Johnny Cash

Bearing in mind that we saw Django Django, Hot Chip, and Super Furry Animals, today, this might seem an odd - in fact, somewhat mundane - choice of photo. However...

Johnny Cash was the name of our 'street' on the Honeybells site and one that I was particularly pleased with. After all, Johnny Cash was the first artist that I loved whom I (kind of) found for myself. If memory serves me correctly - and, frankly, forty years later, I'm not entirely sure it does - we'd gone to visit friends of my parents, and our host played an album by Johhny Cash. This would have been around the mid-Seventies. I managed to find a tape of Cash at the Poor Man's Nightclub, in Hong Kong: a street market that opened at night, which sold, amongst many other things, loads of bootleg tapes.  And so it was that in amongst The Beatles and Abba, plus all the stuff my dad listened to, I made myself familiar with most of Cash's back catalogue.

When we came back from Hong Kong, I didn't meet anyone else my age who liked Johnny Cash until the sixth form, when it turned out that my friend, Mark Ayers, was also a fan. I seem to remember that my chum John Watton, whom I met a couple of years after that, was also a fan but I'll need to check that with him. I've little doubt that my love for Nick Cave stems at least in part from Cash and I was delighted when Rick Rubin restarted the latter's career with the American Recordings series. To this day, I am still very moved by the video of Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' 'Hurt', with the older Cash's performance interspersed with the virile shots from his youth.

But back to Glastonbury! It poured down around the middle of the day, today, so we stayed in the café/bar/lounge area of the Honeybells site, lying on a sofa, under a huge canvas awning, enjoying the sound of the rain, eating, and drinking. Later on, though, when it brightened up, we went into the festival, where we stumbled across Django Django and enjoyed a bit of their set: rolling drums, great guitar sounds and gorgeous harmonies.

Later we went to meet up with Ben Cameron, who's friends with the Minx. We watched most of the Hot Chip gig with him, which started off amazingly: great songs, joyful performances and a drummer who was absolutely locked into the grooves. After four or five songs, though, it all got a bit more anodyne - reminiscent of Level 42 but without Mark King, in fact - so we headed up to the Park Stage to catch some of Super Furry Animals. I really wish I was familiar with their catalogue but the stuff we heard all sounded magnificent: a great big sound from a proper band.