Start of show: "Hello Austrian folk, it's your good buddy John Peel on the Nachtexpress, and this is..."
A lot of chat about the Phoenix Festival. Mercury Rev, 1: Faith No More: 0.
Sessions[]
None
Tracklisting[]
Jack'O'Nuts: 'Raw Candle Vote (7")' (Radial)
Spanishtownians: 'Rudie Gets Plenty (Compilation CD-Rudies All Around)' (Trojan)
(JP: 'Last weekend I spent at an event called the Phoenix Festival near Stratford Upon Avon, a three-day event, which had been set up originally as a kind of rival to the Reading Festival, but then of course the same people have taken over the Reading Festival, so they didn't need to have a rival, if you see what I mean. Musically, well it wasn't terrific, it must be said. There were some good moments, notably Sonic Youth. The best set I thought (I couldn't see them all because I had to spend the entire time on the main stage and four of my alternative stages as well, which had on a lot of the bands that I wanted to see), but on the main stage and by some distance the best set came from Hole, perhaps rather surprisingly, because they've come in for a lot of criticism over the past few years, really I suppose because Courtney Love married Kurt Cobain... but as a band they really cared about what they were doing and their set at the Phoenix Festival was especially good. Especially bad were Living Colour, who I didn't like in the slightest, and worst of the lot were Faith No More. They had mountains of equipment: you've never seen such equipment, and you feel that's part of it, and loads of grotesquely over-confident people operating the equipment. They even set up their own kind of little cordon sanitaire on the stage and threw my wife off, because she was helping me and they threw her off because...well, they just threw her off, you know, more of them than there was of her really, and I took an instant dislike to them, I must say. But their music, through all of this superfluous equipment, was so utterly banal. I'm not just saying this because they were unpleasant to my wife, I would have told you this anyway. Really, it's one of those things where you sit back and think, as you did in the days of bands like Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, "What in god's name is it that anybody can see in this?" Just cliche-ridden piffle.')
(JP: 'I can't remember whether I mentioned to you a month ago that Glastonbury, the Glastonbury Festival, the music there was a bit dismal as well: lots of record company bands playing competent sets for the benefit of record company people, as far as I could tell. About the only thing that really inspired me over the whole of the weekend was a set by the Irish accordionist Sharon Shannon.')