The great promoter in the sky has really been getting it together this month. Patterns everywhere. Last week the Great Western Festival bored me silly, this week I came out of David Bowies show so happy that I can’t remember how I got home. Yesterday I finally saw Gimme Shelter; today they’re playing the new Who single, Pete Townshend’s message that rock has no message. “Metal Guru” is number 1 and it still hasn’t stopped raining. it still hasn't stopped raining.

It started for the festival. English rock festivals have always had the status of battles. People wear the ribbons in their hair -"Isle of Wight 1970, Weeley 1971, Bickershaw 1972. They’re all dire, windswept occasions, when pleasure has to be fought for and is. Maybe we need to out-Blitz our parents. After the fun is over we remember not how wonderful the music was but how Wonderful we were, sitting grinning in the mud. Woodstock might seem a long time ago to you, but England still needs its festivals. Rituals of recharging. The hairies gather from every small town in the land, show themselves off and check that the others are still there. Hey man, we’re real.

The dreams and nightmares are written by publicists – people believe their own hype. In fact I’m very confused about festivals. It used to be easy. Woodstock - and we had a community. Altamont, and we had death. Festivals were left , to the loony money-grubbers and the dealers. But we were all shaken up by the Night Assemblies Bill. This was a bright idea a Conservative MP had for wiping out festivals. We pricked up our ears. The tramp of hairy feet. Sex.

Dope! Revolution! Hmmmmmm. Maybe it was true all. For a moment the bill united the opposition. Politics and music and the street fought together again. We really did have a community.

It was only after we won and the bill was thrown out that doubts set in. The government showed up with an advisory committee on pop festivals. Show-biz moved in. And no-one was there to care anymore. They were all at the Great Western Festival.

I went too, but I only lasted a day. Even Rory Gallagher couldn’t shake the depression that had set in as Buddy Miles battered his way through the thirty tons of mud. The music papers have been unanimous in hailing a triumph for English rock, youth, etc.; their letter pages have been filled with love. But I’m not sure. Is that what the Night Assemblies Bill was all about? Great Western Festivals? What I remember is the aimless wandering from stall to stall being sold at; the cold-arsed waiting to be entertained, the music piling up, one circus act on another. A festival of consumption. Mick Farren asked the right question all those years ago when he lead his White Panthers through the barricades of the Isle of Wight: what kind liberation do you buy for a weekend?

Altamont was an American answer only. I used to believe all those stories in the American press about how it was all Mick Jagger’s fault but I’ve seen Gimmie Shelter now and bullshit. Altamont was a strictly family affair. The Stones went as tourists, clutching their bunches of flowers, sticky fingered. We

arrange things differently. The old cliche is still true. The English don’t assassinate their enemies, they assimilate them. English rock culture is fast becoming a bank holiday weekend affair, courtesy of Lord Harlech. One thing you can be bloody sure of. The government’s pop advisory committee is only going to approve nice commercial events like the Great Western, with lots of capital and responsibility and organisation. Everyone seems to be obsessed with organisation and how good it is. Mad ventures like last year’s druidic celebrations at Glastonbury (the funkiest, funniest festival we’ve had) will be tidily swept away. Edgar Broughton will go on being arrested on his summer sea-side tours and 100,000 potential nasties will be rapt up in a field with Lindisfarne – nicely in tune. Shit. The Mods and Rockers on Clacton’s beaches had more to do with rock than Stanley Baker smiling through the rain in his wellies. And what’s really pissed me off is that while everyone’s been so busy congratulating themselves on the mud (and the GWF – before, during and fater – has dominated rock here for the last four weeks) they’ve been missing out on England’s brightest rock and roll star ever.

The festival smelt of stale beer, piss and wet wool. David Bowie’s show smelt of Pink Camay. This, as he’d say, is ridiculous, but how else can I describe it? When did you last see a star – not a super-star or a singer-songwriter or a voice of a generation or any other of these afflictions, but a good old fashioned rock and roll star, with his satin and no tat and red, white and green spot-lights and choreographed prancing and a silver haired lead guitarist whipping through the hoops. And all the time relentless, hard, imploring music. David Bowie and the Spiders and.........Starman !!! Whoosh. Straight into cosmic memory. It shakes me still to think about it. Like when did you last see the lead singer leave the stage during the guitar break in ’I Feel Free’ suddenly to reappear, changed out of his illuminated cat suit into white stain. Yeah. And out for the encore in leopard skin. And every movement timed to perfection. Glamour rides again.

I guess what David Bowie is doing is deliberate. If Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey have created film stars from scratch, he has created a rock star. A perfect image, remote, androgynous and thrilling. The image that kept occuring to us was of a rock phoenix risen from the ashes. Look out, Marc, here we come. Vroom, vroom, vroom .... POW!! Got you. At this point I was going to make a magnificent connection. All about how David Bowie is everything that’s good in English rock and the Great Western Festival everything that’s bad. I can’t do it. Fuck. I know there’s a difference between rock as entertainment and rock as experience, between watching a band on stage and being with them but how to describe it? Speechless. Shitshitshitshitshitshitshit. And then (and this gets worse and worse) in galloped the Who. Ignore the claim that ’we don’t make any connections’ — they’ve got a message alright:

It’s the singer, not the song, that makes the music move along, so come on join together with the band

It all boils down to one question: what would curl your toes further with excitement — the news that the Stones will top the bill of the summer Great Western Festival, or the news .that David Bowie has written and produced Mott the Hoople’s next single? v

Tit-Bits (not many actually)

Come-back of the month: Teddy Boys — they’re beginning to appear on our street comers again.

Good news: Free at last.

Discovery: the Beach Boys (live). Immigrants: Iggy Stooge, the MC 5, the Flaming Groovies. What’s happened to Alice Cooper?

Black Sabbath of the Month: Uriah HeeD