Mojo - The Music Magazine

Dylan's SatNav May Answer The Question: How Many Roads?

Bob Dylan may soon be offering words of advice to those wishing to avoid accidentally revisiting Highway 61, if negotiations with SatNav manufacturers are successful.

Dylan revealed during his radio show Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour that he has received offers from SatNav firms to provide the voice for their in-car GPS systems, and with a wry reference to his typically meandering lyrics, announced "I think it would be good if you are looking for directions and hear my voice saying something like, 'Left at the next street, no a right. You know what? Just go straight'."

Dylan could have used some navigational help when he took a meandering walk in the Long Branch, New Jersey earlier this month. Police took him for a vagrant and drove him back to his hotel to confirm his identity.

The raspy-voiced folk-rock legend, never noted for his crystal-clear articulation, has himself said of the SatNav offers: "I probably shouldn't do it, because whichever way I go I always end up at one place: Lonely Avenue."

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Pete Townshend Writing New Musical

Pete Townshend, Who guitarist and creater of rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia has revealed on The Who's official web site that he is working on a new project called "Floss."

Townshend hopes to explore the problems faced by an ageing baby boomer generation in the musical, which centres on "a straight-cut pub rock musician" Walter, who encounters marital difficulties just as a return to writing music provokes some disturbing self-realisations.

The man who wrote the the line "hope I die before I get old" said in his blog that "as a 19 year old - with My Generation - I wrote the most explicitly ageist song in rock. At 64, I now want to take on ageing and mortality, using the powerfully angry context of rock 'n' roll." Townshend describes it as an ambitious project in which "the songs are interspersed with surround-sound 'soundscapes' featuring complex sound effects and musical montages."

The previously non-committal Townshend seems to have found renewed interest in his band while Roger Daltrey "exercises his ageing vocal chords" on tour. He intends for the album to be debuted in 2011 for outdoor or arena performance, and also hopes to reveal some of the musical's more "conventional" songs on a forthcoming Who release in 2010.

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Flags Banned At Reading And Leeds, Glastonbury May Follow

Reading and Leeds festivals have imposed a ban on flags this weekend with the intention of confiscating any flags at the arena gates, while Glastonbury is considering doing the same next year.

The tall flags, which have become increasingly common at most British festivals, have been criticised for blocking music fan's views of performers, notably during Bruce Springsteen's performance at Glastonbury this year. Glastonbury organisers received numerous complaints from people further back from the front-of-stage flag-wavers whose line of vision was completely obscured. The flags are usually positioned very close to the front of the stage so as to appear in the cameras' lines of vision, and sometimes bear corporate advertising messages.

Melvin Benn, chief executive of Festival Republic which runs Reading and Leeds and also helps to organise Glastonbury, said "You couldn't see the acts -- the flags were everywhere. There have always been flags but not to the level that there has been [recently]. And the flags have become very long and tall."