Have we hit peak Festival? Well, that depends.

If your idea of a Festival is getting hilariously off your face in a stinky mud bath, with hopes of random copping off, your time has probably been and gone. But relax, they don't do that at Moseley anyway...

Do NOT pray for rain. Photo by Alicia Zinn from Pexels

It's been 49 years since Hendrix at Woodstock over there and Dylan at the Isle of White over here: 60s hippy enthusiasm sparking legends and juicy profits. Profits? Woodstock lost an absolute packet because of the rain (there's an ongoing theme here) but they seriously cashed in with the movie and the albums. 

I have it on first-hand authority, by the way, that Woodstock was actually a ghastly ill-conceived and massively overcrowded shit-storm; to which I can add that the Isle of Wight shindig was rather fine, apart from the trek back to the ferry. But since then, things have rather evolved. The big boys moved in.

It was fifty years ago today! The merchandise is here to stay!

Tell me about the good old days, son...

This is an excerpt - the whole flyer is below

One of Birmingham's finer music DJs, Dylan Gibbons, son of Steve, has dug out a lovely flyer and put it up on Facebook. It lists acts playing the long-gone Barbarellas in Spring 1974, 43 years ago. I was at the (also long-gone) BRMB Radio then. I interviewed some of those acts on air before they headed to the gig. My show ran from 7-10 at night; the timing worked. The complete flyer, with amazing spelling errors, is available to enjoy a bit down this post: you can see Queen, at the start of their run, and Cockney Rebel too. 

But check the March acts, in the detail above. From March 28 to 30, Bill Haley and the Comets played. Then, Hayley was at the tail end of his career, aged 49 or so; he died at 55. At his peak, he played the Birmingham Odeon, in 1957. Haley it was who had the very first rock and roll hits, in 1953 and 54. Then Elvis came along and blew him out of the water.

Nostalgia kept Haley in business. And look! The very next day, a few years into his career, there's Steve Gibbons. Steve, of course, is still gigging now. How brilliant is that? The entire historic timespan of rock music, from 1953 to now, captured quite by accident on a playbill from two generations back.

The Nostalgia business. Ker-ching.

Floyd Cans! £379! Bargain!

It's lovely to look back at those days. Nostalgia's great fun. I do, however, get ticked off at the nostalgia industry. The Victoria and Albert museum in London makes a bundle putting on artsy nostalgia shows, generally about acts they wouldn't have given the time of day to when those artists were at their peak. In 2013, the show was David Bowie, and the merch page is still up on site, with goodies at eye-watering prices - £125 get you an album cover print; Bowie vinyls are £25 a pop. 

This year, it's Pink Floyd. Step right up, £20 gets you in the door, so you can be told all about it. Exit through the gift shop – where pink Pink Floyd headphones go for a mere £379, and a Dark Side Of The Moon cycling jersey is a snip at £85. Bargain! Have a cigar! That's some considerable distance from one of the albums of my student days, Ummagumma, half of which was recorded in front of maybe 200 souls at Mothers in Erdington.

Brace yourselves, though: Sergeant Pepper is now fifty years old. So there's shows on TV with learned and earnest experts. Just out: a 6-CD reissue package. While the Beatles had, by 1967, long since moved out to country estates in the south, Liverpool, logically, is putting on a summer series of events. Most of them are free, which is fair enough.

Thing is, I remember the day the album came out. We lapped it up, of course – the Beatles were ours – but it was part of our lives, not some pumped up deal, it wasn't a marketable experience. We were kids, it was our music, end of. The Beatles weren't gods; they were just good guys, our good guys. The marketing-driven reverence now being afforded the band, and which shoots though the poshed up Bowie and Floyd museum offers like a lucrative golden vein, simply wasn't there.

That deification of things past is there for commercial purposes. It's only another way to squeeze yet more money out of the original product, after cassettes, CD reissues, repackaging, remastering and more. With this reverence come the priests of pop culture: the writers, the experts, the pundits, the curators, generally quite a lot younger than the audience this music was first made for. Of course, that's nothing new – as long as I can remember, we've had fresh-faced jazz pundits explaining Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, Wagner experts, Sinatraphiles, ready to explain it all.

Who knew? Well, we did, actually. 

Only now, I'm taking it personally. I'm being lectured about the music of my youth, the stuff I grew up with, by people who weren't born when it came out. And I'm sorry, that does piss me off. The music? It was and is brilliant, and it lives on. 

But its longevity and charm provides platforms for more revenue generation and pundit career development. The people who paid for that music in the first place are no longer part of the equation. 

I'm not saying pundits 25 years younger than me can't have valid or interesting takes on the music, mind - of course they can. There's always room for a fresh perspective. But that room only exists because of the nostalgia industry.

Meantime, looking at that frayed old 1974 flyer for those bands at Barbs, I'm thinking of the bands of the day, and exactly how great that classic Gibbons line-up was (the current one's pretty damn good, too). But there's no money to be made, or careers to build, out of that scene. The V and A won't come calling; fresh faced music scribes won't prance down Broad Street expounding to camera on how great it was.

But I bet they're working on those Police and Dire Straits shows right now, for some time next decade. Peter Gabriel and Genesis? That's an obvious one. What price a Coldplay retrospective for 2030? 

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I still do radio stuff on Brum Radio, a volunteer-run internet station. Listen online here; download the Brum Radio app here. My Brum Radio page is here; scroll down for all the shows. 

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The JB's book. Dudley cool.

People make places. 

It's only when you look back that you realise. You sail along with your crew, deep in the moment. You deal with hassles, fix problems, file away a bit of quiet satisfaction when it goes well, and savour the moments when things really click. But you don't get the perspective until later. 

Say you were in a band, and you check back on those recordings of a 25 years back, when you were young and smoking hot... Or you played in a particularly sharp football team. Or you sang, you really sang. 

Steve Gibbons talks and plays on Radio to Go

A conversation with live music from Steve Gibbons and John Caswell

I aim to tell stories about musicians from my city on this blog. In this post, however, Steve Gibbons is telling the stories... and how. This is one of a series of programmes I recorded with local musicians last year, working with Brian Travers of UB40 on his Music Up project. 

It’s a simple notion: we get together in a studio, we talk, and the musicians play, live. It’s a conversation with music, and, of course, the programme is only as good as the music and the conversation. Steve has great music and brilliant stories, so this one’s a winner.

I now have the privilege of giving the show a first outing on Radio To Go. But if you’re working on a station that would like to air it, that’s fine too; just read on. I’ve broken it down into roughly two equal parts: part one is right here; part two, now with a Flipcam clip of part of the session, follows on.

Steve Gibbons is one of the most loved musicians in Birmingham. He’s been his highly individual, poetic and articulate self, for nigh on fifty years. If you don’t know Steve, you should. Here’s the Wikipedia page, and here's a fan site.

This show was originally meant for a first broadcast airing on Birmingham Internet station Rhubarb Radio, but since that station fell over late last year, I’d rather not let it gather dust. So, accidentally, but not unpleasantly, this was an exclusive on this blog. However, we agreed at the start of working this series that shows would be free for rebroadcast on any station that would like to have the programme. So, if you’re such a station, email me through this blog (link below) and I’ll get a copy to you.  WCRfm, a community station in Wolverhampton, was the first station to take delivery of this programme for rebroadcast. It aired in February. 

My thanks for to Steve and John, Brian and the team at Music Up in Coventry. And the photo right here? Thank you, Steve Ajao.

There may be more to come in this series. Feedback is very welcome in the meantime. And I am open to suggestions...

Finally, here's a FlipCam shot of part of the session, shot by Brian Travers.



Also in the In The Studio series
360 at Elephant House
Steve Ajao