'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

From some of the press its minor rebrand received, you'd have thought Rise was being transformed into Nuremberg N4, rather than having its slogan tweaked from "Unite Against Racism" to the cheerier "Celebrating Diversity". I can attest to a disappointing lack of torchlit rallies, lynch-mobs or BoriSS corps. Although the pedestrian Brit rapper on the bill ("before Oysters there was two pound travelcards" - bless) did get everyone to put one hand in the air and chant "One nation, one people", which perhaps could have done with a rethink.
Highlights: Kitty, Daisy & Lewis' old-time rock'n'roll worked surprisingly well in a sunny field at lunchtime (where 'lunch' = 'gin'). The Aliens would have bored me rigid in a traditional gig setting, but as very loud background noise, they were just the ticket. Beardyman is impressive in a way very few beatboxers can manage, and once the Dub Pistols got Terry Hall on (for 'Our Lips Are Sealed', 'Problem Is' and 'Gangsters'), they were glorious.
Also, the man who'd got around the ban on dogs by smuggling his dachshund in a bag.
Lowlights: The aforementioned rappers, comprehensively pwned when the DJ followed their set with 'Witness (One Hope)' to show how UK rap should be done. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings - even if I hadn't seen them on Jools Holland, I would still class them as 'Jools Holland music'. Everything I saw on my brief tour of the other stages, including one band who sounded like the Brand New Heavies, and some clowns called Yabba Funk with a song whose title translated as 'Victory to Africa' - whatever angle I look at that sentiment from, it's at best meaningless and at worst vile.
But below all that - CSS. Dear heavens. I was never quite as caught up in them as some people - possibly because I only thought Lovefoxxx 'quite cute' rather than collapsing into the same paroxysms as many - but they made some fun party tracks. Since when they've got miserable, learnt how to play, improved their English and stopped being randomly rude - ie, systematically erased everything people liked about them. Oh, and picked up a new drummer from The Cooper Temple Clause, a band I liked but who judging from this and the other one's stint with the tit from the Libertines, have taken some sort of oath of post-TCTC rubbishness so as not to eclipse their legacy. Lovefoxxx attempts to bring some liveliness to proceedings by coming on in hard hat, facial stripes and a cloak, but that cannot disguise what a dreadfully dull band they have become. A couple of songs in, I cannot take it anymore - "If the next song's not 'Death from Above', I'm going". It's not. I go, and sit on the Parkland Walk reading Philip K Dick for a bit instead.

Other than that I have been:
Seeing MJ Hibbett's My Exciting Life In Rock preview;
Reading Ian Kelly's new Casanova biography, which is extremely funny, very well-researched, and was apparently proofread by a dyslexic chimpanzee;
Building castles in the clouds.

Public Enemy were heroes to most, but they never meant sh1t to me me - most of my heroes ain't appeared on no list of Farrakhan supporters. But those who disagree may be interested to learn that The Bomb Squad have got into dubstep.

burkesworks has already posted his thoughts on the David Peace South Bank Show, and as regards his opinion of Martin Amis' strengths, of ITV in general and of the second half of this programme in particular, I agree. It was especially galling that while there was some discussion of Peace's work prior to The Damned Utd (the little of which I've encountered I found pretty unimpressive), so little was made of his having published another novel since, the astonishing Tokyo Year Zero. Instead, we got some old fool of an ex-player who seemed to be under the misapprehension that he could write, talking about how no non-player could understand the allegedly unique experience of being dropped from a football team. Which for starters plays into the horrid underestimation of a little thing called 'imagination' - but he then described it, badly, in terms which would apply equally to being sacked from any job one likes, or indeed to being dumped*.
Where I'd disagree is in the association of Peace with the 'angry young men' and working class realism. When I heard Peace read from GB84, that was what I thought of too - and that's why I filed him under Of No Further Interest until the praise for The Damned Utd from people whose recommendations I respect got overwhelming. What interests me in The Damned Utd and Tokyo Year Zero isn't that sort of writer, it's one burrows into the guts the past like James Ellroy. If there's a comparison to be made with a Northern writer, I'd go for Tony Harrison - they've a similar gift for marrying the rhythms of everyday speech with something deeper, rhythmic, primal. But even ahead of that, when I hear Peace say "there is no such thing as non-fiction" and talk about his working method of immersion in the past, I think of Marguerite Yourcenar or the Alan Moore of Voice of the Fire, writers who channel the dead in a manner which breaks down those silly little genre barriers which separated art from sorcery for a time. Peace even talked about how he'd initially wanted to interweave Brian Clough's story with an "occult history of Leeds United" - and how I wish he had, beyond those enigmatic little moments of cursing which divide the sections of The Damned Utd. Moments which a typically underinformed Melvyn Bragg inevitably failed to mention at this point in the interview, remnants though they must be of that earlier incarnation of the book.
I remain convinced, mind, that David Peace could one day write the definitive book on Gordon Brown.
(In other Northern literary news: Paul Morley on John Cooper Clarke. Bit rushed, and I could understand maybe one word in ten of Mark E Smith's contributions, but still well worth a listen; I loved Morley's description of JCC as "the missing link between Diana Ross and Charles Baudelaire". But how sad that a man who once hung with Nico and the Honey Monster is now reduced to working with Reverend & the Makers and the Arctic Monkeys)

*Until he started in on this little rant, I was unclear whether he had been a player or a fan. Not only is it a pretty academic point as far as I'm concerned, but many of the fans seem a bit confused on the point themselves: wearing exact replicas of their idols' tops even down to having the idol's name on; referring to the team's performance as though they'd contributed...I'm still not entirely sure that this fellow wasn't similarly deluded, even by the standards of the field he really didn't seem very bright.