Saturday, April 04, 2009
thoughts on bruce at glastonbury
I have tried not to think about Bruce Springsteen playing at Glastonbury because I didn’t have a ticket to see him. I have gone to the last five or six Glastos but skipped last year because I was so fed up with being caught up in a mudbath each year. Of course last year it was scorching hot. There have been rumours that Bruce would play Glastonbury for a few years but I never believed them; Bruce doesn’t play festivals and I just could not imagine him on the Pyramid Stage. Springsteen and Glastonbury seem to exist in different universes. But then this year, incredibly, it was announced that Springsteen would indeed be headling. I hadn’t managed to get a ticket and so I tried to keep it out of my head, I tried to console myself with tickets for Hyde Park but I always knew in my heart that the show to see was the Glastonbury one. And then this week I learnt that there is a chance I may be able to attend after all and suddenly the awesome reality of what will be occuring this summer has started to sink in. I have seen Radiohead, REM, The Killers, Paul McCartney, Oasis and Coldplay all headline and I know the atmosphere that is created by the sea of flags and the heaving masses as the headline act approaches but I still cannot imagine what it will be like when the headline act is Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I still can’t picture all those NME reading festival goers watching Bruce, I think they’ll love it but the very fact that they will be exposed to it is mind-blowing and I suspect that I am going to get unfeasibly excited as the end of June approaches.
on a seperate note, I have had a few emails asking why I don’t write more often on things that are not published in the papers. One of the answers is that I simply don’t know if anyone is reading this and whether there is any appetite to read my thoughts. I don’t have facebook or twitter and thus I don’t have much of an idea of how many people read these entries. I did have some way of measuring such things but I don’t seem to have much luck with it. So if i feel there is appetite for more entries than perhaps I will write more. if you want to contribute to this debate add your comments at the end of this entry.
I read this on CiF last week and the comments posted by readers.
Quite a few of them expressed joy at reading your articles and I have to
agree with them when they said you’d never have been fulfilled if you
hadn’t become a journalist. If you had become a lawyer or doctor
instead, you may have become richer or made a bigger difference in the
lives of others but then we readers would have been robbed of your
reporting.
If you changed careers now and left journalism behind, there would be
a big gap left at the paper you write for because right now there isn’t
anyone out there who does what you do as good as you. Many readers rely
on you to report about topics in a language they speak because they see
you as one of them. Someone they can trust for honest and accurate
reporting.
Even if you switched to a more secure career now, you shouldn’t have
regrets about your career choices in the past because I think you’ve
left a solid body of work as your legacy.