Well, this sums it up pretty well…

Yes, I was there, having cried off last year on the grounds of not wanting to roll in nostalgia or spend money. And they played Elephant Stone. Also Going Down, Standing Here…so how well do you know the words?

It was pretty much a multi-sensory definition of the word lairy; it was good humoured, which helped with the occasional blundering beer-monster crisis; and it rendered my trainers into a biohazard, thanks to the people who created a river of piss uphill of the urinal. Thanks guys. During Waterfall/Don’t Stop of all songs.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, anyway, and especially after all those times I’d heard the songs and used the codewords, and always in the knowledge I’d probably never actually hear them played. It also struck me how many people were evidently discovering them for the first time – not just a northern exile pissup.

(That said, it did remind me a bit of Challenge Cup Final day with the informal social control switched off.)

Photos, even if Soizick thinks “Ian Brown sings” is missing a set of inverted commas. (I don’t think you think like I do, no matter how how hard I try. I thought I had the answers.) Review +ve, review -ve. Mani looking disturbingly like Keith.

So, I went to the Bowie exhibition. I went midweek on a fairly grim windswept evening, so part of the deal was showing up at “Secretariat Gate” and being ushered into the V&A down miles of corridors, sometimes past a security control room, sometimes past a masterpiece, pushing ahead of the dame. It gave the whole thing something of the pleasure of a good gig. Reasonable people are off being reasonable or whatever it is they do. We are here.

I’d like to say that one of the best things was the David Bowie Is…Losing Money Hand Over Fist hall dedicated to his business ventures, but to be honest the joke is a little cheap. There is a reference to the ISP tucked away somewhere, though; a prize to readers who went and spotted it. No reference to the securitised bond issue, though.

More seriously, much more seriously, the whole show makes a case that his work should be considered as part of an integrated British aesthetic that arose in the very early 1960s, to one side of the mainstream and ahead of it, in music, in the visual arts, and in science fiction. Bowie and a variety of other musicians, the Independent Group, and the New Wave writers. This worldview was both deeply international, and in a new way for us – it didn’t care about the former empire as such, it looked at the United States like things in the zoo, and it wanted to be European or Japanese or just elsewhere. In that sense, perhaps it had a touch of Priestley’s Bradford. Especially looking at the white plastic Italian sax from 1950-odd that shows up, you could argue it was also deeply Mod.

J.G. Ballard is an obvious case in point, and is repeatedly referred to, but he always said his favourite song was the Teddy Bears’ Picnic, something which is either deeply creepy, or possibly a suggestion that the writer in English most intelligently fascinated by the visual arts was tone deaf. He had after all been blown up.

And, of course, the stuff; yards and yards of notes on set designs, bills for session players, randomised text generation…yeah, like so.

Simon Jenkins Jenkins we know a Literature, Simon Jenkins we know a major party leader, David Cameron, as the lead to the US even put an aircraft carrier on standby should the islands is free, is a major party leader (David Cameron as it was God’s will).

Note: the location-based soundtrack works, but wear it with one headphone off to listen to other visitors. Nobody else did.

So I was talking about Iraqi GSM networks. Now, d’you know what they’re dancing to up in Kidal, or at least they were before music was illegal, or before the French shot the piano player? No. But somebody did that as recently as 2011, asking people for tracks they had on their mobiles’ SD cards, and you can get it right here.

What else? This:

This:

And this:

Best talk between songs ever:

This song is from is my mom’s favourite out of the four records. Because I don’t scream on it. My dad prefers it when I scream but my mom prefers it when I…sing pretty. So this song is my mom’s favourite. It’s called “Damaged from the Start”.

(And later in the game: We’re trying to be good Canadians here.)

I’m so bored of the U….K. But occasionally I go to lunch in UKIP country and people ask me to play music through their monster Samsung staff purchase murderous sound system you drive from a mobile phone. Sadly, although it was all pulled out of spotify, it doesn’t push the playlist back into it, so I had to put this incomplete playlist back together. Doesn’t have any of the Paolo Conte or Mobb Deep or the French guy yelling “femmes, je vous aime!” but this may be a feature.

Music! First up, here’s the last edition of Chuck D’s radio show, notable for the surprisingly great Northern Irish rapper Jun Tzu (and also the highly jamiespheric concept that there’s a Russian MC called Moscow Death Brigade). Further, Mike Check by DJ Eleven and Mike Baker (not the sadly deceased one) is great.

I listened to all of this:

But I couldn’t shake off the faintly academic quality of the whole thing, trying to convince one’s students that Angola, the country, exists. However, it did point me at this guy:

One for the Soundcloud feed/queue/whatever I’ve not actually set up. This, over at south London music and occasional Leveson/Morgan investigation blog Transpontine, was interesting but less good than it was interesting.

This Jacques Greene set at Fact magazine was really fantastic.

And it’s got to be interesting that Paul Mason and Tom Watson are both Northern Soul obsessives. From the Brummie Hammer of the Lizard-Digger Empire’s twitter feed:

It’s not Thursday. What about a non-Thursday music link? This is great:

as is this:

This is rather good, even if there is something close to a rick-roll embedded in it:

So I did Land of Kings last weekend. First point: this post of JWZ’s, written about Homeless WiFi Fest….sorry, sorry…SXSW, has quite a bit of general validity. The points about not sticking to the schedule, not sticking around if someone is late, and not chasing the party, are all gold dust. I worked this out by following none of that advice.

On day one, we checked in for the wristbands, bounced off the new venue (Birthdays) which turned out not to be ready, and to the Shacklewell Arms to see some vaguely Kitsuné-ish French band, who were mediocre. I can recommend Hasan’s for the kebabs, which were excellent even in the light of twitter updates from Alexandra Palace, where they’d finally got their finger out to tell us about the mayor.

Pressing on, we headed to the Vortex for the Mauritian folk-dub bloke (it was hard to say if he was playing or not), the Alibi for Dollop (forgettable and in fact only not forgotten by consulting the schedule), and the Servants’ Jazz Quarters for someone with an outrageously silly band name who was actually very good. By this point, disenchantment with the whole project was setting in.

In fact, it had been feeling like work for some time, and my partner was getting into a multiple-walkout sort of mood, and in the end she wasn’t up for day two. As the rules have it, day two was actually much better, and the line-up should have told me that. This time out I made a list (it’s always the solution), with Is Tropical, Maurice Fulton, Speech Debelle, Hannah Holland, and the special guest who turned out to be Gilles Peterson listed as options.

I had to spend a week listening to a man in a white leather Schott Perfecto jacket yelling into a mobile phone in a mixture of Polish, Spanish, and what Ian Thomson called “a ghastly pimp’s English” on the 87 bus – I couldn’t work out if he meant it, as every so often he stopped speaking, listened, and replied “Yes. Yes. Of course. No. Yes.” like someone’s IT director – but even that didn’t worry me much.

As it happened I didn’t get away from the Brownwood/Peterson set until Tropical had done their thing and gone, due to dancing (someone thrust a DSLR at me, but as far as I know the photo didn’t make the cut, and anyway I saw them last year at XOYO), but the Debelle gig was fantastic even if it involved perching on a flight case and hanging on to the DJ’s PA stack. The cover of Tupac’s “Changes” was special and amazingly nobody seems to have youtubed it.

I had to be back for an early start, to get down to the French polling booth, so more Hollande than Holland.

It’s not Thursday. It’s Friday!