Blossoms – Glastonbury 2016. Recorded on June 24th by the venerable (and always amazing) BBC 6 Music. It occurred to me that I ran another Blossoms concert earlier this month and one last year. Okay, I’m a fan and it’s good to hear them get the audience and the press on their side. In what is shaping up to being (yet another) stellar Festival season this year, Blossoms have been hitting just about every one since Spring of this year.
Only together for three years, they made 4th in the BBC’s Sound of New Music for 2016. With a slew of singles, a fistful of ep’s and a well-received debut album (Blossoms) to their credit, the future is looking good for this band of Indie/Alternative/quasi-Psych upstarts from Manchester. Shades of Madchester, and a healthy legacy it is. Must be the water.
Suffice to say, they are still in their formative stages – still doing the slog and working hard getting the message across. They are far from phoning it in, and they capture all the excitement of a band on the rise with all the energy a band puts out as a result. The audience is clearly on their side – and the Glasto audience turned it into a love fest.
Good on them. This is the primary reason I love running live concerts and sessions from bands – you get to hear the energy exchange between band and audience as well you getting to hear the band (particularly if you’ve been following them from the start) go through the growth process that all bands and artists invariably go through. Not only is it great for the listener, but it’s also a textbook for the up-and-comer. You can fix all kinds of stuff in the mix – especially these days with auto-tune and a whole battery of “fi-its” available in the studio. Hearing a band flying without a net however, is exciting – I’ve always thought that and I say it often. It’s one reason that, to support a band – really support them, you have to see them live – catch the atmosphere and feel the energy.
Glastonbury continues to be the model for festivals – and the wide range of artists represented within the massive framework of that farm in Pilton has been responsible for an explosion of festivals all over Europe this year – more than even last year.
So maybe you’re sitting in Los Angeles, or in Tucson or somewhere in upstate New York, and you couldn’t get to Glastonbury this year, and getting to a festival on the mass scale as Glasto just isn’t in the cards for you – luckily, you can still catch a lot of these acts via streaming video and audio.
That’s the nice part about high-tech – you get to witness everything without getting drenched in a summer rain storm in order to do it.
Crank this one up and enjoy. I suspect there will be another Blossoms festival appearance before the Summer is out
