Instagram, the social media app which showcases a beautiful, aesthetically pleasing gallery of your life. Cut out all the embarrassingly painful Facebook statuses, the awkwardly angled double-chin Snapchat selfies, the ‘I’m bored out of mind’ tweets and you are left with a handsome selection of perfectly filtered, delightfully bordered photos, which capture the exact image of your life you want to portray.

Talk about the dozens of Facebook friends you haven’t spoken to for years on end, hundreds, thousands even millions of the Instagram followers that persistently scroll down their screen to see the next carefully crafted addition to the collage of your life, you have never even met. But who cares? There’s not really an issue of invasion of privacy here, what are these strangers going to find out about you anyway? Where you went on your recent holiday, what fancy restaurant you visited last night, the new kind of chai latte you tried today? You’re not even in most of the photos. Forget about the countless different attempts you made in order to get that flawless profile picture. A beautiful Instagram account does not even require plenty of snapshots of your gorgeous face or exquisitely toned bikini bod, instead it’s all about the image you want your followers to see, to believe.

Did you know you can even have a colour scheme to your Instagram page? I didn’t, not until a friend asked me if I had one. I thought colour coordinating was for curtains and carpets or for when making sure your bright yellow top doesn’t clash with your alarmingly lime green skirt, but apparently I was wrong. The assortment of filters one uses can have a large impact on the attractiveness of your Instagram page. As can the type of photos you post. See it’s all about the ratios. Yes, even maths is involved when concocting the dazzling Instagram page everyone so desires. You don’t want too many ‘person’ photos, it needs to be balanced out by snaps of your latest clothes, perhaps a few healthy meals to show you take care of yourself and don’t forget a few quotes just to show you have a ‘deep’ side too. The amount of ludicrous design that goes into Instragram pages no wonder the app has millions of addicted users.

Let’s be honest though some Instagram accounts are just more impressive than others. We all follow a few celebrities, who doesn’t want to see Justin Beiber’s latest photo shoot or videos of Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance? But how about these nobodies who have suddenly become instafamous? Channel 4’s recent documentary, ‘The Rich Kids of Instagram’ showed the orchestration of the app in all its glory. These cyber world stars quite literally devote their lives to creating their Instagram alter ego. One pitiful image which stuck with me was when a young man sat in a bath tub as his girlfriend reluctantly sprinkled cash over him, all for his next boastful video instalment to his page. If it be promoting a brand, showing off wealth or presenting a certain attitude, when thinking of this extreme side of Instagram the word ‘fake’ springs to mind.

Some Instagram prodigies have recognised the ugliness in the fabrication. Former Instagram model, Essena O’Neill deleted over 2000 photos and re-captioned the perfectly poised posts she did keep to reveal the truth behind the lens. These new captions included, ‘Took over 50 shots until I got one I though you might like’, ‘Be aware what people promote, ask yourself, what’s their intention behind the photo?’ and ‘Not real life’. Essena has inspired other Instagram addicts too, Lexi Harvey, an Instagram obsessed student from Nottingham changed the captions on her photos after admitting that she would delete posts if in three hours she didn’t have more than three likes and would take more than fifty images before settling on one she was happy with. The ugly truth is that this obsession with creating a certain representation of yourself not only takes an awful amount of time and effort, giving an artificial focus to one’s life, but puts an unhealthy amount of pressure on us normal folk, who seem to live mind numbingly boring, poor and unattractive lives compared to these Instagram idols.

We cannot lie though there is something very arty about Instagram. To be honest I’m starting to question maybe I’ve been too harsh on the app. At least it is a platform for creativity and self-invention, which other social media apps perhaps don’t provide. You can use it for business, promoting your company or brand; you can find inspiration if this be through those cringe worthy but sometimes needed encouraging quotes or by stealing interior design and fashion ideas and let’s not forget those heart-warming, cheer-me-up cute animal accounts. There’s a purpose, a story behind every Instagram page. However, whether this story is true is another story altogether. As humans we like continuity, we like an image. But this image is unrealistic and makes us look at our own disjointed, disorderly lives and sigh. This is where the ugliness of Instagram creeps up on us.

Why can’t I be that girl who wakes up every morning to a broccoli and celery juice before being pictured in a charmingly candid shot running across the beach bare foot and then settling down for afternoon yoga? It’s depressing. It’s not even about looks anymore, it’s not about the amount of friends you have, or the places you go. It’s about showing that you have your life ‘all together’. And what better place to exhibit your beautifully ordered life than the tasteful, neat pages of Instagram? But we can’t resist, it may be painfully formulated, but perhaps that’s why we love it. We need an escape from the mundane reality of Facebook status rants and Twitter trash talk. Happy scrolling!

Hunter S Thompson emerges from underneath a crumpled American flag mumbling incoherently. He lifts himself from the floor to survey his vast hotel suite and begins to stagger through the flooded room wiggling the enormous crocodile tale he has tapped to his bum. Clutching a small statue in his arms, with a microphone and a cigarette holder tapped to his face he traverses the psychedelic debris, pink balloons, rainbow bulbs and fluorescent strip lights glowing all around him. He passes a make-shift shrine to Debbie Reynolds, moaning her name, before the camera cuts to a giant purple stuffed elephant wearing a fez. A photo of Richard Nixon has been pinned to the wall surrounded by knives and darts, ketchup and mustard ooze from the holes in the plaster. He makes it into a bedroom to find a smoking crater in the bare mattress and ‘He Lives’ daubed in giant red letters above the head board. His ‘attorney’ begins howling from the corner of the room before smashing a mirror with his fist. In the toilet Thompson discovers a pair of grotesque porcelain legs sticking upright from the toilet bowl. He removes them and begins pissing on a gun lurking beneath the brown water. Outside the toilet his attorney is on all fours in front of a giant stuffed toy soldier violently vomiting.

This is the cinematic depiction of a scene from Thompson’s infamous book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. ‘The general back alley ambience of the suite was so rotten, so incredibly foul’ he says, what could be the meaning of this filth?

The book is a masterpiece in human hideousness, bending and breaking the linear narrative of normal life through ‘excessive consumption of almost every drug known to civilised man.’ Thompson’s partly fictionalised alter ego Raoul Duke has been commissioned to cover the Mint 400, a desert off road race, but journalism quickly becomes subordinated to the enjoyment of Las Vegas’s finer pleasurers much distorted through hard core narcotics. This unashamed excess may seem familiar to those who have encountered the Beat literature of the 1950s. The same psychedelic hysteria can be found in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and the road trip with drugs motif is central to Kerouac’s On the Road. However, Fear and Loathing was in many ways a departure. Whilst Naked Lunch can be seen as a musing on the sickness of addiction Thompson says that his antics were ‘not the hoofprints of your normal, god fearing junkie. It was too savage, far too aggressive’ and Kerouac’s jazz bars and deserted railroads are a far cry from Thompson’s lurid casinos and trashed hotel suites.

The book attacks the ugly absurdity of the American Dream, whilst also showing the degeneration of 1960s countercultural idealism. ‘A vile epitaph’ he called it. The horror of consumerist reality is made properly apparent through its hallucinogenic exaggeration, greasy diners that make ‘your brain start humming with brutal vibes as you approach the front door.’ The books aggressive mania reveals the dark side of the romanticised vision of ‘drop acid not bombs’ youth culture. A vicious drunkard screams ‘Woodstock Uber Alles!’ on the floor of a bizarre circus casino, where county-fair carnival madness goes on just above the heads of the haggard gamblers, who do not seem to notice or care. Placing Nazi slogans alongside the foremost event of the 1960s countercultural movement goes epitomises Thompson’s brutal bastardisation of these ideals.  But the work itself is more than just a social comment. It is also a statement on the nature of journalism.

Although he was primarily a journalist Thompson produced this piece of partly fictionalised first person narrative and with it the foremost work of what would become known as ‘gonzo’ journalism. The way he writes has traces of journalistic style to it. It is often lumped in the same camp as Kerouac’s stream of consciousness prose but in fact is far more direct than this. He doesn’t mess around with metaphor or spirituality, but states his madness as it is, ‘after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grand-mother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.’ Fear and Loathing did begin as a piece of journalism, paid $ 250 to cover Nevada’s Mint 400 by Sports Illustrated Thompson had headed with his drug fiend lawyer to Las Vegas. However, the 15,000 word piece he submitted, ten times the size of the originally commission, was firmly rejected. It wasn’t at home in the pages of a conventional magazine like Sports Illustrated, but it was eventually published by Rolling Stone and later as the book.Thompson is firmly enmeshed in the events that are unfolding, an involved chronicler of partly fictionalised experience. In producing a work like this while remaining nominally a journalist Thompson was damningly indicting what he called the ‘bogus objectivity’ of conventional journalism. Ralph Steadman’s distinctive cartoons accompany the book rather than photos of the lit up streets of Las Vegas. Rather than write an essay or an article on the death of the American dream or the 1960s counterculture movement Thompson wanted to show it dying violently in a chaotic whirlwind of personal prose. The confines of conventional journalism wouldn’t accommodate the force of his angry message. The utter commitment to ugly depravity on every page may seem to some like a throwaway paper obscenity, with no purpose other than to provoke. But, the way he goes about expressing his subject matter is a hysterical laugh in the face of the suggestion that journalism can ever be objective, a laughter that seems very relevant in the face of modern media pretence at neutrality. No doubt Thompson would be appalled at the quiet timidity of much modern reportage. Ugly degeneration is just a part of the picture as it ever was. Maybe journalism needs more disrespectable reprobates. Only his depraved experiences and imaginations could properly capture the essence of his epigraph, that ‘he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’ 

★★☆☆☆

She has Sir Elton John’s support, and a few days after the UK release of her fi fth album Eternal Return, Australian singersongwriter Sarah Blasko has already secured a series of very positive reviews by The Guardian and Rolling Stone, among others.

Despite tackling serious issues like the perception of gender as a central part of a person’s identity, especially in the music video for the explicitly titled ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, Sarah Blasko’s songs are accessible and easy-going. Almost exclusively based on retro synth rhythm and bass parts, the 10 tracks of the album seem to rely on the repetition of key lines, like “I am ready / I said I am ready” and the singer’s versatile voice to get their message through to our ears.

In fact, there is no need to make much of an eff ort to understand that Sarah Blasko is essentially talking about love and the various eff ects it has on whoever is feeling it. Far from presenting a novel vision of romance, the various tracks successively explore separate stereotypes such as sadness and yearning.

As the cheerful accents of ‘Better With You’ gently fade into the background, it becomes more diffi cult to believe that Eternal Return is the product of in-depth introspection into the singer’s state of mind, but the touching honesty in Sarah’s smooth voice is just enough to save a listener keen on dynamism from boredom.

About halfway through Tame Impala’s set at Alexandra Palace, Kevin Parker picks out a member of the audience holding a sign with the name of their song ‘Alter Ego’. Despite the levity of the moment (Parker tells them to show the crowd, and instructs the band, “Dudes, play some celebration music,” which they duly do, breaking into 30 seconds of Beck’s ‘Where It’s At’ almost spontaneously,) it belies a deeper sentiment, one that runs through all of the band’s output and shapes their sonic and lyrical identity. By making the audience provide their own celebration, the Perth psychrockers remove themselves from the equation, retreating into their own world where they can ignore the pressure of reality.

The band’s relentless focus on this singular theme allows the gig to transcend mere live music, becoming an all-enveloping bodily experience. Yet curiously it also limits their ambition as a live band, and the clear experimental powers that they occasionally allow to shine through remain undeveloped.

From the start, this isolation exists as a backdrop for the gig. Alexandra Palace, perched at the top of Muswell Hill with commanding views over London, is hardly the most cosmopolitan of venues. The journey up the hill and the panorama from its summit provides an odd but thrilling sense of detachment. This is somewhat ruined by the irritating faux-festival vibe in the main atrium, complete with astroturf and an accordion player, with more tweed than you could ever wish to see in one room. But the hall itself is entirely as Tame Impala intend it. The lighting and sound are used to fantastic eff ect by the band, pervasive throughout the set and drowning out any sense of the outside.

Isolation comes hand-in-hand with authenticity, and this is perhaps what keeps Tame Impala back. ‘Alter Ego’ is a good example of this, a psychedelic musing on social anxiety whose very title is an exploration of locking oneself away, of projecting an image that isn’t entirely truthful. Tame Impala strive against this throughout, insisting that they hold themselves up to the musical standards expected of them. Save for a minority of songs, there is little deviation from the album recording in their live set. Sometimes this is to a devastatingly powerful effect, as in ‘Elephant’ when the entire crowd sings along to the guitar solo as successfully as they do the lyrics. One can hardly blame the band when they’ve released three albums of such stunning quality, but when they do display the skill they obviously have in improvising, it becomes jarring to see it utilised so little.

The highlight of the show, the crashing ‘Apocalypse Dreams’, is transformed from a slightly obscure Lonerism album track into a nine-minute odyssey that moves through driving snare beats and starry guitar parts to culminate in a drum build that seems to last for decades before exploding back into the finale. This is where Tame Impala’s skill as performers is truly evident – the audience is captivated by every moment of it, swaying along in solitary rapture, and the full-bodied lighting only emphasises the changes in timbre and tone, as rainbows spilling out of the stage frame the band in their triumphal conclusion.

Moments like this show why Tame Impala deserve their fearsome reputation, and while this sort of extension on every song would be foolish, it throws the rest of the band’s set into sharp relief. The change in emphasis between 2012’s Lonerism and 2015’s Currents, from their bluesy roots to a more clinical synth-pop, plays out on stage. This internal battle of competing influences again shows how in Parker’s struggle for authenticity, he has to balance the demands of performance with those of his own self-belief.

As he sings so pointedly on set ender ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes’, “maybe fake’s what I like”. If there is one thing to take away from this gig, it is that Parker truly doesn’t, and it manifests itself in a triumphant, if unwarrantedly reserved set.

Like all decent human beings, Aidan Knight does not like people who talk during gigs. Particularly during his gigs. The Canadian experimental folk musician is supporting Irish folkies Villagers on their UK tour, playing songs from third album, Each Other, and, as he tells me before his show at Oxford’s O2 Academy, opening a show in front of a crowd who aren’t there to see you is hard. It is made even harder when a crowd assembled in front do not listen to you play, but instead talk amongst themselves.

“I have this opinion that people who talk during shows – they just don’t know,” he says, and a small pretentious part of me loves his blatant calling out of the ignorance of many a selfi sh gig-goer. “I think they’re actually unaware that when you talk at a show it makes for a bad time for everyone. But here’s the thing: when a show is going really well and no-one is talking, it’s so great that both sides can feel it. The audience and whoever’s performing on stage can feel it. It’s this thing that until you have experienced it, maybe you continue talking.”

If this is the case, no one in the audience will ever talk during a gig again, as, unusually for a support act, Knight’s often harrowing guitar-plucking presence really does leave the audience at a loss for words. On stage, Knight revels in this, his lively banter juxtaposed with his meandering, and much softer, guitar-led tunes. “Does anyone have any questions?” he jovially asks half-way through the set, “I’ve really been hogging the mic up here.” His sardonic charm works even better delivered from a stage in a dimly-lit room than it does when talking to me over a sofa in an equally dimly-lit room backstage.

A kind of talking Knight does enjoy listening to, however, is intelligent musicians talking to one another via podcasts. He names Jesse Cohen’s No Effects, saying, “I just like to hear people’s stories and opinions, and how they’re similar to me and diff erent from me. It helps me to empathise better with other people, which is something that I’m working on. Not just with musicians – with humans in general. It’s not that I’m not doing it at the moment, it’s just that I think it’s an important thing for all people to do – to realise all the similarities and commonalities between everyone. But also to try and understand differences.”

Aidan Knight does the whole musician thing very well, happily picking away at his guitar and singing, on ‘Margaret Downe’, “I heard she was a dentist before she fell in love.”

But in his intelligent conversation he happily contemplates his existence as a human being, not just as a touring musician. Bemused at the one-time nature of the event, he ponders, “When you think about it, this is never going to happen again. It has to do with air molecules and physics and shit.”

Prophecies of doom have been ringing in the ears of indie fans for years now: the festival is an endangered species. With T in the Park struggling to secure a suitable venue, the same faces headlining the same festivals and a disheartening lack of women and diverse representation at the summit of the art form, now is not the best time to catch the festival bug, we are repeatedly told.

But look beyond the fields of Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, and there is so much about which to be hopeful. Y Not Festival, a mediumsized event taking place in the depths of Derbyshire, has booked Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds as one of its three headliners this July. To contextualise this, Y Not started 10 years ago as a house party, and last year Noel Gallagher headlined Latitude. Clearly, larger acts are being drawn to the intimate allure of smaller festivals, catering to a more concentrated, yet dedicated audience.

Y Not is just one of a proliferation of smaller festivals competing with the established names. Tramlines, a cheaper festival, sees every venue in Sheffield become an arena in addition to a specially-constructed main stage, providing a showcase for both up-and-comers and veterans. While their 2016 headliners Catfish and the Bottlemen and Dizzee Rascal are hardly A-game stars, they will certainly help to accentuate the unique atmosphere of a cheaply-run festival.

Looking to the south, Boomtown Festival sees an entire city, replete with fictional history and political turmoil, constructed as one big party venue, attracting the best of the UK’s underground music, showing that invention and risk-taking are still alive and well in a largely sanitised artistic culture.

That’s saying nothing of those ‘unimaginative’ big-name festivals which are starting to finally push the boat out: Reading and Leeds have announced Foals as a headliner for 2016 whilst Bestival have turned to Major Lazer who, as well as guaranteeing one hell of a night, also feature two members from a Caribbean and an African-American background respectively. Festivals may have gone through a rough patch recently, but the dearth of talent is symptomatic of broader problems in the music industry. It is not the fault of festival organisers, who are in fact working hard to address their shortcomings. There’s much to look forward to in 2016: in the north and south; on scales both large and, most excitingly, small.