Festivals

When brass instruments with button-operated valves were introduced in the first half of the 19th century, music-making changed. Once requiring a semi-professional approach, it could now be quickly mastered by large groups of working people. A noisy result were Britain’s colliery bands: but a more spirited upshot was Serbia’s trumpet tradition. Like the colliery bands, Serbian brass music had a political imperative — re-weaving national identity after 500 years of Turkish occupation. The leader who first hit on trumpets as a vehicle for this joie-de-liberté was Prince Milos Obrenovic, who created the first Serbian brass ensembles in 1831. They took swift hold, providing an outlet for everyday south Slav exuberance. The

When did you last experience a boring Sunday afternoon? If you’re over 16, probably not since you were last 16 and stuck at home, raindrops sliding down the window pane, nothing on TV until five o’clock, nowhere to go because everywhere is shut. But boredom, says Phill Jupitus, has become an endangered emotion. Now that we have smartphones, at a gentle swipe, the touch of a button, we have access to any amount of diversion, 24 hours a day. We need never find ourselves with nothing to do, nothing to read that takes our fancy, no one to talk to. He’s not happy about this. In Being Bored: The Importance

Utopia dons some unlikely guises, crops up in some odd places. On the sea wall a couple in their teens stood clutching their baby and gazing half a mile across the opaque river to where streets run down to the shore: spires and warehouses, inns and gables announced a town. The boy asked me if I knew over there. He said that that was where they wanted to go to, where they wanted to be. There’s so much happening over there. Not like here. Here there were only vast ships, big sheds, cranes, mean houses. And nothing to do. No life. We were between Tilbury Fort and a pub called

‘How do we feel about leaving the EU today? Who doesn’t give a fook?’ yelled Oli Sykes of Sheffield’s Bring Me The Horizon — instantly becoming my favourite act of this year’s Glastonbury Festival. Sorry, I’m just not buying the line put out by the Guardian, the BBC, Damon Albarn and the rest of the wankerati that the crowds were bummed out by the referendum going the wrong way. Most of the 160,000 revellers had more pressing matters to consider like: Adele or New Order; long queue for the shower or not bother; samosa or falafel; cider or reefer or both; and — of course — how to negotiate the

Oculus Rift. It sounds like something from a science fiction novel, and in many ways it is. Its release this week is the first stirring of a future stuffed with virtual reality headsets. The hope of its Californian engineers and their bitcoin backers is that we, the consumers, will soon use them to spend a whole lot of time outside of our lives. Strap the goggles to your face, position the headphones over your ears, press the on button, and — bzzzztp — you’re in a different world. The question is, who will create these worlds? The first prototype of the Oculus Rift was built five years ago by an

Like everyone performing at the Edinburgh Fringe I’m about to make a lot of mistakes. I’m about to lose a lot of money too. But after ten years covering the festival as a reviewer I’m at least able to predict which errors I can’t avoid blundering into. First, the campaign to attract a crowd will be pointless. This stands to reason. Five or six thousand hopefuls swarm up to Edinburgh each year and they all use the same marketing strategy. Attention-seeking stunts on the Royal Mile. Tiresome afternoons forcing leaflets on unimpressed Americans. Fly-posting after dark, on tiptoe, by torchlight. Desperate texts to friends of friends promising five-for-one discounts. Bravura

It’s easy to forget what a mess of an art form opera once was. For its first 100 years it had no name, it had no fixed address, it didn’t really know who it was or what it was doing. You’d find it at schools, at weddings, at political functions. It was an artistic whore for hire. Embroiled in an epic tug-of-war as to which of the three art forms — word, music or dance — should be primary, it was also lithe and experimental. In fact, it was more like performance art than anything you’ll witness in a modern opera house. Why this historical detour? To remind us not

I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall. This is supposed to be a literary and music festival and my reason for being there was to talk about my new book What Every Parent Needs to Know. In reality, though, it’s just an excuse to go camping with old friends, drink plenty of alcohol and stay up late. You’d think this would be difficult with four children in tow, particularly children as young as mine, but Port Eliot is an object lesson in benign neglect. By the end of the three days I had been taught more about parenting by the festival–goers than I’d managed to teach them. Caroline