of ignoring the Rolling Stones and Mumford and Sons at Glastonbury, tuning in instead to Public Enemy, who really haven't aged gracefully, for which they deserve our admiration. While the Stones churn out songs written before I was born, like a particularly charmless jukebox, PE are still righteous. 

Mumford and Sons depressed me beyond words: imagine giving your band a corporate name and then churning out music which is – at best  – unobjectionable. I remember a few years ago the NME dubbing a bunch of bands 'The New Boring': Turin Brakes and Co. And they were: pretty tunes, competent musicians, sensitive lyrics, but absolutely nothing to get the hormones racing. 

Compared to Mumford and Sons, The New Boring band were death metallers. Compared to Mumford and Sons, The Weavers sound like Slayer. I found myself wondering how the line-up was constructed. In the end, I decided that the schedulers channelled the spirit of David Cameron or Michael Gove and asked themselves who their PR advisors would tell them to pick on Desert Island Discs: nothing offensive, but a nod to 'classic' rock, someone female and a young cool band. Remember Gordon Brown claiming to like Arctic Monkeys? 

I'm 37 and yet I can now claim quite seriously that I'm too young for Glastonbury. It's only to be expected: only the Stones' generation can afford Glasto tickets now. It's not for the likes of us.

But I digress: I avoided them all and stayed happy. And then Sunday saw the start of the real summer: the Tour de France. I like cricket. A five day match with no firm conclusion is fine by me. So a three week orgy of tactical battles, backstabbing, team orders, injuries, duels and maddened spectators is basically my idea of heaven. Oh yes, and amazing bikes for me to drool over. The opening stages in Corsica this weekend were brilliant: organisational chaos and strategic errors led to unheralded riders winning, the unlovely Sky juggernaut getting badly caught out, and lots of doomed-but-noble breakaways. Sporting perfection, even if lots of them are still on drugs. 

The last element contributing to my good mood is today's event: our school's Staff Research Conference. It's one of the best days of the year: lots of my colleagues getting together to share what we've been getting up to (or not) over the course of the year. It's relaxed, friendly and intellectually searching. I've been to papers today on the Seren Books series retelling the Mabinogion medieval Welsh myths (which I've taught with some success to students here); a Foucauldian critique of my own university's pedagogic unit's critical approach; a presentation of doctoral research into HE academics' resistance to 'technopedagogy' (very weird seeing quotes from my own interview on screen under an assumed name). Then I presented with my colleague a chapter we wrote on the presentation of jazz and masculinity in some contemporary novels: Jackie Kay's Trumpet, Jim Crace's All That Follows and Alan Plater's the Beiderbecke Trilogy. 

I've never done a joint paper before, and really enjoyed it. Very good questions too, mostly jazz fans denying that their particular sub-genres count as jazz in the ways we mean. After us, Polly gave a fully illustrated talk on 'Naked Masculinity: Fear, Freedom and Eroticism' which was, well, eye-opening. Now I'm in the politics section: one colleague gave a fascinating philosophical analysis on theories of loyalty in politics, and Eamonn's finishing with an archive-driven examination of the secret back-channels between the IRA and the UK Government between the 1970s and the late 1990s. It's fascinating: naming names and showing us historic documents such as the famous hand-written note to the UK state announcing that the conflict was over and the IRA needed help ending the war. It was used by UKG as the 'start' of the peace process (until forced to admit that negotiations had been going on for two years). McGuinness says it's a fake and he never sent it, but it seems that the note was a summary by Dennis Bradley of more general discussions, with the plea for help added. Are there multiple notes? The note has a '4' at the top: was this Draft 4 or part 4: if so, what were parts 1-3? Additionally, the Link personalities seem to have been adding things to what the Republican movement said, much to the displeasure of the Republicans when they find out what the Link people are up to. Murky, fascinating stuff. 

And to top it all off: wine reception next!

Result: a Vole in a sunny disposition. It won't last…

Trivia roundup

OK, I'm in considerable pain - I've actually pulled chest muscles from coughing so much. It may be the infection I've got, or it may be the sheer spleen-busting disbelief occasioned by watching U2 and Primal Scream performing at Glastonbury. It wasn't the musicians so much: U2 were reliably pompous, while Primal Scream yet again pulled off the trick of persuading the public that they're somehow interesting or relevant.

No: they do what they do and some people - unfathomably - like it. What made my intestines make a bid for freedom was the jaw-dropping idiocy of the BBC's presenters. U2 were discussed by Jo Whiley and someone called Zane Lowe. The pearls of wisdom spilling from their mouths would have shamed a toddler. Mostly, of course, just unconnected adjectives ('amazing', 'awesome' etc.). But then Mr. Lowe started claiming that U2's power was due to their set being 'raw', 'stripped down' and 'all about the music'. Really? Doing a live video link from the stage to the International Space Station so that an astronaut (the one whose Congresswoman wife was recently shot in the head) can mumble some platitudes to a drug-addled bunch of hipsters is somehow 'raw', rather than 'incredibly pretentious', 'arrogant' and 'pompous'? They then 'interviewed' U2 afterwards with the kind of journalistic incisiveness that inevitably leads to the interviewee having to wipe drool from the soles of their shoes.

This idiot - or it may have been some other idiot, all BBC yoof presenters are pretty much interchangeable - then proceeded to claim that Primal Scream's set proved that they'd 'always looked forward' in their music. For feck's sake: they're touring their Screamadelica album in some kind of retro cash-in. You know, the one that was released 20 years ago. The one that was a deliberate retro homage to the Rolling Stones' 60s work. The band which released and album with a bloody Confederate flag on it. How, in the name of all that's holy, is that 'always looking forward'?

Bloody charlatans, the lot of them. Time for a salad to calm me down.

It's Pay Day!

So I can sack work off and start buying books and music!

After praising Sweden to the skies yesterday, apparently it's all gone tits up, to use a terrible phrase from the 90s.

Right. Time for coffee with Neal, who swam alone today because I overslept for the first time since I finished my PhD. Alan's told us all about the Nightingales at Glastonbury - hundreds of people lapping up their arty noise rock. Another triumph!

A miseryguts writes…

Happy Monday you lot! There used to be a tradition called St. Monday in Northern cities, including Stoke. A heavy weekend required a day off - a religious festival. In industries with highly specialised skills such as pottery, enough individuals absent meant that a whole crew couldn't do any work - so men took turns a few times a year. This is how I feel today, except that I'm at work and absolutely nobody else is other than the cleaners, who are always very cheery.

It's hot, sticky and horrible, yet I've already seen one student (advice: don't nick your resit from the internet and characters with speaking parts usually aren't dead in Renaissance literature). I've got to write a conference paper for Wednesday ('O. M. Edwards, Travel Writing and Definitions of Welshness' or something similar and the beer festival is still weighing heavily on my guts.

We all had a good time, without getting hammered. Except for Mr. Radford Sallow, who arrived many hours late and proceeded to catch up in spectacular fashion. Poor old man isn't used to drinking. He took the pledge in 1934…

Many of you seem horrified that I'm indifferent to Michael Jackson's oeuvre. Sorry, I just didn't listen to much pop at that formative age. My parents didn't believe in radios in every room, and they listened to mainstream classical, bits of folk, and a lot of religious music. Dad's concession to Irish culture was a U2 cassette and one by the Dubliners, and Mum played a lot more music than she listens to.

If it's any consolation, I watched Blur's performance at Glastonbury last night. All the presenters were talking about it being a seminal, wondrous, amazing set. I didn't. I thought they were quite good. Maybe I'm just getting grumpy. Wonder how the Nightingales went down? The BBC didn't see fit to broadcast any of their set.

On arrival at university I owned a cassette of Automatic for the People given to me by a schoolmate. A few days later I walked into the fabulous Recordiau Cob Records in Bangor and opened up a financial vein which flowed freely for many years to com. I bought two interesting looking records: Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's Patio and Tindersticks Kathleen/ E-Type Joe, both on 10" vinyl - not bad for a random pick. Henceforth, I'd go in on Thursday and pore over the list of next week's releases, making a list. On Monday, I'd collect several groaning plastic bags, to which the helpful gimps behind the counter would add 'some things we thought you'd like'. Years later, I realised that this meant 'our own records because nobody else will buy them [hello, Ectogram] and anything we've ordered in and realised won't sell'. Add to this the stuff I bought because I trusted the record label and all the secondhand bits, and you get the beginnings of my 30,000 collection, surprisingly little of which I now regret. Except for Cast's album: played once, put away for ever. I had to sell some once - 250 7" singles to Norman's Records simply to survive one summer. very depressingly. The collection is now like a smile with several teeth missing.

Private school hippies - grab your bongs

Full Glastonbury lineup has been announced - it's a humdinger. Of particular interest to Black Country post-punks is The Nightingales: Saturday on the Peel Stage.

Cower, all you hippies

The Nightingales are playing Glastonbury (at 11 a.m. on the Saturday). They will be brilliant. Especially if the American half of the band are allowed into the country.