Words Dept.: entry

Now I wasn’t there and so I probably have no right to comment on the subject. But isn’t the purpose of a blog to prattle amateurishly about subjects one has no right to prattle amateurishly about? Well, exactly.

To this end, I feel I must take issue with renowned man of letters Gordon Smart and his assessment, in the Sun‘s Bizarre pages, of the headline performance by Jay-Z at Glastonbury on Saturday night.

Gordon does not feel the event went well. While I was only watching on telly, natch, I can safely say that it’s the most excited I’ve ever been while watching Glastonbury on telly and from what I could see, the crowd seemed to like it too. I particularly enjoyed the way Jay-Z deliberately murdered Oasis’ Wonderwall by way of a jokey introduction. Gordon, however, doesn’t quite get the irony.

The whole point of the big bill topper is to get your arms around your pals’ shoulders and sing along to the chorus.

So when Jay opened the show by miming to OASIS megahit Wonderwall – after playing a tape of NOEL GALLAGHER saying he was wrong for Glasto – I thought we were in for a treat.

It was all downhill after that, though.

Perhaps Gordon wanted a medley of further karaoke cover versions. A blast of Brotherhood of Man’s Save All Your Kisses for Me would no doubt have pleased the esteemed critic. But no. Jay-Z, this so-called “hip hop artist”, who has sold a mere 50 million records, had the raw temerity to play his own songs for the duration of his hour-long set. The bastard!

To back up his point, Smart ropes in respected musicologist and man-about-zeitgeist Tim Lovejoy.

TV host TIM LOVEJOY, who knows his tunes, agreed with me that it was poor. Speaking backstage, Tim said: “That was bland.

“You need big recognisable hits you can get involved in and after 99 Problems he didn’t really have anything.

“Noel and Liam must be laughing that they were played on the main stage and weren’t even on the bill.”

Note the way we are told Tim “knows his tunes”, in a laughable attempt to paper over the randomness of asking Lovejoy for his opinion.

Perhaps the cause of Smart’s ambivalence is that the “rumoured” guest performances he and others plucked from thin air (Amy Winehouse, Beyonce, etc) never took place. Or perhaps it’s because Jay-Z turned up in the first place – you’ll remember that back in April Gordon ran a series of incredibly well-sourced stories saying Jay-Z was going to pull-out.

So anyway, aside from Coldplay and Oasis, who does Gordon favour to rock the Saturday night slot next year?

I am pleased to say that one brilliant thing did come of his gig.

Kasabian’s SERGE PIZZORNO rang and said: “Watching that was a call to arms for rock ’n’ roll. Next year we are going to take Glastonbury.”

Yes, that’s right, Kasabian. Kas. Fucking. Abian. Good news for fans of bearded Leicester-based pub rockers who only occasionally trouble the top ten, then.

And sorry, Gordon, but isn’t the fact that Jay-Z mentioned the Sun in a rap that was especially composed for the occasion manna from heaven for a tirelessly self-promoting showbiz hack such as yourself? The headline writes itself. I mean, he never mentioned the 3AM girls, did he?

But strangely enough, Smart doesn’t refer to it until the last two sentences of his story. It’s almost as though he didn’t notice the Sun ditty had happened at all and, at the last moment, one of the junior writers bolted a reference to it on to the end of the copy.

As I say, though, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about – and, indeed, no right to talk about it.