Mojo - The Music Magazine

While other media behemoths can offer you blanket coverage of Glastonbury festival from cabaret to cuisine; MOJO can offer but the one path, the path stumbled down by MOJO Consultant Editor Danny Eccleston. He squidged through the mud, saw some bands, had some thoughts, the sum of which you'll find below.

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GLASTONBURY 2009 is under an array of shadows. The death of Michael Jackson, news of which swept the site over the Thursday, has thrown a mind-boggling curveball. The demise of The Seeds' Sky Saxon has MOJO types reduced to respectful whispers backstage, and legendary, rabble-rousing NME scribe Steven Wells has gone too, taking his inspiring, livid prose with him.

But it is 2pm on Friday June, 26, and the first great band of the festival is about to blow the blues away. Toronto hardcore-psych-punks F__ked Up are the soi-disant "third heaviest band of the festival" (after Spinal Tap and Status Quo, natch) and are about to offer an object lesson in how to grab a festival crowd by the short-and-curlies. Almost as soon as gargantuan singer Damian "Pink Eyes" Abraham hits the John Peel Tent stage, he goes gloriously AWOL, as the band's three-SG attack build a wall of whooshing noise. Then he's carried out into the audience as far as the sound desk, as audience members hold his mic lead aloft like BBC Outside Broadcast technicians.

It s a wonderfully involving performance in the great barrier-trashing hardcore tradition and with brilliant songs like Black Albino Bones, Crooked Head and Crusades, converts will have been made here.

Whether that will be the case subsequent to Fleet Foxes' Pyramid Stage set, hmmmmm. The boys sing and play beautifully, but their droll, mumbled patter, which works so well in a theatre, is lost in front of the outdoor throng. Painful longeurs between songs drain the set of energy, and though a mass humalong is inspired by White Winter Hymnal, the jury remains out.

No reflection on the quality Pecknold and co have on offer, but there is too much self-effacement here. A new song is introduced as the "sophomore slump", an all-too-knowing and grimly downbeat reference to disappointing second albums and the hangover of success, but it's a beautiful, gently unfurling CSN thing and needs no bushel to hide its light behind. FF need a bit (but not much) more "Glastonbury, are you ready to rock?!" and wider recognition will do justice to their brilliance and promise.

After a Thursday night deluge - non-stop rain from 03.00 to midday - the site is hard to negotiate, but spirits are high. This is a generation of Glasto-goers that have been inured to mud, and they are better prepared, camping-and-conditions-wise that some of their naive '80s and '90s antecedents. That said, you wonder how, since the festival know *exactly how many tickets they've sold, camping pitches can have been exhausted by mid-Thursday. Does everyone have bigger tents these days? Are Milletts to blame? Is it the "gazebo effect"? Or are Glastonbury stuffing their site to the gills to the detriment of the festival experience? Answers on a postcard please.

The Specials are also packing them in, and rightly. For all the hidden politics - should this really be happening without Jerry Dammers? - these songs are undeniable. Meanwhile, the onstage chemistry - dry Terry Hall, outgoing Neville Staple, rocking Roddy Radiation - is firing, and unsung hero John Bradbury on the drums belies his years with engine-stoking intensity. Still so unique - why aren't young British bands bucking the current "pub verité" trend to emulate The Specials' brand of street-level-social comment - they're still spooky, edgy, funny, *brilliant. Standout number: Too Much Too Young.

MOJO's day ends at the Park stage at 11.15, as we swim against the tide flowing towards Neil Young's Pyramid Stage finale to revel in Animal Collective. Nerdy sound-collagers turned ravey electro-Beach Boys, the Marylanders nail their Park closer with an astonishing tapestry of texture, noise, melody and uplifting vocal harmonies: a properly psychedelic rumpus to the Glastonbury manner born, a flashback to the Floyd, or Orbital here in 1994, with bells - quite literally, on.

Springsteen tomorrow. Or will it be Bon Iver?

Far out.

Danny Eccleston

F___ed Up photographed by: Andy Ennis