T IN THE PARK
Countdown to T in the Park It’s less than a month til Scotland’s biggest music festival. We reminisce. . .
10 Biffy Clyro have performed TEN times at TITP, making them the band with the most appearances. This is the
6 A SIX-person tent is the smallest venue the festival has featured. In 2010, Kassidy performed an exclusive acoustic set for 14
1 The festival’s new The festival’s new late license means that late license means that the live music will the live music will
i rst time The Biff are headlining but they i rst played as an unsigned band on the Tennent’s T Break stage in 1999. competition winners.
5 During the weekend, T in the Park becomes Scotland’s FIFTH largest town.
be going on till ONE am – be going on till ONE am – which allows Pharrell to which allows Pharrell to take to the stage, as take to the stage, as he refused to he refused to perform while perform while it was still it was still light. light.
9 Pharrell Williams (right) wrote his number 1 hit ‘Happy’ NINE times before he was happy with it. Once satisi ed, he declared it ‘probably the best song I’ve written in my life’.
8 EIGHT is the number of songs from Calvin Harris’ album 18 Months that went to number 1 last year, making him, much
like Roy Castle, a record breaker. (The previous record holder was Michael Jackson, with seven number ones from Dangerous).
7 More than SEVEN thousand staff work on making T in the Park come together. With 70,000 campers expected,
that’s a tenth of the people on the campsite.
4 The Human League are making their T debut this year. Their 1981 hit, ‘Don’t You Want Me’ recently made number FOUR on the
ut
iTunes chart following a social media campaign by y Aberdeen FC.
IT IS
NOT ALL ABOUT THE
MUSIC:
3 Over the THREE days T in the Park runs, the festival is host to 85,000 people per day.
2 In 2004, the festival had the world’s longest urinal – 676 feet long, approximately the length of TWO football pitches.
t
Robbie Williams turned up to the fi rst
T – not to sing, but to play football. Dizzee Rascal and Snoop Dogg played crazy golf and basketball before going on in 2005, while Nicole Appleton challenged Bobby Gillespie to
a dance-off in the same
Domino Effect
Malcolm Jack catches up with sweary Glasgow trio, The Amazing Snakeheads, riding a wave of success after releasing their debut album in April
‘P laying live when we i rst started was just about fucking war,’ blurts singer and guitarist Dale Barclay over a phoneline from Paris, in summing up the philosophical arc of The Amazing Snakeheads across a transformative debut year. ‘It wasn’t about anything other than that,’ he continues. ‘Total fucking chaos and destruction. But now I don’t know. To not be changed by something like this would be to do the music a disservice.’
The comic-book, violence-bloodied doom-wop of the Glasgow trio’s Domino Records-released debut Amphetamine Ballads, the molten intensity of their live shows, Barclay’s i ery attitude (he politely threatens to ‘fucking strangle’ the next person to compare them to The Birthday Party), all of it burns white hot. But as they tour Europe to humblingly enthusiastic receptions, they’re cooling the confrontational stance which characterised their earliest gigs – something which, it seems, only ever came from a perceived necessity to counter threat with threat. Barclay basically never believed anyone would like them. ‘Not at all,’ he admits. ‘Didn’t think anyone would. And I didn’t want anyone to, to be
26 THE LIST 12 Jun–10 Jul 2014
year.
honest.’ Which explains a lot about the deep, dark well from which the Snakeheads’ harsh, often intimidating sound is drawn, and frames Barlcay’s songwriting as the uncontainable primal scream of an artist for whom, as a younger man, the stonemason son of a stonemason, music was ‘never going to be on the radar’. ‘I just worked. That was what I was going to do,’ he says. Journalists’ enthusiasm for discussing the Snakeheads’ working class roots is ‘getting a bit fucking mundane’, Barclay grumbles. But he concedes that his background is something which he carries with him everywhere he goes. ‘I can be in Germany and walk by a building site and think “I should be in there, getting fucking bogging”,’ he spits. ‘It can be tough on tour, but it’s never as tough as going to work on a fucking building site in winter.’ (Malcolm Jack)
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