Latitude (part III)

Sunday kicked off with a mesmerising performance by Joanna Newsom, whom I will marry one day.  She was completely enchanting, holding the main stage audience captive at noon on the final day of a festival (surely some feat) and keeping me at the least enthralled with the strange contortions of her face while singing; even when she forgot some of the words to a couple of songs the audience went with her, laughing along with her at her honest shock that this should happen, which she said had never happened before.  I was thoroughly delighted and will be looking into her back catalogue with glee.

Next we went to investigate Scrabble Sunday in Pandora’s Playground, an area given over to things much like Scrabble Sunday.  The idea was to have a number of Scrabble boards available for use by festival-goers with a referee and a pint to hand, possibly even getting a tournament started.  Unfortunately there were many Scrabble fans at Latitude and all the boards had been taken over, so I went and had a look at Foals on the main stage, who are pretentious and twitch far more devotedly to their own music than almost anyone else, but I liked them for all that.  Next I saw a terribly uncomfortable-looking Travis Elborough (Routemaster man) reading from what I took to be his new book on Brian Eno.  On the Uncut stage were Noah and the Whale, a band who had a glorious write-up in the festival programme, mentioning among their influences everyone’s favourite Scandinavian, Jens Lekman.  While showing some promise, I’m not too sure they deserve the attention they’ve been getting elsewhere (I’ve since seen them being blurbed as the Next Great Thing in quite a few publications, at least out and about in This London).  They gave off the confidence of people with better tunes than they really had.  The crowd then changed almost completely from artily-dressed young people to altogether more sensibly-dressed mature types, from predominantly female to predominantly male, for Paul Heaton’s set on the same stage.  Heaton played exclusively new material, and I think it’s a mark of the esteem in which he is held that the audience listened to it all with attention and without any outward sign of impatience for the hits.  I did wish that the vocal line could have been clearer, as I was unable to catch almost all his lyrics, which for Heaton is a real pity and doubly so as the music is unimaginative pub rock/rockabilly at best.  Still, nice to see a performer with a sense of humour: before launching into one song, he asked the crowd, in order to draw in more people, to boo enthusiastically at its end – there was a bottle of Jack Daniels in it for the most enthusiastic heckler.  The entire crowd took part lustily, but Heaton gave the bottle to a man in the middle, for “not only did he boo and give us the thumbs-down, he also called me a wanker several times”.

I looked in on Omid Djalili’s set, which was exactly the same as all the other turns I’ve ever witnessed of his, on my way to the Breeders, who were extremely genial and relaxed and murdered a medley of White Album songs.  After this I was made to wait for the appearance of Grinderman, Nick Cave’s latest vanity project, which was in every possible respect as proposterous an act as will ever be seen and, despite myself, I found them very enjoyably silly.  I headed over before their final song to pop my head into the literary tent one last time for my closing act of the festival, Dave Gorman reading from his America Unchained book.  Although I know plenty who don’t, I have a lot of time for Gorman and found him a very warm and engaging speaker and his adventures in America sounded like an interesting departure for him (though when he finished his spiel about not patronising the MacDonalds, the Burger Kings, the Holiday Inns, the audience – clearly made up for the most part of fans – started clapping and whooping sycophantically, which made me thoroughly pleased that the festival was now coming to an end).

I said goodbye to Latitude 2008 with a very fine chocolate and banana crepe and a stroll around the grounds, which were very pretty and had been kept so by the organisers’ excellent waste-management system, where every festival-goer was responsible for disposing of their own rubbish into either a compost, recycle or landfill bag.  I also felt the organisation extended into the good running of most of the stages – only one or two stages, to my knowledge, overran by very much and this, along with the fortuitous timetabling, meant that almost nothing I wanted to see clashed very much with anything else.  The atmosphere was pleasantly laid-back throughout, in contrast to other festivals I’ve been to when everything feels a bit rushed and panicked in getting from one stage to another and back again in order to pack in everything.  If only they could sort out the shower who run their shuttle buses, even I would be happy.

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This week I also saw Pixar’s latest, Wall-E.  I can’t see how the vast majority of it would work for kids due to the sheer bleakness of much of the story (at least bleak by my expectations of a Pixar film*) but it works fantastically well as a film in every other respect.  The animation is utterly flawless, from the jaw-dropping sequences of gorgeous-looking space to the ability to make two robots express emotion to the extent that they do, though this is probably more fairly attributed to the phenomenal sound design on the film – a good two-thirds of the film is silent, with only the minimum of dialogue in the rest of it.  All the same, the robots in the film, Wall-E and EVE, do communicate, just through a serious of bleeps and noises and sort-of words.  I really recommend this one.

* Now I come to think of it, the Toy Story films, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc and so on are all about loss and peril in some way.  But Wall-E is far more dark than any of these.