Big Weekend '06

Another vintage Big Weekend in Cardiff’s Civic Centre a couple of days ago. A desire to avoid the festival-style toilets meant that I only made it for brief sessions, but on Saturday, I managed to catch the whole of the sets by perennially excellent intense-soft-rockers The Crimea, and punk-funk-tastic East Londoners The Infadels, and a good section of The Automatic (although I left before the singalong fun of “Monster”). On Sunday evening, it was the Stereo MCs, who seemed quite miffed at the fact that people weren’t dancing, apparently forgetting that they only had two famous songs, which were hits long before a large section of the audience was born; followed by festival closer and homecoming queen Cerys Matthews, who kicked ass, playing only one Catatonia song, “Lost Cat” (written a stone’s throw away in Splott), and concentrating on her country-tinged new material (her drummer being, apparently, the grandson of George Jones). Beautiful.
Currently, the news is full of the terror alerts involving aircraft departing from U.K. airports. Even more depressing than the prospect of more Al-Qaeda-sponsored attacks is the inevitable “there are no terrorists, but if there are, it’s all the fault of the Jews” bile which will be spilt all over the public prints. Still, hats off to Channel Five for trailing a showing of Mel Gibson’s “Man Without A Face” with a clip of his character reciting the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech from “Merchant” – very funny.