Park Life (Indian Summer 2006, Victoria Park)

Music

Indian Summer (the good bits)

Gazing longingly at the line-up before anything had even happened - for a festival’s inaugural year, managing to nab Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Antony and the Johnsons, The Fall, Yo La Tengo, Gang Of Four, My Latest Novel, Hot Chip, Broken Social Scene, Guillemots and Camera Obscura (to name but ten of around forty) ain’t half bad. On a band-by-band basis, arguably a better line up than any of the major British festivals had this year - as if they took a smaller stage where all the most interesting stuff happens (usually relegated to a tent) and made it the main attraction, saving you the trouble of having to spend £3 on a cup of beer to fill with assorted bodily fluids and throw at Athlete and such like. Clearly assembled by people who know and care about their music for people who know and care about their music, as evidenced by the residency of BBC 6Music, possibly the finest radio station in existence (also, when Antony and the Johnsons - that’s a chubby, homosexual, thirty-something, greasy-black-wig-sporting, Nina Simone-sound-a-like man-who-wishes-he-was-a-girl singing torch songs backed by his string section - are your most well-known performers, you know we’re not talking Live And Loud here).

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Kieran Docherty + The Fortunate Sons (ABC2)

Music

Music, in digital form, is the new money. Or sex. Whatever. The point is, you're never going to collect enough to make you feel complete. Ah, you millionaires out there may have reached that personal target where you'd sworn that would be it - like Sir Alan Sugar probably didn't - or you'd reached that point of complete satiety, just knowing that this time you'd collected every personal 'must have' album and track… only to succumb to an irresistible horniness twenty minutes later for the ultimate quickie, the one minute download. It's invisible, therefore you mustn't have spent any real money. You whore.

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Adam Beattie (ABC1)

Music

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Photo by Ke Cai
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f Adam Beattie’s really as uncomfortable as he makes out, opening for the legendary Bert Jansch on the biggest stage he’s ever had to play on, then he’’s got a quite phenomenal poker face, because you’d never know if he hadn’t told you.  There aren’t any rookie mistakes, no nervous stumbling; his five-song set emerges fully-formed, exuding a quiet confidence in the strength of the material, a confidence that turns out to be wholly deserved.

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