Glastonbury”. Rick Astley is a tool. I was watching some Glastonbury shite on the weekend. For those of you who don’t know “Glastonbury” is is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts held near Pilton, Somerset, England. Glastonbury itself is a town in Somerset. It has been associated with historical events such as King Arthur and the Holy Grail. I’ll put a link below shall I? Anyway back to the festivus which was held over the weekend. The first thing I watched was something called the Manic Street Preachers. It appeared to be some Gen X dudes playing their greatest hits and dancing around the stage like it was 1995. Forgettable indeed. Next up (in no particular order) were Guns n’ Roses, who had a spectacular backdrop/rear projection light show, but it was stupefyingly loud and boring. Axel Rose couldn’t really be heard over the industrial strength guitar riffs. Does “Slash” really need to play endlessly boring guitar licks over everything? I guess so. They all were “rocking” the pirate look, favored by 80’s hair bands and wanna be rocker movie stars like Johnny Depp.
Gunners. It’s a costume party.
I didn’t like any of it really. Preceding them were the Pretenders with The Smiths guitarist, Johnny Marr on lead. They were actually good until Chrissie Hynde invited rock n’ roll resident boofhead and annoying cunt, Dave Grohl onstage to butcher up “Tattooed Love Boys”, a song about rape. Grohl started the song with a flourish, and played it too fucking loud. Anyone who overly uses crash cymbals should be shot at dawn IMO. I thought he was playing it too fast, but now I’ve seen the original version, (below) it’s at that tempo. In my humble opinion it was/is too fast. In any case he effectively raped the actual song with his butchered up drum playing. It was rock n roll first. During all of this fuckery, the cameras were giving us a sneak peek at who was watching from the side of the stage. None other than Paul McCartney was digging the action. This became a theme for Glastonbury. If Macca was watching from the sidelines, it was quality stuff. Chrissie dragged him reluctantly on stage at the end. “Look, here’s who’s watching me! A Beatle no less.” Here was also there at Elton’s concert, but I didn’t see him elsewhere, but then I didn’t watch everything.
Which brings us to Rick Astley famous for “Never Gonna Give You Up”, which has become a kind of internet meme for, I dunno… stupidity? Rick did a show as Rick Astley that I watched. It was in the afternoon, and he bounced (ponced?) about sounding like a latter day Tom Jones, wearing a really daggy pink suit. At one point he got on the drum kit and played “Highway to Hell”, because, in his words, “This was the song I learned to play the drums on, and I have always had a dream of me playing it on the stage at Glastonbury”…or some such nonsense. Rick’s daggy pants got in the way of the kick pedal so he fucked it up. Rick seemed to be continually trying to manufacture “moments” whenever he was on. His reptile brain kept driving him to do and say stupid things to get the audience to react like trained seals.
Sometimes they did, sometimes they ignored him at one point when he said, ” I had a dream that I was performing at Glastonbury and the entire audience turned and faced in the opposite direction, and then somebody said Rick Astley, really? And they all turned around and gave the thumbs up.” He then asked everyone to do exactly that. Try as hard as he could, his dream didn’t come true. Most of them probably wished they weren’t there right then it was so cringey and stupid.
Rick Astley as Morrissey. He even adjusted the hair for accuracy.
Later on Rick, and a Smith’s cover band called the Blossoms performed in some tent somewhere. Rick was wearing a white suit this time. It was as daggy as the pink one. He told us it was “Saville Row”. Saville Row where? Ecuador maybe? It looked like something the cat had dragged in, dropped, picked it back up, took it outside, and then dragged it back in again. RIck excelled at playing Morrissey Her was almost better being Morrissey than he was being Rick Astley. The audience loved it. They didn’t care that it was a cover band. Everyone sang along. “Are you loving it, Glastonbuuuury?” Paul McCartney was absent. There was lots to see, and I didn’t watch most of it. It’s online if you can access it. The flags were all there, the usual Glastonbury vibe. It was as if “covid” had never existed, which it never really did anyway.