the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Anyway, here is one of my favourite ever Glastonbury moments. I was there, along with a few hundred other people, the mud and the rain. Just before Faithless had come on it had hammered it down, that’s why everyone is wearing waterproofs and why you can see the rain dripping off front of the stage. But more importantly, much more importantly, the crowd is well up for it, going totally banana’s, and then going a full fruit salad after 5.50. A few years later, when they were bigger name, they played the Pyramid stage to a far bigger crowd but to a much, much less enthusiastic response.

As far as I’m concerned, those who knew knew, but those who came later had possibly only read about Faithless and because they were told they were good and it legitimised them. Those people had no yardstick upon which to base any judgement of if something was good or not, never having been into dance music in any of its forms. They relied on the opinions of others, with more experience, cultural commissars, to do it for them. This partly explains – well to me anyhow – the curious and long-lasting reverence which some have bestowed upon ‘Aphex Twin’. Because no matter how good his press is, no matter how how many laurels the critics put on his wreaths, after one listen to most of his many tracks, most people would be hard pressed to want to listen to anymore.

But those who knew where he came from, had danced to some of the same tunes he had, had some of the same musical influences he had, would know. They’d discern in his music threads of a rich and ever expanding aural tapestry, one that they didn’t need a music critic to explain to them what colours were his. Because, as I wrote in the previous post, we are as much defined by what we don’t like as what we do, and no-one better exemplifies that musical truism better than ‘Aphex Twin’