I enjoyed watching Paul McCartney’s Glastonbury set on the telly in 2022. An 80 year old man came on and did a powerful, dynamic and extremely long set without a toilet break. Everybody knows his songs. Let’s face it, we even feel like we really know him. And my favourite thing about it? That 80 year old scouser was pretty much the only person standing up there all weekend without any backing tracks or even click tracks. I was overjoyed to see him turn round about three tunes in and give his drummer a little “slow down” signal. Anyway, the descent from “live music” into “public performances of music that aren’t live but cost a fortune to go to” is a separate essay for Madden to write. The main thing I was thinking as I watched was This is the end of headliners.
They’re not making them anymore are they? We don’t all listen to Radio One together and we don’t watch Top of the Pops as a nation. We don’t make a cassette of the top 40 on Sunday night after our weekly bath. It all leads to us having a lack of shared, ubiquitous musical moments and that leads to a lack of headliners. Sure, you can stick someone on that stage and fire enough lights up, set off enough bangers and rockets that we think we’ll be watching a headliner but we won’t be singing along.
Coldplay are headlining again this year. They’ve done 2002, 2005, 2016 and they’re about to do 2024. All as fucking headliners! This is a band that has been deliberately writing vacuously epic music in the hope of contriving era defining, phone torches aloft festival moments for as long as I can remember. Four times though, is there nobody else? No there probably isn’t. I think we’re going to be on a carousel of Coldplay, the Killers, the Foo Fighters and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers till we’re all in our 80s. We’ll turn to each other, smile and say “I don’t know this one, do you?”
Jimi at Glastonbury
It’s ten years since we played at Glastonbury with Jimi Goodwin. That’s believable to me. Whenever something is twenty years past I reel from the shock of it like a wet slap but when I’m told something was ten years ago I think, “that’s about right, yes.” We were a good tight band and Jimi is a genius who’d produced a fabulously unusual album for us to peddle up and down the country. I don’t think Glastonbury was the high point of the tour, that was probably Manchester at the end, but it was memorable. I think the stage might’ve had to power down due to lightning storms or something. The PA was off for a while and Jimi went out to the front of the stage and sang Oh Whiskey! on an acoustic guitar. I imagine the front hundred or so people got to really enjoy that, you can’t fault him for doing what he could in the situation. I can’t find any video evidence of us being there other than this low grade Youtube of us playing Sulphur Man.
I don’t even remember us playing Sulphur Man. Some things just clean leave your head and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Playing with Jimi was indispensable for me learning to play live with samples. We built up complicated multilayered patches that could trigger as many mad sounds from his album as possible. The only limitation was being a ten digit ape descendant really. It’s been a useful skillset many times since, you can’t stick Hammond everywhere much as you might try. I think my favourite to play was Terracotta Warrior which we always started with. It felt like if you were chatting out front maybe you’d be forced to shut up and listen by this aggressive wallop of an intro. I’m glad the Guardian took the time to record us doing this excellent version of it:
Cherry Ghost a decade ago
There were a few gigs I couldn’t do on the Jimi Goodwin tour that I got Matt Steele to cover me for because I was also playing with Cherry Ghost around this time. I wasn’t on the two big Cherry Ghost albums that everybody knows and loves, but Simon was (and still is) a good friend and when some of his band cleared out to play with Miles Kane I ended up plugging the hole.
Even people who say they’re Cherry Ghost fans for the most part are pretty unaware of the third album Herdrunners and that’s a shame because it’s every bit as good as the other two. Even though I’m obviously saying that because I’m on it and so is our Nicky. Listen to it you jackaninny:
Sometime in the spring or early summer of 2014 me and Simon did a tour supporting Paul Heaton and Jaqui Abbott, just the two of us in a hire car. It was great fun but fun of the quiet, attentive sort. The kind of thing that matured me considerably really, learning to sit in quiet service of these masterful songs and not do any showing off. Anyway, some idiot who can’t stay off their smartphone at gigs captured a few tunes and stuck them on Youtube. I’m forever grateful to them, thanks for documenting my life. I look disheveled and weighty but then the kids were very young and we were tired all the time. I didn’t have time to worry about what I looked like. I still don’t.
Herd Runners. What an album. Despite some dodgy characters being on it!
Always enjoyed our conversations when we were on the road together. So much I didn’t know about your musical apprenticeship… but always remember your smile.