So who else out there was at the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts this year? There were four of us from Empeg there (plus Hugo's other half) and though we all ended up reasonably muddy, everyone had a great time. Highlights for me were Suzanne Vega doing In Liverpool (somehow still feeling intimate even with 1,500 people in the marquee), Snow Patrol doing Run (for my money one of the best rock songs since the Stone Roses), and the Chemical Brothers doing Out Of Control (we were right in front of the speaker stack for that one). Sir Paul was great too (you could have heard a pin drop during Here Today, dedicated to "my great friend John"), as were Ocean Colour Scene in an acoustic set, Orbital (though much the same as their 2002 performance), and the English National Opera doing Act III of Die Walkure (with fortuitous helicopter circling above for the Ride of the Valkyries and fortuitous black cloud arriving for the arrival of Wotan). I was dying to see James Brown (or, as Claire called him, "What, The James Brown?"), but it'd have made a better show if they'd spent less time telling us how great he was and more time with him just getting on with being great -- and great he was once he started going through the classics, and I'll be happy if I've a tenth his energy when I'm 71, but cutting down on the bombast might have left room in the set for Funky Drummer or Funky President.

What did anyone else rate? I didn't get to see Oasis, Supergrass, Morrissey, or Zero 7 -- how were they?

Peter

Must be about 35 years since I saw James Brown in Brixton, he was great then, Jagger and Richards were in the audience. Didn't see Glastonbury, But I flicked quickly through the Olympic torch concert, where he outshone people a third of his age.
I brought "Live at the Apollo" in '64, and It's still one of the best live albums ever.

Sadly all I have is the BBC coverage as I was unable to get tickets but Morrissey was good, Oasis were crap (as to be expected nowadays). I think my favorite was Orbital.

Out of interest did you or the empeg guys employ special tactics to get tickets like calling the international number or bypassing the load balancer on the website. I tried for the whole evening and only found out about the tricks after all the tickets had gone.

Out of interest did you or the empeg guys employ special tactics to get tickets like calling the international number or bypassing the load balancer on the website.

We did the bypass the load balancer thing. The only other people I know who got tickets did the international number thing. Hugo was talking at one point about printing up T-shirts with the bypass URL on them, just to see how many cheers we'd get wandering around the site in them.

Peter