Who has the best Festival line-up this year?

So with the announcement of Reading and Leeds festivals on Monday, bar a few festivals, most of this summers line-ups have been announced. So who do I think has the best line-up this year and worth your hard earned cash?

I’ll start off bluntly, Sonisphere festival have a truly awful line-up. With headliners Kiss (Who must be about 400 years old by now) and Queen who have somehow convinced themselves that replacing Freddie Mercury with some reality TV runner up is a great idea. Sure the Sunday of the festival looks quite impressive with Faith No More and whole-album shows by Mastodon and Glassjaw, but compared to the powerhouse of the Big 4 and Slipknot last year, this year’s festival looks pretty terrible.

Download festival have stepped up the bar this year after last year’s disappointing line-up. Headlined by Metallica, Black Sabbath and Prodigy, with tonnes of bands like Soundgarden, Slash, and Tenacious D plus loads more, this summer’s festival looks like the best yet. However some pretty horrific clashes throughout the weekend and some questionable bookings like You Me at Six may put a damper on the overall impressive weekend.

V festival has the usual mix of impressive artists and contemporary tripe that the festival is famous for. In fact complaints have been made that Nicki Minaj should be headlining over the Stone Roses. That sentence should explain what kind of crowd you’re in for if you decide to venture to Chelmsford or Staffordshire.

Reading and Leeds festival this year is a similar story to that of V. Some really great bands like Foo Fighters, The Cure and At the Drive-In are however brought down by an overall quite disappointing line-up. Hopefully organisers will pull out some impressive bands later on at the Festival Republic and Lock-up stage similar to how they did last year.

Isle of Wight festival has Tom Petty, Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen...... That kicks ass!!

However my personal winner for best line-up so far is Bestival. The Isle of Wight based festival has such an awesome variety of band it appeals to literally everyone into music. The XX, New Order, Sigur Ros, Gallows, Rizzle Kicks and Orbital are amongst hundreds of bands playing the festival and they still haven’t announced all the headliners!! Bestival should become a great example to other festivals around the country. An unpredictable line-up can make a festival exciting and you may even find your next favourite band. 

Why I'll miss HMV, sort of...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or just completely oblivious to what is happening in the world, HMV are on the edge of collapse. The institution, which has been around since 1921, is going through very tough financial problems and is unlikely to see out the year.

I have quite mixed feelings to the thought of HMV going under. On one hand HMV are incredibly stupid with their prices. For example I saw Black Sabbaths Paranoid album in a store the other day still for £10. £10!! For an album released in 1971!! And then the company wonders why people are reverting to illegally downloading music instead of buying the album. HMV should have become far more competitive with their prices, especially with CD’s, because as sad as it sounds it’s become the last place on the high street to buy CDs.

Now I love downloading music from the internet and I love using download sites like Pirate Bay were I conveniently have to pay nothing for music. However I still enjoy picking up CDs, especially if they are from small bands who I feel guilty stealing from. HMV is the best place I go for CDs as they still stock CDs from all kinds of bands across genres and sadly I don’t live near any decent record stores.

So if HMV was to go, my CD buying days will no doubt come to an end. I don’t like ordering CD’s online because what is the point waiting 2 days for it to be delivered when you can simply log onto Pirate Bay and get it instantly. Even though I disagree with a lot of the pricing of HMV, it would be a real shame to see the British icon disappear forever. 

Why Ticket re-sale Websites must be stopped

Last week, Channel 4 programme Dispatches exposed the fraudulent behaviour of so called ‘Fan to fan ticket exchange’ websites Viagogo and Seatwave. These websites claimed that they were a basis where fans could easily and safely buy and sell tickets to other fans. However an undercover investigation discovered that the websites were lying to customers and charging excessive amounts for the tickets.

One account was of a Woman who had queued for hours in order to get a front row seat for a Will Young concert (in case you were wondering that wasn’t the horrible finding). She discovered that Viagogo had already been allocated the first 4 rows of the show, so the woman was unable to get a front row ticket unless she paid over the odds prices on the website.

The findings from Dispatches did make me particular angry as I’ve experienced many times where I’ve been either unable to buy tickets or be given horrible seats, despite the fact I’ve ordered my tickets the instant they go on sale.

A couple of years ago I had waited patiently on my computer for tickets to Green Day’s show at the 02 arena. As soon as it hit 9am I spammed the refresh button and finally after about 20 minutes of trying I got through to the ticket purchase page. However the only tickets left were seating tickets at the back of the arena.  I had a quick look on Seatwave and discovered that standing tickets had already gone on sale for almost 3 times the price of a normal ticket!

To say I was gutted was an understatement, I grabbed my gun and went out on a Death Wish style revenge on Seatwave and all its employees (Well the real story was slightly different to that). But I do find it disgraceful that websites like Viagogo can still go about ripping off fans without anyone stepping in to stop it. It’s incredibly unfair for fans to wait for hours in order to buy tickets for their favourite band, only to be turned away because Viagogo have already been given the best tickets.

One of the pioneers of new technology that I would love to see introduced with all tickets is Glastonbury festival. For the last 2 years, everyone who wants to buy a ticket has to register their name and photo with the website. If they can’t attend the festival, they simply sell the ticket back to the festival with a full refund and the festival sells the ticket at no extra price.

This incredibly simple idea is brilliant and will stop touts and rip off websites and everyone seems to win (except of course conmen like Seatwave). I hope organisers take note and bring a stop to this practice once and for all. 

Why I hate the Brit Awards...

For anyone who hasn’t seen Mike Judges’s brilliant and scarily realistic film ‘Idiorcracy’, I’ll give you a quick summary. Corporal Joe Bauers gets frozen in time and wakes up 500 years in the future and discovers that the world has become incredibly stupid. The human race becomes devoid of any cultural value and instead wastes its time watching pointless TV programmes like ‘Ow my balls!’ Well watching the Brit Awards last night (February 21) felt to me what Joe Bauers must have felt when he saw people watching and enjoying ‘Ow my balls!’.

Presented by the criminally unfunny James Corden, the night showcased the best of music the industry forces people to listen to. Two awards went to the suicidally boring Adele, who made the highlight of the night by having her speech cut short by James Corden, who was jealous that someone else was garnering attention for 10 seconds. Another two awards went to equally as boring Ed Sheeran (who looks forever bemused by his own success) and further awards went to Rihanna, Bruno Mars and One Direction, proving that the Brits should really be re-named the Teen Choice awards.

Luckily the Brits gave away a couple of awards to artists who deserve recognition. Best International group went to the Foo Fighters, who didn’t even make the effort to attend the event. Instead only their drummer spoke on their behalf, showing that the band probably knew what a waste of electricity the awards had become.

Blur gained the Outstanding contribution to music award and closed the night on a brilliant performance including a hilarious performance of ‘Parklife’ featuring Phil Daniels. Although you can imagine the hordes of Rihanna and Bruno Mars fans complaining that the band was ‘emo’ or ‘too old’.

Now reading this blog post, you might think I’m an old man sitting in my armchair, waving my walking stick in the air, exclaiming that everything was better during WWII, but I just really dislike the Brits. Not even giving awards to brilliant British acts such as PJ Harvey, Elbow, Arctic Monkeys or Laura Marling is downright idiotic. Next year I would love to see the Brit awards be far braver and give awards to artists who deserve it, not the ones who have the biggest record sales. But maybe I’m thinking far too into it, maybe I should just ignore it and let people enjoy their episode of ‘Ow my balls!’….

Why Music reunions will be the death of music

The Stone Roses, Soundgarden, Black Sabbath, Happy Mondays, At The Drive in.... These are just some of the bands that have chosen to bury the hatches, cash the huge record companies check and reunite to play live again. Whilst this is great news for all those fans that didn’t get to witness the band the first time round or wish to relive the glory days, it poses quite a threat to the music industry that most people seemed to have totally ignored.

A band nowadays can work incredibly hard for years, touring relentlessly to gain attention but the instant a band that have been split up for the last 20 years come around they’re instantly pushed aside. The 21^st century mentality on music has created a situation which will have a massive impact on the industry. What will happen in the future when Ozzy and pals eventually go to the great gig in the sky? In an extreme scenario we will end up having no bands capable enough to play massive festival and stadium shows and we’re pretty much already in that situation. We have become so concerned with reliving the past that we have forgotten that a present and future exist, and I feel like the minority that is actually worried.

Whilst most bands reuniting have their original lineup and have a purpose for their reunion, others seem to be reuniting for the sake of it (Who in their right mind asked for a Queen reunion with a runner up of American Idol? That’s the equivalent of reuniting Nirvana with Frankie Cocozza as the new lead singer). I wonder if the future will see record companies reanimating bands in order to fill up festival headline slots.

It seems like a pretty bleak future if we don’t act now and support up and coming artists. The reunion of bands from yesterday may seem like an exciting prospect for the time being, but once they're in their wheelchairs too old to rock out, who’s going to be there to fill their shoes?