Ok I am yet again giving Glastonbury a miss instead my weekend will consist attending the Bowie exhibition at the V&A and the Springsteen Concert at Olypic Park as part of Hard Rock Calling. I think the sound will be poor but I am looking forwrad to the show:
If you are suffering from overload of prime time karaoke from The Voice and the like this is the place to restore your faith in quality music.
In looking up the information on this album I came across the following great Rolling Stone Reviews from 1984:
The Waterboys’ chunk of British big-guitar rock has a very familiar ring. There
are resonant echoes of the Bunnymen in singer Mike Scott’s tremulous wail and
the martial slice of his massed acoustic guitars, along with hints of fellow
Scotsmen Big Country’s Highland swirl and enough studio reverb to swallow U2.
What distinguishes ‘A Pagan Place’ - the Waterboys’ first full-length U.S.
release - is the unique, exhilarating force of its rock & roll heart. Like a
punk bursting into Van Morrison’s mystic with six strings blazing, Scott (head
Waterboy and the album’s producer) has made a kind of black-leather-jacket
version of ‘Astral Weeks’. The raging guitars of “Rags” and eager gallop of
“Church Not Made with Hands,” with its bursts of Gabriel like trumpet, explode
the folkie purity of his melodies and frank introspection of his lyrics into
epic blasts of what he aptly calls, in another song, “The Big
Music”.
The gripping quality of Scott’s expansive big-music gestures is
wondrous enough. That he pulls it off with a defiant acoustic purity - no
synthesizers, by God! - is reason to cheer. Contrary to their name, the
Waterboys already qualify for a spot on the new-rock A team.