Doune the Rabbit Hole 2017 is fast approaching, this year from 18 to 20 August. As regular readers know, this Festival is very important to me personally in recharging my spiritual batteries. A weekend in idyllic Stirlingshire surroundings amongst kind and caring people in a kind of “pop up community”, it is a brilliant way to de-stress. The musical selection is stubbornly non-commercial and often I find myself enjoying completely unexpected things. I must say though having Steve Davis (yes, that Steve Davis) doing a DJ set this year is rather intriguing.
The music is important, but it is primarily a lifestyle festival. It has no political agenda, but it is fair to say that readers of this blog will be in company in which they feel comfortable. And of course, as always I shall be running the bars. Running a bar is perhaps what being a former Ambassador best qualifies you to do!
Buy tickets here: http://dounetherabbithole.co.uk/tickets
If you have more energy than money, there are still positions open for volunteers. Contact [email protected] and quote that you came through this blog.
UPDATE
Have just found a YouTube about Steve Davis as DJ.
Hope the weather’s turns out to be nice, yes, I’m sure most readers realise by now that you have a penchant for a wee tipple, running the bar will be right up your street. Im sure you’ll have a nice relaxing time, everything in moderation now. ?
If Mr Davis roll as DJ, is a reflected in anyway in his style of snooker, well lets just say Steve wasn’t the most exciting snooker player in the world, but he was still rather successful.
For the record, Steve Davis has had a bit of a career as a radio DJ after retiring from snooker. He’s apparently a huge fan of prog rock – which makes total sense, if you think about it – the nerdiest and most boring sportsman of the nineteen eighties matched with the nerdiest and least-cool music of the nineteen seventies! I’ve no idea how Steve Davis, of all people, plans to get revellers rocking out to the likes of Genesis or Gentle Giant in a summer music festival in Space Year 2017, but I reckon it’ll be interesting seeing him try!
Craig’s bar at the festival is excellent year after year, a really friendly, relaxed, but buzzing atmosphere. It’s called The Whistleblower’s Arms, and has its own semi-accoustic stage. Many fascinating conversations occur there, as you might imagine.
Steve Davis DJs on Phoenix FM from Brentwood, just down the road from my place. He plays Zeuhl, RIO and Canterbury. These are rather more eclectic than “prog rock”, under which they tend to get classified in desperation!
Prog Rock, is alive and well. O.K., I admit I was not that keen on early or even most of Genesis….I thought it was girly rock…so I had to start going. She told me.
You are going to see Peter Gabriel with me.
And so I did.
“Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush – Don’t Give Up”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17FB65gm1Y
We’re still here and got our bus passes.
Tony
I think that early Genesis – and prog in general – tends to be “boyi rock” or, to be more precise. “schoolboyi rock”. Nothing wrong with that I hasten to add.
Tony, thanks. Peter Gabriel seems a good bloke; he started the Womad festival. I volunteered for Womad ones, 1988 I think, at St Austell. I was passing through Box on my motorbike on my way back from Bristol. I’d heard that the Womad offices were in Box (the Box office?) so I just asked the way and went in and volunteered. I turned down a security post but they took me on anyway because they thought it would be good to have a motorcyclist available.
Officially I was on Site Deco, the decoration team, but in fact I helped put up the festoon lights. A stepladder set up on the back of a pick-up truck, leaning at wild angles on the sand. Four others held the stepladder while I ventured up to attach the festoon cable to the top of each wobbly scaff-pole. I also played the part of Hanuman the Monkey in the festival procession, and changed the bottles on the gas lamps.
The beach at the bottom of the cliffs at St Austell originally was manufactured; I think the sand used was a waste product from the kaolin industry.
– “Running a bar is perhaps what being a former Ambassador best qualifies you to do!”
As I have long suspected. It is what it qualifies you to do best!
I am climbing out of my hole this weekend to attend the Glimmerglass Music Festival, outside Cooperstown, NY. Has nothing to do with baseball’s Hall of Fame, but will be performing Donizetti’s The Gates of Calais, Handel’s Xerxes, and Oklahoma, with bits from Porgie and Bess thrown in. For once, the Americans will be outdoing the Europeans.
My brother, the real Doctor, will be providing a catered dinner when we arrive before the Donizetti racket.
Probsbly still be hung over by the time of Doune.
Trowbridge.
You should if you haven’t already taken in Donizetti’s Elixir of Love, (A Furtive Tear) the aria Una Furtiva Lagrima is a beautiful love song from the opera.
Here the legendary Pavarotti performs it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2J7JM0tGgRY
Incidently Trowbridge why are you announcing that you intend to leave your bunker, wouldn’t it be more prudent just to do so, without telling the myriad of followers on this blog? For safety reasons of course.
Thanks for the link to Pavarottii’s arias, Ros. Have nothing against Donizetti, and naver heard The Gates of Calais.
Just a crude effort to bring him down to Sybil’s level in Faulty Towers about Brahms’s symphonies.
I am in my hole to protect myself when Trump bumps you off. To think that this lunatic is next to the black box just blows my mind. It is far worse than anything that Kim might do.
Hope we go quickly.
Trowbridge, good that you’re getting to a festival.
Don’t worry so much about Trump and the nukes; no one would take his order seriously, and I doubt he could work out how to uncap the switches on his own.
Craig,
If the “doune” that you reference has any similarity to ‘Alice in Wonderland’ then when you do arrive:-
give my my kind regards to “Her Imperial Highness, Her Grace, Her Excellency, Her Royal Majesty, the Queen of Hearts!” per ‘The White Rabbit’
If no such meeting takes place – simply enjoy yourself.
Cheers.
Courtenay
Excellent news. We will be at Cambridge Rock Festival tomorrow (not the Folk Festival). We first went 10 years ago when it was fairly small. It is still fairly small, and last year we all thought it was probably going to be the last one – including I suspect the organisers though I do not personally know them. However the story goes (I have no links to prove this but I’m pretty sure its true (ish)) one of the people who had been going to this festival for years, won an exceedingly large amount of money on the Euro lottery (or something similar) -and said to the organisers…you can run it in my back garden if you like.
So I had a look to see where we were going tomoroow, and I can well believe it is true.
I won’t bore you with the photographs, but it will probably be much the same in the gardens of a mansion.
They will probably have deer running around in the camping field instead of the usual horses.
http://cambridgerockfestival.co.uk/
Tony
OK you piss-heads. Before you get your brain-cells totally funked. I have serious moral question to ask:
If a highly-paid professional, corporate voyeur whose job is to legally spy on the private lives of the corporate company’s employees, finds one of those minions in turn voyeuristically looking at a bit of porn, does his highly-paid legally-entitled, corporate-priveledged voyeurism entitle him to give that employee instant dismissal for his little bit of private voyeurism he found out through his highly-paid, corporate job?
Hypocrisy stinks. Try saying that after you’ve had a few whistleblowers’ pints.
Depends on the porn, really. Though I get the impression that a higher authority might be just as censorious…
http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/index.php?page=fatwa&tab=1&vPart=546
BTW the corporate company was Unite Students and the job involved repairing electrical fittings while ensconced with extremely minimally-dressed young females. My religion doesn’t permit me to be ensconced with any kind of female in private old or young, dressed or undressed. I think the corporate bastards were trying to set me up for failure on that one. However I didn’t succumb, and that seems to have got them extremely annoyed, along with the fact that rats have been seen on the 7th floor by climbing up inside the external cladding and I was telling them they’d now got to worry about chewed cables shorting out wherever the rats might have been,
Corporate manslaughter eh? Grenfell changes everything. Sound worser than Weils didease.
“Nobody can keep back what Allah gives , and no-one can give what Allah keeps back and His power supercedes everything”. Corporate power can and will deny everything, and use every trick in their legal toolbox to intimidate everyone who reveals anything.
Fortunately for the modern world the technology that enables them to spy remotely on my private life also enables me to broadcast literally across the world to their investors in China all their dirty linen.
Thanks to Craig.
It has also brought USUKIS to utter global humiliation by exposing their blatant breaches of international law across that same globe. Right now they are trying to cut free from their neighbours in Europe like dog-turd. Do the foaming-nutters in power not realise that their behaviour in Syria has also been noticed in China? China made the technology that enabled Russia to bomb their proxy terrorists and crush their evil plans to destroy the lives of millions of Muslims. China was light-years ahead of them.
Good thing God made England an Island.
Could you not just have waited until you got home?
Stu
I work as an electrician. Nobody needs to play politics with me, politics over the availability of electrical materials because of an apparently non-existent budget, politics over the suitability of my professional advice, politics over their right to inquisition me over my private life – I am after all not hacking into their silly, sad lives- and above all the politics of their stupid Politics, which is that putting caring lipstick on raw capitalist greed is the one and only model that can be followed in this country.
If these political people haven’t got anyone else to play their silly games with other than hirelings like me, then their sad Blairite souls are a joke across the universe : sad little former colonial Englishmen and women harking back to a cruel, filthy decrepit Victorian society that they resent has been reformed by socialist ideals.
Everyone has their own coping mechanisms for the utter futility of the minds of those around them.
It appears that the utter futility of Blairism has been rejected by the electorate in favour of a less hypocritical thesis, viz Mrs May’s capitalism. Caring Blairite gravy-trainers driving shiny BMWs and penny pinching on the budgets just about does my little head in – sorry.
Stu
You think this company ever gave me time or access to a computer? There was a smelly space that stunk of sewage with a few computers in it. I had to email my boss from home if I needed to keep a record of something on paper. No, the government has made it legal for corporations to hack into the private life of its employees. Corporations account for much more hacking than other institutions like GCHQ or its satellites.
BTW did you hear on the news how MI5 and the police set up the 3 musketeers, planting terrorist accessories in the suspects cars, the cars provided by them too?
Beware of honey-traps. Specially if you really want to be a MI5 patsy and boost their success in preventing terror figures.
Corporations will only black-list you. MI5 will lock you up until they find something else useful they want you to do. Abu Qatada refers.
– “Corporations account for much more hacking than other institutions like GCHQ or its satellites”
Hear, hear! Remember that Edward Snowden worked for Booz Hamilton; he was only contracted to the NSA. Or just read Spotify’s Terms and Conditions – and then click “I AGREE”.
“Good thing God made England an Island”
Did he really? Science may disagree with that, science has some pointers to enhance their theory believable ones that is.
I’m sure you’ll put believable ones as well, on God’s behalf.
If you’re up there reading this Big Man, no offence meant. ?
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/news070716-11.html
I might add, that in this sexual equality day and age, that if women and men are so equal now, why is God, never, portrayed as a woman?
She just fakes her gender on the Divine Internet.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg
If I was you I’d kick Fid Def off my heather mountains and start anew
I see a brilliant Canadian band in the lineup. Wikipedia has the following to say:
[i]”The band uses live instrumentation and miscellaneous instruments and non-instruments (including a 35 mm film synchronizer, toy keyboards and toy phaser guns) to achieve electronic-sounding effects without the use of laptops or programmed backing tracks.[2] According to Pitchfork Media, “The band was formed with the intent of creating the equivalent of modern electronic music without actually using the techniques—looping, splicing, programming and the like—of that music.”[3] [/i]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PARM1V0NkFA
Their biggest hit was probably the following from around 9 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfDwMbtBgfU
Do you have to be a Scottish nationalist to be welcome at this event?
No.
NO is the Short ..True Answere Not that you are interested in Truth
looking forward to Daft Punk and Steve Awesome Davis, as good at spinning vinyl as he is playing snooker.