Glasto - in praise of the BBC (and Ed Sheeran)

I said last year that, now the Beeb has practically had to pull out of sport, its Glastonbury coverage is not only excellent but, for me, just about the best thing about the corporation these days. And brilliant the coverage was again. I can't possibly watch all of the things I'd like to while they remain available on iPlayer. But the right wing press (ok, the Daily Mail) got its knickers in a twist about political bias because of the attention given to Jeremy Corbyn. I'm not a fan of Corbyn and even less so of McDonnell, whose comments at Glasto about housing and the Grenfell Tower disaster were truly and unsurprisingly awful. I'm not just talking about his "murdered by political decisions" comment, which had two angles. The first was his argument that housing in our country is built only for "financial speculation rather than for meeting a basic human need". Well he would think that because he won't accept that a market  produces better results than a command economy, despite all the evidence to the contrary, including the self-evident fact that the standard of housing provided by the likes of the Smolensk Workers Co-operative would not exactly command a lot of enthusiasm here. The second was fire service cuts, which was refuted by the London Fire Commissioner, Dany Cotton, who said "there were no issues about numbers of firefighters". What one has to recognise, of course, is that when McDonnell blames "governments" and "political decisions" he doesn't just mean since 2010 as he has no hesitation in blaming the Blair and Brown governments as well as Cameron and May since, to him, they are all awful Tories of one kind or another.

But back to the accusation of bias in the TV coverage. Corbyn was invited to speak by the festival organisers. A bad call for me as I think politicians only belong there in the audience, but one the organisers are entitled to make. And it is then only reasonable for the Beeb to cover it, as it's part of the event. The fact that lots of petit bourgeoisie who can pay the nearly £250 a head for the cheapest ticket seem to be overwhelmingly supportive of someone who would tax them hard is remarkable but not surprising as they all get carried away with young person's group think on occasions like this, even if some are ageing hippies. And of course those who have a student loan would love to have it written off, though why they think they should benefit compared to the people of the same age who didn't go to university, or indeed other people who willingly signed up for a loan of any kind, I'm not sure. There'd be just as much logic in writing off the car loans of people under 30. Seems the idealistic young are just as interested in a "bung" as anyone. This seems to me of more import than the BBC briefly covering something that actually happened at an event they were televising. I suppose they could have totally ignored it and not shown or said anything about Corbyn but to me that would have been strange and tantamount to censorship.

The other thing about Glasto that caught my attention was Ed Sheeran having to explain on twitter that he hadn't been miming or using tape recordings, but simply using a loop station to create his own backing riffs and rhythms as part of his remarkable one man show. I must admit I thought everybody knew about loop stations. We first saw someone using one many years ago now at a pub or golf club gig. I was nearly as fascinated as when I realised a similar performer was enhancing his vocals through software on his laptop - I'd just thought he was remarkably good at impersonating all sorts of famous singers till I realised. I thought Sheeran did well, though the set was perhaps a little long: we were losing attention and felt the audience there was too about three-quarters of the way through. Mind, I've had the riff from Eraser on a loop in my head ever since. Its autobiographical lyric is totally risible in some places:
I forget when I get awards now the wave I had to ride
The paving stones I played on that kept me to the grind....
Guess it's a stereotypical day for someone like me
Without a nine to five job or a uni degree
To be caught up in the trappings of the industry....
I used to think that nothing could be better than touring the world with my songs
I chased the picture perfect life, I think they painted it wrong
I think that money is the route (sic*) of all evil and fame is hell....
With my beaten small guitar, wearing the same old jeans
Wembley Stadium crowds, two hundred and forty thou**
And to the next generation inspiration's allowed....
And I'll find comfort in my pain eraser....
You poor sausage, Ed Sheeran MBE. You're all of 26 years old.... and though you had to make quite a few independently produced EPs before you got a record deal (the first when he was 14 and one of which was a minor hit and won a silver disc) it wasn't that slow and long a trajectory to fame aged 20! Most buskers aren't expecting that big breakthrough to come easily, nor do most stars find the trappings of fame tiresome so quickly. But I do think this is a good song, nevertheless. After all there are plenty of risible Joe Strummer lyrics I like to sing along to.

It took me a long time to get Sheeran. My boss told me about him and suggested I might like his stuff. As she's a big Led Zep fan she has taste so I took a listen. Now Sheeran is officially genre-d (a verb I probably just invented) as pop, acoustic and contemporary folk. Well, he clearly isn't folk, but as my favourite man with just an acoustic guitar, Roy Harper, isn't either, I thought he might be promising. This was very early in Ed's career - his first album might just have come out. I checked him out on youtube and was nonplussed. I saw him on several TV shows, including Graham Norton. I remember saying to my other half "I feel I ought to like this guy but I just don't warm to him". I gave him more chances than there are in a monopoly card deck. The song that finally did it for me, perhaps predictably, was 2016 Grammy winning Thinking Out Loud from his second album, Multiply, which I then went out and bought. And I quite liked some of it; though the grime/rap stuff didn't seem to me to fit with the rest of the tracks. Though to be fair, Sheeran has always been as much grime as folk - some of his independently produced teenage EPs were grime collaborations. And it didn't stop me buying the latest album, Divide, because I thought I should and I liked more than its predecessor (though when I go back and listen to X now I think I prefer it). Glastonbury is the first time I've seen a live Sheeran set and I loved it. It's not the first time I've had to see a live performance to really get an artist. I guess this is partly because what you don't see when he does one song on a TV show is the energy he puts in to his set.

But now I really do like him, rather than thinking that I ought to like him. I just had to give him far more chances than I've ever given any artist previously. Mind, I still don't like singing along to rap: I just can't remember that many words that quickly!

*I typed these lyric extracts direct from the official CD inlay, not some dodgy website
**I find this lyric remarkably self aggrandising. On a pedantic point of detail, you can't play to 240 thousand people at Wembley. Well not all at once. The official stadium capacity is 90,000 but it's generally lower for concerts and was about 80,000 a night for Ed Sheeran's "X" tour. The official figure (well, on Wikipedia anyway) for the tour was 229,725 over 4 nights, but that wouldn't have rhymed. They can get more in by using a 360 degree layout, the maximum so far being 92,000 for U2, but for Adele in a few days' time they are going to get 98,000 in. Over 4 nights that will be 392 thou, a new record for Wembley. Eat your hear out Ed, or just use your pain eraser. P.S. Oops, Adele damaged her vocal chords after two of the Wembley gigs....