“And the rain came in from the wild blue yonder, through all the stages I wandered”.

Joe Strummer was pretty much spot on when he sang about Glastonbury in his final single, ‘Coma Girl’, back in 2003. The mud, the rain, the loos – it’s all part of what is  perhaps the most British of festivals. As I returned on the Tuesday morning for a second year working behind the scenes with the press I’ve got to admit that I was slightly disappointed by the glorious sunshine. However, the heavens well and truly opened on the Thursday afternoon, turning a little piece of West Somerset into almighty bog.

But what exactly is Glasto all about? By now, you will have heard of Metallica’s triumphant “here’s two fingers up to all the haters” headline set, the security guards dancing along to Dolly Parton, and perhaps even Banksy’s ‘Sirens of the Lambs’ being toured around the site. BBC’s ‘Glastovision’ would like us to think that the festival centres around the 90 minutes of each Pyramid stage headline act. Much like the World Cup, these acts are judged as triumphant or failing according to the final number. This just isn’t representative of reality.

Take the size, for example. For one weekend, this tiny piece of British countryside becomes the biggest town in the South West, the tenth biggest town in the country, and the most densely populated place in Europe. 165,000 people crowd onto the site – that’s 10,000 more than in the whole of Oxford – and each person comes back with an entirely different tale to tell.

The ‘secret set’, for example, is a feature entirely unique to Glasto. I saw four in total, including a beautifully intimate sunny afternoon with Lianne La Havas and a mental evening with Chase and Status down on the ‘Blues’ stage. These sets could not have been more different in terms of atmosphere yet they had one thing in common: the unique experience of being able to say ‘I was there’.

I’m still caught in the Glasto haze, as you can probably tell. Life is good and the world can be saved. I was even persuaded to sign up to Greenpeace (for a direct debit of £5 per month) by a very persuasive man with some equally persuasive dreadlocks.

The more people I spoke to the more I got the impression that there is ‘something for everyone’ at Glastonbury. One man pointed out the lack of advertising on-site, claiming that my Superdry t-shirt was a bit over the top. Another almost broke down into tears when I asked what he felt about Michael Eavis. I spotted the great man driving along by the ‘Park’ stage, where Yoko Ono was about to perform, in his Land Rover. Hoards of people ran after him just to shake his hand and say thanks.

Sitting on the sofa at home flicking between Wimbledon, the World Cup, and Dolly Parton might be fun, but bearing the mud, blood and grime to crawl to a tiny corner of the site to see a band that nobody has ever heard of is far more satisfying. That’s what Glastonbury is about.

My first concert was a Westlife one. I even have a commemorative 2001 bean filled bear to remind me of the occasion. It wasn’t something cool like Arctic Monkeys or a hazy recollection of Greenday at my first Reading festival. I was a full-blown, annual Wembley-stadium-gig-attending Westlife fan until the age of 12. So you can imagine my distress when, in 2011, they announced it would all be over after a Greatest Hits album and farewell tour. What a way to go.

However, the boys haven’t completely slipped through the dazzling net of stardom. Nicky and Kian became celebrity C-Listers with the former’s performance on Strictly Come Dancing and the latter’s win on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!

Alas, it has not been a happy ending for all. Frontman Shane announced almost immediately after the split that he was 18 million pounds bankrupt. But he’s bounced back with a solo career and appearance on X Factor, so there’s no stopping him now. That love for the music; sometimes you just can’t fight it.

It’s the third full-length release from experimental music project tUnE-yArDs, AKA Merrill Garbus. It’s a deliciously confusing and messy mixture of squeaky synths and world music drums.

From the dictaphone and GarageBand history of 2009’s BiRd-BrAiNs to the success of sophomore effort w h o k i l l in 2011, Garbus has never been one to shy away from exploring new sounds and layering them with commercial melodies. Nikki Nack is no exception.

On this record, Garbus drops the music completely on ‘Why Do We Dine On The Tots’, for a spoken interlude about Grandfather Lou and a Tupperware dish (and eating children.) Two tracks later, she’s deployed a pseudo R&B beat that quickly becomes overtaken by barking sound effect samples. It’s like listening to a vocoder wonderfully explode and the result being converted into a DJ set. It may not be catchy, but it’s certainly a party.

Yet, for the lack of obvious catchiness and powerful lyrical content to fill the gaps, Garbus tells us “we wouldn’t let them take our soil,” on ‘Left Behind’ in a defiant message amongst the musical madness. It’s high energy fun and fearlessness that is at the core of this record, but there’s no compromise on sophistication as a result.

It’s the question that’s been on everyone’s lips since the late nineties. We all know they got knocked down, but did they really get back up again? Did Chumbawamba’s ‘Tubthumping’ just get to number one with big chat? The answer is, as you’d expect, yes. They maintained their position on the ground through the noughties, then broke up.

That’s not to say they haven’t tried. They attempted to fight the inevitable “One Hit Wonder” label with a plethora of invisible records, but everyone seemed to forget Chumbawamba’s existence after about 2000. Naturally, they had their memories jogged in 2007 when the song featured on the Alvin and the Chipmunks video game. It was a seminal reemergence for the anarcho-punk band, to be rivalled only by UKIP’s use of the song at the 2011 party conference.

Sadly, it all came to an ‘official split’ end in 2012. It was a travesty, but luckily 2013 brought the release of In Memoriam: Margaret Thatcher, an EP ode to the great leader recorded in 2005 to be released upon her death. Rumour has it David Cameron ordered a copy back in ‘07.

For those of you who haven’t yet encountered Bo Ningen, let me present to you the (highly pretentious) opening line from their website’s bio page as an introduction: ‘Enlightenment activists from far east psychedelic underground’. Yeah.

Japanese-born but Hackney-based, they’re not ‘60s psychedelic’; more like a sometimes funky, sometimes punky metal band filled with noise and harsh vocals. In fact, the only quality that could qualify them for psychedelia is that they’re incredibly boring. Seemingly unable to decide upon exactly what type of music they want to play, on III they meander around the metal end of the musical spectrum, leaning towards prog, ultimately accomplishing little. They can’t sit still on any good idea they have, and most of the things they try out can be (and have been) done better. Pantera are funkier, Dream Theater are more interesting, and as far as inspired experimental metal goes, I really can’t recommend Thought Industry’s album Mods Carve the Pig too highly.

What you get on III is a lukewarm mixture of half-baked ideas, that goes on for way too long. If it was condensed to half the length, leaving less room for musical waffling, maybe it’d be a better listen. But it’s not, and I’m sure you’ve got better ways to spend an hour.

This is an album you can love. The Black Keys have occasionally felt like an NME band: musically weak, sunglasses indoors, happy to play to a crowd of twenty-five. However, Turn Blue feels like real music, like something you could reminisce to in your dotage. The problem is that Arctic Monkeys blew the roof off rock and roll this summer with AM, and it will now forever be nigh on impossible for guitar swindling bands of the ‘10s to match up. To The Black Keys’ credit, the opening three tracks of Turn Blue manage to resuscitate the in-the-room feel of a Hendrix album: there are accidental twitches of imperfection, subtle fault-lines in his voice.

The guitar solos feel spontaneous (a rarity), the deep bass is a welcome heaviness in the age of ukuleles, and the xylophone fl utters are suitably experimental. Even easy plodders like the second track ‘In Time’ have a real thud-in-the-stomach, a disturbing funk. Listen to either this second song

or ‘10 Lovers’ and sit still – I dare you. Perhaps Turn Blue’s greatest asset is its sheer confidence. There’s a pirate’s nonchalance all the way through, and you feel brilliantly talked-down to. The fi rst three songs demonstrate that you don’t need ‘Lonely Boy’ pace and ‘Gold On The Ceiling’ riff s to get your dance on; the ‘less is more’ cliché is really appropriate here. The bass line to ‘10 Lovers’ – despite being washed away by the irritating synth melody – is absolutely amazing.It suffers from ‘Foster The People Syndrome’, a terrible disease – clean and excellent bass lines are vomited-on by idiotic major chords or patronising synth riffs (as a reference, listen to Foster The People’s ‘Best Friend’ from their new album Supermodel, and compare the dire chorus with the excellent breakdown).

Yet, somehow, it unexpectedly, yet brilliantly works. The lyrics are fairly plain, and obviously derivative. Title track ‘Turn Blue’ features lines like, “when the music is done and all the lights are low” that lack originality, and make the duo feel more like an Arctic Monkeys tribute than ever. ‘‘Bullet in The Brain’ should be a killer, but the lyrics, ironically along with the title lack sophistication. But so what? You don’t sing along to this album: you dance around in your pants to it.

So you may well ask, who are these orange, topless, tools with the peroxide hair and shitty ink? The answer, dear friends, is Crazy Town, of ‘Butterfly’ fame. “Come my lady, come come ma lady, you ma butterfwy, suga, babey.” Now you remember! Yep, it’s them, that hideous off spring of the ‘rapmetal’ genre, a time in the 2000s everyone would rather forget. Crazy Town, formed by Bret Mazur and Seth Binzer, shot to fame after supporting the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on tour. However, they split up after the largely unsuccessful release of their second album, Darkhorse.

The band announced in 2007 that they were working on a new album creatively entitled ‘Crazy Town is Back’, but alas, the record has never come to fruition. 2010 saw the band play SRH FEST 2010, where they debuted new track ‘Come Inside’. They didn’t specify to where. One might have hoped this would be the end of Crazy Town, but in 2013 they announced a new album, The Brimstone Sluggers, was in the works, and released a free download single called ‘Lemonface’. Perhaps ‘Orangeface’ would have been a more apt title.

Since forming in Maghull, Liverpool in 1978, the New Wave veterans have had their fair share of ups and downs, including the death of their drummer Pete de Freitas in 1988. They are now reduced to just two members of their original line up: lead singer Ian McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant. The eponymous opening track of Meteorites atmospherically opens with the line “Hope, where is the hope in me?”.

Reflection and melancholy appears to be the premise to the album, as demonstrated by its opening song, but the band’s characteristic brand of new wave rock and neo-psychadellica (epitomised in their 1984 hit “The Killing Moon”) is also evident. “Constantinople” avoids what could have been a patronising, cliched guitar riff with eastern influences by adopting the characteristic heavy feedback and trance-like reverb. “It’s so Cold in Constantinople” – a theme seems to be forming here, and is perhaps a little to intense for what should, in some ways, a more enthusiastic return to the studio for the first time since 2009.

Fortunately, the run of self pity is brought to an end with “This Is A Breakdown” where a key change and the repeated lyrics “I don’t think so” ensure that the the rest of the album takes a more positive direction. “Holy Moses”, a track basking in anthemic glory, introduces a more biblical theme which is developed more closely by “Grapes Upon The Vine”: “The devil in you, The devil’s in you” is bittersweetly juxtaposed with upbeat strings. Things take a dramatic turn with “Lovers on the Run” and its acoustic melodies treading the boundary between hope and regret, while “Burn It Down” and “Explosions” have the air of being straight out of the britpop era. The crooning “No survivors will be found” in “Market Town” instead employs lyrics to convey the same characteristically melancholic themes with relative simplicity. The closing track, “New Horizons” goes full circle and is more slow and reflective while sounding altogether more hopeful.

The layered vocals consisting of a low growl and higher pitches along with more upbeat orchestral tones present an ethereal darker presence below the surface of the songs. And this makes it all the more profound.