A drunken day at Evolution in some marketing exercise known as NewcastleGateshead

Evolution is the north-east’s premier Bank Holiday Monday on the lash, and although this year’s line-up didn’t look particularly strong, it’s a chance to watch a load of bands for a ridiculously small sum of three English pounds (sadly the same price as the lager: Evolution is the only time of the year you go to the Pitcher and Piano to save money). And it was sunny this year as well. Top stuff.

Sunderland’s This Ain’t Vegas opened the proceedings at the Spillars Wharf stage, firmly stating their mackem credentials to a partisan crowd. It’s a great set from the Wearside indie-types, so often forgotten in the wake of fellow wheese-keys-are-these lads, the Futureheads.

The Whip are next. They play their best tune while I’m at the toilet, the rest of their set is, well, toilet. Instantly forgettable generic electro, with a frontman who is achingly desperate to be cool. His craic with the crowd is woeful, and he’s wearing a Batman t-shirt that was a cliché when Kele Okereke did it three years ago.

I’ve heard really good things and really bad things about Glasvegas, and I’m now siding with the latter. They come across as massively dull, and the Glaswegians’ name is reminiscent of the tendency of the inhabitants of various crap South Durham towns to add ‘Vegas’ to everything. I never want a night out in ‘Crook Vegas’, and I’d rather not have to listen to this lot again either.

Down on the other stage, I’m attracted to Hercules and the Love Machine by their links with my favourite transvestite New Yorker, Antony Hegarty (of Antony & the Johnsons fame). This project however lacks the immediate charm and beauty of his earlier work, as we’re presented with a poorly-timed cacophony of crap disco.

Duffy is a diminutive little minx, but fills the stage with a presence and a voice far beyond her tiny frame. It’s all a little bit Radio 2 though, although altogether less irritating than fellow soul-lite exponent, Adele.

Reverend and the Makers are bloody awful though. Poorly-informed leftist sentiment delivered by a raving tosspot who looks more likely to mug your gran then deliver any of the ‘peace and love’ he kept spouting on about.

I try to like Kate Nash, I really do, as by now the debacle that is backstage has made me decide to slum it with my mates who have assembled to watch her. She’s late, confuses stroppy little piano-smacking with charisma, and chucks glottal stops all over the shop. I get through one song before I can’t take any more of her mockney tedium and head for the bar.

All in all, Evolution remains a good day out. Next year we just need to hope for a better line-up. And more sun, please.

Whatever Happened to My Rock and Roll? (I'd rather not have the BRMC reference, but it fits the piece, reet?)

I can’t be alone in thinking that we’re on the edge of Something Very Shit Indeed.

You know the line in Fight Club about how our generation has no great war, no great depression? That our Great War is a spiritual war, and our Great Depression is our lives?

Pretty soon we’ll see how much shit hits the fan when we experience our Great War and our Great Depression at the same time (only after we’ve explained to a generally moronic and apathetic public that we’re using ‘great’ as a pejorative). Religious nutjobs trying to outdo each other in the Rank Stupidity and Death to Innocent Civilians stakes, and inflation threatening to go through the roof. Don’t get me started on the price of chicken. (Doesn’t seem to be affecting KFC though. Bastards.)

Anyway, I digress. What annoys me is that something somewhere is clearly going quite tits up, and Boris Johnson runs our capital city.

But on my radio is some berk telling me that she’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, she’s just so fucking lovely.

We’re all aware of the proliferation of NME diet-Libertines dross in the British music scene these days, but something a little deeper, a little more worrying struck me a month or so ago: the uber-pretentious music site Pitchfork’s main problem with the new Billy Bragg album is that it’s not political enough

They lamented that he’s foregone the polemic couplets of yore and made an album that’s, well, happy. They were criticising a man who remains one of Britain’s greatest living songwriters, who has produced another solid record, for not remaining the leftwing, Red Wedge firebrand he was so regularly caricaturised as. Often lambasted as a relic of Old Labour, a broken-record champagne socialist who shunned his roots, it appears we still need him to Help Save the Youth of America, and apparently the UK too. We still need him, and people like him, to speak for us.

It’s not, in essence, this idea I have a problem with.

I don’t disagree with the idea that musicians should speak for the disenfranchised and the jaded. Rock music in particular should be a simmering bastion of political dissent. Rock music should be rocking against racism one day, then shouting ‘cunt’ on live telly the next.

What worries me is that Bragg is a 51 year old folk-singer who clearly doesn’t want to be just a political songwriter, yet for some reason we are now yearning for him to be just that.

That’s because there’s nobody else. British music is a lethargic mess of indifference that only gets its arse in gear when they can make money from a cause they, in all honesty, know nothing about. Moody teenagers find solace in rebellion. Where’s the rebellion in the homogenized radio-friendly NME twat-rock that they’re force fed now? Once they had the Clash or Nirvana. Now they have the Kooks.

And we certainly can’t rely on Luke Pritchard to point out that the only way ID cards will save us from terrorism is if they’re nine feet by seven feet and made out of Kevlar (so we can hide behind them the next time some fuckwit sets fire to his shoes on a 747).

I wonder what the Twang’s opinion on the current plight of the Burmese public is. Does anyone think they actually have one? Does anyone care?

Is the View one of the stupidest band names ever? Is there actually a single thought between whole lot of the scruffy Cornershop-raping cunts?

When this generation shows our grandchildren the popular music of our day, what will they think? Will they be inspired by a Lennon or Stummer type figure, or be too busy scratching the microchip that’s implanted in their face because we were a generation that didn’t care, and looked to Alex Turner for social commentary? A generation that failed to see the irony of watching Big Brother as everything fell apart around us?

I’m not sure if the lack of activism amongst musicians is a result of the aforementioned apathetic and moronic public, or the root of it. It’s a chicken and egg situation, but chicken is too fucking expensive and we’re looking to the Hoosiers to save us.