I hope you enjoyed your picnic! I could not make it, as I was attending a festival. I trust that Kenneth will report back. That's what I am going to do, now. Weather conditions have been mixed. At one point it was hurtling straight down and I felt for the rock band who were gamely playing on through the late afternoon air. But when the rain cleared in the evening I wandered through the festival and caught THE NEW CASSETTES. They don't look like their picture in the programme. They sound a lot like the Futureheads, but without the Sunderland accents. I could easily imagine hearing them on R1. The singer announced a 'firework solo', because in the distance Saturday night's fireworks were going up. So that was exciting, and after that you could ignore the band, and watch the lovely fireworks. Today MUNGO JERRY took the stage. I know that Peter Miller has been anxiously awaiting news of this. He started by playing the riff of 'Summertime'. He played it several more times through the set, as a 'teaser'. But then he would play another song. He played a lot of R&B. It was a bit like Status Quo, you could say, but with more eccentricity attached. You could imagine SAXONDALE watching with some approval. At one point this old ROCKER couple walked past in denim. They were very thin. It is nice to see THE KIDS out at these events, too. Anyway, the Mungo Jerry fellow had a lot of energy - he kept exclaiming about the performance - 'Nice!', 'We're gonna rock now', that class of thing; and moving a lot as he played. He took lots of solos, but so did his talented guitar sidekick. He tried to get the scattered audience to participate with applause and with singing rather complicated vocal phrases. He also liked to tell of when he had written the songs. The answer was usually 1971. He introduced one song thus: 'I wrote this for Elvis, but he didn't have time to record it'. It was a #1 hit called 'It Feels Like I'm In Love'. It's a tune I quite admire, but his treatment wasn't the best. Eventually he got around to 'Summertime', thanking Britain for keeping it popular for 36 years. It was a fairly elongated treatment. Then he played some high-life guitar, very impressively, on an African sort of celebratory number. And he finished with more Quo boogie, during the coda of which he gave members of the band their spot, and also told us all: 'Be safe - get home safely - rock all the way! boogie on home! Don't get busted! Treat people as you would like to be treated ... be nice to children ... and old people ... and animals!'. A few seconds after he had walked off, the compere insisted that the applause had been sufficient to get him back on. Then he launched into 'Summertime' again. On the way out, the AIR AMBULANCE was giving a demonstration. What a magnificent machine it is. It can take off and land so swiftly, a force of - not nature, of course - of human invention, I suppose, of engineering. It dipped its cockpit in final greeting as it took to the skies again. This is the Air Ambulance that Pele campaigns for, by the way. I would like to be able to report that he emerged from it bearing the World Cup. A track that is more than quite good is 'The Draize Train'. It's a lot more than quite good. I like the way they persuaded Eric Clapton to take part in that session - while he was recording his LP next door, I believe. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+