FESTIVAL T in the Park
Balado, near Kinross, Sat 12 & Sun 13 Jul.
So you failed to make it to T in the Park this year. Maybe it was the extra distance, maybe it was the far from inspired line-up, maybe you just couldn't be arsed. And now you’re watching the television coverage and thinking ‘hmmm, what was it really like?’ Here's a dozen things you should have been party to:
1. The new site. You couldn't get away from Strathclyde Park's urban setting even if you’d brought your own sheep and cows. Balado, on the other hand, is a farm - the only true location for a festival. Plus there’s a natural sloping arena in front of the main stage.
2. Jimi Tenor's scarlet cape. Jimi Tenor’s sequinned jacket. Jimi Tenor's glasses. Jimi Tenor's dirty, funky keyboard sound. Jimi Tenor, pefiod.
3. The talent stage. What other big festival gives local, unsigned bands a look-in? And has half-decent groups to choose from? The Ranters, Bosley, The Starlets, Polar Bear and Magicdrive all strutted consummately.
4. The Virgin Tea Tent - T in the Park's own Korova Milk Bar. Chill out with a herbal tea and watch the crazy lava lamp shapes, man.
5. Urusei Yatsura reversing the normal run of things by throwing their own underwear into the crowd. The audience didn’t respond by lobbing drumsticks at the band, however. Then, there was their swaggering new song about ’glow stars' or something.
6. Dreadzone’s and Spearhead’s effortless ability to get an audience pogoing on the spot and simultaneously cheering the slightest political utterance with wild abandon.
7. Dubhenge. It was just some old cars painted grey and arranged like standing stones, but I liked it.
8. Lessons in cool from The Divine Comedy and Fun
SHONA WONG
The Charlatans
Lovin' Criminals. Neil Hannon rendering his mini romantic epics despite being trussed up in an English gent's three-piece suit and having to serenade a Tweety Pie balloon bobbing about the crowd. The Crims being dudes
9. The view from the Big Wheel — ha ha, you're flailing about in the mud down below and we‘re cruising at 20,000ft. etc.
10. Placebo's Brian Molko chucking a drink over a troublesome punter backstage - must have been his PMT.
11. The mulled wine stall.
12. Daft Punk proving that you don't need visuals to perform (they make The Orb look like attention-seeking showmen) to produce the most euphoric set of the weekend. (Fiona Shepherd)
Tish Hinojosa: genre leaping songstress
She has been marketed as a Latin artist, for example, but Latin radio stations don’t play her songs because they see her as a country singer. And, naturally, it works in reverse as well.
For someone like Hinojosa, the musrcal hotbed of Austin seemed a natural destination, and she settled there after a spell in Nashville in the late 805. For the Labyrinth album, though, she went back to an old chapel in San Antonio where 'the Vibes were great', and cut the music there, mixing Spanish and English lyrics in a way she had not done before.
'My memories of San Antonio were bittersweet,’ she says. 'We were
TEX-MEX PREVIEW Tish Hinojosa Glasgow: Cottier Theatre, Thu 31 Jul.
Tish Hinoiosa has covered a lot of ground in a musical career stretching back a couple of decades, and taking in nine albums, from her self- produced debut cassette in 1987, to last year’s ambitious bilingual epic Dreaming From the Labyrinth (Sonar del Laberinto).
The singer hails from San Antonio,
Texas, a border town where the pull of her parents' Mexican roots remained strong, but the dominant American culture exerted an equally powerful force. She has been labelled a folk singer, a country singer, a teJano singer, and even a pop Singer, but the truth lies somewhere between those categories
The irony is that, as she pomts Out herself, the inuSic business's heaVily commercial orientation is rarely sympathetic to the non-categorisable.
always comfortable in such a MeXican-American city, but my older siblings experienced segregation, and that cast a shadow over their sense of dignity in their Mexican culture. I always knew I was supposed to do something With that culture -- for me, biculturalism is a step toward multiculturism, and that is the key to understanding and appreCiating a lot more of the world. Working on this record was another step in that process' (Kenny Mathieson)
live reviews MUSIC
ROCK Soundbuggy
Glasgow: The Halt Bar, Thu 10 Jul *ir **
It’s rare to see a band where things click into place so quickly, but Glasgow's latest unsigned-but-surely- soon-to-be-feeding-off-The-Man stormtroopers Soundbuggy, sound and look like contenders after only a few bars of their hi—octane harmonising, poptastic set.
Imagine the musical sweep and confidence of Supergrass — an easy comparison given that Soundbuggy are a tightly-driven trio with masses of presence, a voice brimming with character and the supernova confidence of a group who know they're first past the post before they’ve even zipped off the starting blocks. But a deserved comparison. Like the ’Grass, Soundbuggy have absorbed psychedelic, mod, punk and New Wave influences and, unlike the turgid copyists of our time, have come up with a zingy set which is the dog’s bollocks rather than a dog's breakfast. (Fiona Shepherd)
Soundbuggy: the greyhound's gonads, apparently
ROCK
Lung Leg
Glasgow: King Tut's Wah Wah Hut
Fri l8Jul ****
It’s a family affair. Lung Leg are playing at home with an audience full of assorted parents and friends. The intimate atmosphere provides a relaxed forum for their angular punk-pop and the short set is sassy, unhurried and fun.
One member down, Lung Leg are assisted by a grinning boy guitarist who is the spit of Grange Hill’s Gonch while scissor-kicking like Pete Townsend.
The references are obvious — bis, Kenickie, The Buzzcocks, but Lung Leg convince simply by being excellent. They play at least one song, ‘Maid To Minx', which can hold its spiky head up in any company. Such a cool set of prom queen punk, Glasgow glam and discordant disco is irresistible. Dance to the music. (Peter Ross)
Lung Leg: prom queen punk
25 Jul—7 Aug 1997 THEUSTM