Last weekend was the festival’s 18th year and my eighth visit. I lost my T virginity in 2001 or 2002 I think. Back then it was all for fun – camping, reaching a sustainable level of drunkenness for an entire weekend, laughing at the dire bands, enjoying the good ones, not giving a shit if your tent was completely flooded. Did I mention the drinking?

Then in my student days I entered T exile, preferring to sample the offerings of Spanish festivals like Benicassim, Summercase and Primavera. But for the past four or five years I’ve been back at T in the much less fun capacity of music journalist. This obviously has its advantages – free ticket, access to the not-really-that-special hospitality area, less slumming it. But every year I quickly realise that T in the f***ing Park is almost impossible to really truly enjoy unless you’re in some state of considerable inebriation.

Still, when I wasn’t reviewing, tweeting or publishing this year I tried my level best at getting into the T spirit while sober. The Slam Tent proved the biggest challenge to overcome – Boots could learn something from the customer service techniques of its army of pill sellers. But there was no way I was missing Leftfield – an old favourite of mine – and I forced myself to bounce along with the hands-in-the-air hordes.

T in the f***ing Park gets a lot of stick from us music snobs. We dismiss it as a neds’ holiday, a celebration of knuckle-dragging, brutish drunkenness and rampant commercialism.

Okay, fair enough, but I’m getting a little tired of this sniping. It might not be to all of our tastes, but the undeniable fact is that 85,000 people turn up, have an evidently brilliant time and usually return the following year. To those who slate the choice of headliners or the mediocre pap that usually precedes it on the Main Stage, it’s a necessary evil if you want to stage a mainstream event and subsidise the smaller stages that host the genuinely exciting international acts and breakthrough Scots bands.

And you have to admire the level of organisation and professionalism that goes into just making it happen. It’s a premier league event, almost equal in scale to the likes of Glastonbury and Coachella, and Scotland cannot always claim to compete with the biggest and best of the world in other areas of life. This year, for the first time, I wondered whether we should actually be proud of T in the f***ing Park as a great Scottish event that doesn’t involve tartan or bagpipes (at least not as the main draw).

You might be thinking to yourself, ‘Yeah, but I bet he wouldn’t go if he had to pay a couple of hundred quid for a ticket’. And you’d be right. It would take a phenomenal line-up for me to part with that sort of cash, especially when I can get a foreign holiday with a festival included for a little more. But then maybe I’m just too old for it.

Or not old enough. I saw countless middle-aged couples at Balado this year, unashamedly joining the youthful majority in their lager-fuelled revelry.

Good on ‘em. Maybe I’ll be one of them in 15-20 years when T in the f***ing Park is approaching its 40th birthday.

But if I hear that chant of ‘Here we, here we, here we f***ing go’ one more time, I reserve the right to reverse all opinions expressed in this post.

Take a look at our T in the Park reviews and photos over on Radar.

Lady North perform in Fleshmarket Close

One thing I’ve never done in my nine years as a resident of Edinburgh has been to take a guided tour of the grand old place. That’s because these tours are usually led by irritatingly boisterous am-dram types dressed badly in jester/wench costumes.

But I broke my duck on this front at the weekend, when I joined about 50-100 other music fans on Detour‘s Wee Jaunt. And there wasn’t a codpiece in sight.

The whole idea is that it’s a secret line-up, and so there was a level of uncertainty, nay, trepidation, beforehand. But it doesn’t take long to be swept along on the upbeat atmosphere – and that was without a drop of alcohol.

I saw some great mini-gigs – especially Conquering Animal Sound and Lady North – in some unlikely locations, and you can read my full review on Radar.

Ally McCrae and David Weaver carry off their Detour exploits with the kind of carefree tomfoolery that makes it all seem effortless. Staging an event like this is anything but.

Here are a few more of my photos from the day.

I love this tune. I suspect you probably won’t.

Feedeth your fish too much and they grow bloated and perisheth, but feedeth them scraps and they stay hungry and healthy.

No? Well that’s because I made it up. But there’s still some value in it.

When it comes to keeping your fans starved of information, few bands are as tight-fisted as Boards of Canada.

We know the basics: brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin, 40-ish, formerly (?)  based in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh at a studio/commune they call Hexagon Sun, sharing an appreciation of crackly old educational documentaries from the 1970s and US cults.

But try learning much more and you’ll only come across rumours, sunburst photographs and cryptic quotes. Contrary to popular belief, they do actually give interviews, but their last one was in 2006.

So us BoC fanatics are hungry little fish, pouncing on any tiny scrap of information that drifts our way.

Such as this evening, with an almost imperceptible but potentially significant change to the official band website. If you now click on the Discography page, there’s a new tenth blank icon after their latest work, which apparently wasn’t there before. It’s hyperlinked, but doesn’t go anywhere.

Could this be the sign of the fourth coming, the fabled new album we’ve been waiting on since the year of our lord 2005?

Whether it’s concrete proof of activity or just a cruel mindgame, one’s thing for sure: for anyone remotely interested it’s far more effective than any superlative-heavy press release or official announcement.

Of course, any new artist will have to play the self-promotion game to some extent, but perhaps when they’re a bit more established they should remember the proverb of the fish tank.

Like every other person in the country who is remotely interested in recorded sounds, I have, for the past ten days, been listening intently to the new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs, and, to a lesser extent, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake. While my first impression of Yorke & Co’s new dispatch (once I’d managed to blank out all the Dancing Thom YouTube silliness) was familiar disappointment at the lack of so-called standout songs (a well-worn complaint since the dawn of the millenium), I quickly started to enjoy the record’s understated and unusual qualities; the spidery percussion, looping basslines and detuned guitars. Like everything Radiohead have done since OK Computer, it’s eminently interesting background music, without the lyrical or era-defining focus of their mid/late 90s output.

But then isn’t Yorke’s commitment to cryptic,  throwaway messages, disorientating time signatures and dubious dance moves becoming a little tiresome, a bit predictable in itself? Wouldn’t it be more refreshing if Radiohead were to unpack their guitars and produce a truly monumental record that didn’t sound like the studio noodlings of five self-indulged 40-something men but took on the absurdities and injustices of 21st century life with the kind of burning anger that underpinned tracks like ‘Paranoid Android’ or the caustic cynicism of ‘Just’?

I’m breaking my own habit here, by the way. I’ve always defended and applauded Yorke’s risky reconfiguring of the Radiohead sound following their huge early success, and the constant complaints from Dad Rockers around the nation about the lack of big, distorted guitars are misguided at best.

But the reason I’m questioning this latest journey into the leftfield from the Oxford group is partly provoked by first listens of Let England Shake, which surfaced just four days before The King of Limbs. It is in many ways the other side of the coin: angry, evocative, political. It is radical in meaning if not in style. It boasts memorable songs with choruses and verses and everything. In short, it’s not background music, because it demands attention.

As a die-hard Radiohead fan that’s what I’d like to see from Yorke. A full-on artistic assault, rather than an interesting-sounding retreat. He’s obviously an engaged, informed, sceptical guy, and it’s time he channelled more of this energy into Radiohead.

To this:

= Genius.

If it’s true that is. There are doubts that it’s not the real deal, some kind of hoax. Surely it would be simple enough to find out – just speed it up 800 times, no?

But even if it isn’t what it claims to be, the person/people behind the second version have not only crafted one of the best chill-out tracks ever recorded, but they also clearly possess an acute understanding of word-spreading in the year 2010. Nuff respect.

… for making my first public DJ set at Pinup Nights in Glasgow a success (success as defined by the fact that there were at least a few groups of folk dancing throughout).

Sorry if I’ve forgotten anyone.

And additional thanks go to Ben McNab for glossing over my technical ignorance and keeping the beats  going when I was sidetracked by blogger acquaintances.

DJing is great fun – I’d love to do it again. Just need a cool-sounding alias…

I’m just home from a fairly manic day at work – but manic in a good way. The reason for the ‘mania’ was the re-launch of the new Radar (formerly known as Under the Radar) website at radar.scotsman.com. Technically it was just a case of switching the testing site to the live server, but there are always things that slip your mind – old links that need changed, social media rebranding, responding to the steady flow of feedback emails and tweets.

First off, I want to pay my dues to the great web development guys at The Scotsman Publications. In hardly any time at all they’ve managed to put together a robust, dynamic and eye-catching mini-site. They really know their stuff, and on projects like this they get to show off a bit.

Secondly, I’d like to pay tribute to the team of writers who’ve shown great enthusiasm and talent over the past 12 months. It’s amazing to think back to this time last year when it was just my own meagre postings and it all felt a bit like a stab in the dark. The new Contributors page is a nice way of boosting the individual profiles of the Radar team.

There are still things I want to add – RSS, a jukebox-style audio player, a multimedia channel – but I’m really happy with how “phase one” has turned out. It’s a huge step forward from what we had before, which was essentially Google Blogger hosted in an iframe. The new site is built with its own CMS and now has unique pages for each artist, each podcast and each blog post. Not exactly mindblowing stuff but we’ve been craving this kind of basic functionality for months.

I’m also excited about where we can take the site. Billy and I are keen to revamp the content we’re currently publishing: we’ll add new strands where they’re needed and take an axe to anything we don’t think is working. This is a transitional period and we’re keeping a very open mind, with an eye towards ways of expanding the site and its profile, both in Scotland and further afield.

If you’re even remotely interested in new music we hope Radar will become one of your regular online haunts.

Right, time to go. I still have another 40-odd artist profiles to upload…

"Steven? Just coming" - Adam & Joe have a cult following

In the media world, 6 Music is like the radio embodiment of its listeners: intelligent, unassuming, perhaps not the life and soul of the party but the one who brings the best records and has the best chat. In other words, since its birth in 2002 it has quietly gone about its business, delighting music fans, carving out a succession of niche audiences and leaving the vain, attention-seeking to its brash FM cousins.

But if your average (Adam &) Joe hadn’t heard of it before last week, he damn well does now. I won’t bore you with the details that you already know, but last Friday the BBC’s latest strategy review was leaked to the media, and that included the proposed closure of 6 Music. Cue a response that was passionate, bewildered, anguished even, from its 700,000 listeners (who, as you might expect, are exactly the type of people who know how to make themselves heard in the blogo-twito-faceo-sphere.)

I added my own thoughts on the weird reasoning behind the announcement on Under the Radar earlier this week, but here I just want to run through some of the arguments I’ve read elsewhere this week. It’s safe to say that Mark Thompson wasn’t expecting such a vigorous backlash …

Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien, from the band’s blog:

It literally is the radio lifeblood for music outside of the mainstream. Not to denigrate Radio’s 1 and 2, but it really is the only station that puts music first, and that’s from a punters point of view and not some bloke in a band. Nowhere else can you hear an archived session track from T Rex juxtaposed next to Midlake’s latest release. As David Bowie, put it … it keeps the spirit of John Peel alive.

Hear hear. And Milo at Gaseous Brain (he’s not in Radiohead but he still deserves a say!) has written a thoughtful dissection of 6 Music that points out its flaws but reiterates its worth:

It is literally the only station we use our DAB radio for, and if it is closed it’s hard to see why having a DAB radio is necessary at all. In fact, I would say the vast majority of people in the UK who own a DAB radio bought it solely to listen to 6Music. If it was on FM things might be different. If it was publicised properly by the BBC things might be different.

Matthew at Song, By Toad meanwhile makes a good point about the huge, unbridgeable gap between underground and mainstream platforms that would be left in 6 Music’s wake:

How the hell are you supposed to progress, to step up, to actually make that massive leap without the developmental step of 6Music, where you can start out with a couple of airplays on one show, maybe get a session on another, and hope to eventually make the step up to a Maida Vale Session and perhaps eventually some Radio1 airplay. Take away 6Music and you have to go from the Song, by Toad podcast to Radio1 in a single leap, which is not only a ludicrous expectation, but also makes the process increasingly arbitrary, because bands develop at different rates.

Nicola Meighan at The List wastes no time in the cultural, political or economic stuff. Instead she lists a succession of reasons and examples why it must be saved:

This week’s 6 Music schedule offers the following: Don Letts’ ace documentary series on reggae powerhouse Trojan Records; interviews with Gorillaz, Fear Factory, Broken Bells and Errors; Steve Lamacq’s pick of unsigned talent.

There are a few priceless videos kicking about as well. Have a swatch of Adam Buxton challenging Mark Thompson to a fight on Channel 4 News …

… or Jeremy Paxman doing much the same (albeit in an interrogative sense) on Newsnight (complete with stifled laughter at the end).

Finally, this infographic by The Guardian illustrates the situation rather nicely.

Who’d have thought that 6 Music could provoke this kind of backlash? Not me. Or Mr Thompson, judging by the look on his face.

Peter Kay: seen by many as the ideal host for the Shit Awards

By our Showbiz Correspondent, Diana Rea

Lady Gaga cleaned up at the 30th annual Shit Awards show in London last night, where she won a hat-trick of statuettes.

The expletive-laden Shit Awards also saw Lily Allen land on stage astride a replica bomb to the sound of air raid sirens. After being named Female Shit, she swore as a horn sounded from beyond the stage during her acceptance speech.

Rap star Dizzee Rascal was named male Shit, telling the audience: “It’s about time as well,” as he collected his award. US rapper Jay-Z won the prize for international male Shit. Rockers Kasabian were named Shittest group, while Florence And The Machine picked up the Shittest album award for Lungs.

It was also a successful night for JLS who collected the award for Shittest breakthrough act, then the statuette for Shittest single for Beat Again.

Two special Shit categories were created to celebrate the best of the Shits over the past 30 years. The Spice Girls’ 1997 performance of their hits Wannabe and Who Do You Think You Are took the Shittest performance award while (What’s the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis was named Shittest album since the ceremony began.

The night climaxed with a performance by Robbie Williams as he collected the award for outstandingly Shit contribution to music. The beaming singer said: “It feels really good up here, Shits. Thank you so much.”

The only Shits missing from the occasion were obvious Shit contenders, N-Dubz.