Sinister: Summertime

[P F]

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.





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