Bluedot Volume1

VOLUME. 1 

22.23.24 JULY 2016 

JODRELL BANK 

53.2363°N 2.3071°W 

An intergalactic festival of 

music, science, arts, culture 

and the exploration of space

PHOTO BY KEITH AINSWORTH

OBSERVE. 

MUSIC. ART. TRANSMISSION. 

EXPLORE. 

CULTURE. COMEDY. FAMILY. 

EXPERIMENT. 

SCIENCE. INVESTIGATE . DISCOVER. 

4 | BLUEDOT

HELLO 

BLUEDOT is a festival of discovery. 

To be human is to be curious. To try to 

understand the world around us, how it works 

and how we might improve it. At Jodrell Bank 

we use the iconic Lovell telescope and others 

around the world to look out, beyond the Earth, to the 

farthest reaches of space. Our aim is primarily curiositydriven 

– to understand the universe. But by doing so, we 

understand more about ourselves. We explore the origin 

of stars and planets. We learn more about life, by finding 

its building blocks in interstellar clouds and by hunting 

for other planets where life might exist. Who knows, one 

day we may even use our telescope to communicate with 

other intelligent civilisations. 

Clearly, science is at the heart of our modern 

technological society but we firmly believe that science 

is also part of culture. It runs like a thread, both implicitly 

and explicitly, through art, music, architecture and 

literature. This is what inspired us to work again, 

alongside the team behind the Live from Jodrell Bank 

events, to produce bluedot, a weekend which promises 

some ground-breaking encounters, amazing live 

performances, DJ sets, comedy, talks and discussions, 

workshops and live experiments. 

We’ve always loved bringing Jodrell Bank to life with 

these events, welcoming audiences who might never 

have considered visiting us before. They are a hugely 

enjoyable celebration of not only our work but also that 

of many other scientists who are invited to take part. Of 

course, we also love the music. There’s an amazing lineup 

at bluedot this year but we must namecheck Public 

Service Broadcasting. They played here in 2013, and 

we loved it so much that we invited them back to film 

the video for their song Sputnik. The symmetry was too 

good for us to ignore: the very first thing that the Lovell 

telescope ever did was to use a radar to track the rocket 

that carried Sputnik I into space. 

To borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan (the astronomer 

whose eloquent description of planet Earth as a ‘pale blue 

dot’ in the vastness of space inspired the festival’s name): 

“the Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena”. 

At bluedot the planet is centre stage as we showcase our 

creative achievements in arts, science, technology and 

the exploration of space. 

We invite you to camp out under the stars alongside 

the Lovell telescope and to explore a stellar programme 

of music, science, arts, technology, culture, food and 

film. We want you to have fun, to discover new 

music, new ideas and to join us in a celebration of 

human ingenuity. And all the time we’ll be hurtling 

through space on a small rocky planet, orbiting a star 

in a galaxy of several hundred billion stars, one of a 

hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 

We want bluedot to blow your minds 

Professor Teresa Anderson, 

Director of Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre 

Professor Tim O’Brien, 

Associate Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory 

5 | DISCOVERTHEBLUEDOT.COM

JODRELL 

BANK – 

SPACE 

PIONEERS 

For almost 60 years, the giant Lovell telescope 

at Jodrell Bank has been a familiar feature of 

the Cheshire landscape and an internationally 

renowned landmark in the world of astronomy. 

The Jodrell Bank Observatory is one of the 

most significant places, worldwide, to have played a role 

in the development of the science of radio astronomy, 

pioneered by the great Sir Bernard Lovell. 

After his pioneering work on radar during the Second 

World War, Lovell wanted to investigate cosmic rays, 

but he was getting too much electrical interference 

from trams in Manchester city centre. So in December 

1945, Lovell moved his operations to the Jodrell Bank 

site, which was then an outstation of the University Of 

Manchester’s Department Of Botany. Following their 

success in detecting radio waves from the Andromeda 

Galaxy, in 1949, Lovell decided to construct a 250-foot 

steerable telescope at Jodrell Bank. He planned to use 

this to study cosmic rays, meteors and radio emissions 

from the deepest reaches of the universe. Masters in 

the art of post-war recycling, the team used gun turret 

mechanisms from the battleships HMS Revenge and HMS 

Royal Sovereign to help drive the telescope, then the 

world’s largest. But in autumn 1957, the project was in 

6 | BLUEDOT

“Jodrell Bank remains 

a culturally important 

and inspiring place, 

and serves as a 

constant reminder 

of the possibility of 

human endeavour” 

serious debt and looked like it may never be completed. 

The “miracle that saved us”, as Lovell described it, was 

the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik 1, in 

October 1957. The first use of the telescope was to track 

the rocket that carried Sputnik into space, at the dawn 

of the space age. It went on to track both American and 

Soviet space missions at the height of the space race; 

and during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the 

telescope was discreetly turned towards the Iron Curtain 

to provide a few minutes’ warning of any missiles that 

might have been launched. 

Although it is now the world’s third largest steerable 

radio telescope, after the Green Bank telescope in West 

Virginia and the Effelsberg telescope in Germany, the 

3,200 tonne Lovell telescope is a Grade I listed building 

and is internationally regarded as an icon of science 

and engineering. A continuing programme of upgrades 

means it is now more capable than ever, and it plays 

an essential role in Jodrell Bank’s research, particularly 

on pulsars and as part of the e-MERLIN array of radio 

telescopes across England. 

Now part of the University Of Manchester’s Jodrell 

Bank Centre for Astrophysics, the site remains at the 

forefront of research in the field of radio astronomy, 

investigating quasars, pulsars, the Cosmic Microwave 

Background Radiation, gravitational lenses and 

astrophysical masers – phenomena that were undreamt 

of when Lovell arrived in a muddy field 70 years ago. 

Continuing a history of significant scientific achievements, 

the future looks just as bright. The Square Kilometre 

Array Organisation, who are building the world’s largest 

telescope in South Africa and Australia, recently chose 

to place their international headquarters at Jodrell 

Bank. The increasingly successful Discovery Centre 

welcomes around 160,000 visitors each year, including 

21,000 school pupils on educational visits. It showcases 

Jodrell Bank’s cutting-edge research work to a wide 

audience and aims to inspire the next generation of 

scientists and engineers. 

Jodrell Bank remains a culturally important and 

inspiring place, and serves as a constant reminder of the 

possibility of human endeavour 

WRITTEN BY CHRISTOPHER TORPEY 

PHOTOS BY KEITH AINSWORTH 


AREAS 

PHOTO BY KEITH AINSWORTH 

lovell stage 

nebula stage 

The Lovell Stage is the hub of the bluedot universe. Situated in 

the shadow of the mighty Lovell telescope, the stage references 

the iconic structure that has been at the very centre of humanity’s 

quest for discovery. The line-up for the Lovell Stage reflects 

the soaring achievements of the telescope’s visionary inventor, 

Bernard Lovell, inviting the audience to consider humankind’s 

obsession with the heavens, and with what lies beyond the stars. 

Voyage into deep space, explore strange new soundscapes, and 

observe exotic aural lifeforms as they intrigue, manipulate and 

distort your very understanding of musical structures. Nebula will 

envelop you in a pulsating cloud of experimental, pioneering 

sounds and performances that are designed to stimulate your 

body and expand your mind. Where new stars are born. 

orbit stage 

roots stage 

Discover the sounds of the near future at Orbit. Featuring an 

eclectic mix of artists, Orbit invites you to journey through a 

galaxy of cutting-edge sonic exploration that will last well into 

the night. Curated by Now Wave – acclaimed promoters of the 

best emerging live talent – Orbit will provide a platform for some 

of the most dynamic and thought-provoking international acts 

currently available in this planetary system. 

Some of humankind’s earliest innovations blossomed within 

the fields of music, storytelling and acoustic instrumentation. 

Celebrating these early pioneers and the rich vocal and musical 

traditions that have endured for millennia is Roots – a stage with 

its feet firmly on the ground but with a soul soaring in the skies 

above. World, folk and spoken word will abound during the 

daylight hours, with some special surprises after dark. 

contact stage 

mission control 

In space no one can hear you laugh. But they can in Contact. 

Here, you can find a bit of light relief in searching for the 

universe’s funny bone, taking in a space-themed quiz, or reclining 

in the presence of celebrated authors. With evenings of stand-up 

comedy, shows and interactive games, get prepared to be tickled 

and tantalised by the awe and humour of the cosmos. 

2016 marks a turning point for UK space discovery, with Tim Peake 

becoming the first European Space Agency astronaut. The UK 

Space Agency brings together panellists, keynote speakers and 

special guests at Mission Control to mark this milestone in British 

space exploration through a series of talks and workshops, and 

to explore what might lie ahead in the UK’s exploration of space. 

8 | BLUEDOT

luminarium 

the arboretum 

From outer space to inner space, this incredible immersive 

experience invites you to enter a new and unique structure and be 

moved to a sense of wonder at the beauty of its light and colour. 

Through labyrinthine tunnels and cavernous domes, visitors can 

explore a visually stunning environment of luminosity – or simply 

relax and meditate in a world apart, drenched in radiant colour. 

A bucolic location ideal for relaxation and reflection. Visitors 

to The Arboretum will discover the pleasant surroundings of 

hundreds of beautiful tree specimens from around the globe, 

perfect for picnics and passing the time away from the noisier 

areas of the festival. Expect poetry, folk music and other mellow, 

downbeat pursuits as you enjoy the lush green grass of bluedot, 

our planet Earth. 

star field 

Discover a world of wonder and discuss the latest discoveries 

with our very own festival scientists in the interactive, intergalactic 

Star Field. Here, family festival-goers will find fun galore with 

a host of specially designed science shows for the young and 

the young at heart. Located beneath the iconic Lovell telescope, 

the Star Field will also feature a real ale tent and a range of 

street food stalls. 

restaurant at the 

end of the universe 

Make a reservation at the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe 

and enjoy one of bluedot’s many cosmic dining experiences: the 

Stargazer’s Feast, a special Sunday roast with locally sourced 

ingredients, and the gastronautic seven-course menu, all of which 

have been put together by Michelin-starred chef Aiden Byrne. 

Enjoy great views of Brian Eno’s Lovell telescope installation from 

its location underneath the iconic structure. 


JEAN-MICHEL JARRE 

“Jodrell Bank is a 

symbolic link to 

communications, 

to connections… 

it’s something 

very poetic” 

Pink Floyd crashing WWII planes into 

enormous, stage-wide walls? A glorified 

puppet show. Muse flying drones around 

stadiums? Boys’ toys. U2 constructing gigantic 

fast-food arches and spider stages? Lego. In 

terms of the grand-scale live music experience only one 

name deserves mention. JEAN-MICHEL JARRE: lord of the 

laser harp, firework warlock, summoner of spectacle on a 

level untouched by any other artist in the history of music. 

Entire cities are his stage, national landmarks his 

backdrop. He’s performed on floating barges on the 

Thames and beneath the pyramids of Giza, used a 

whole kilometre of Houston skyscrapers as gigantic 

video screens, projected cosmonauts onto Moscow State 

University during a live link to the Mir space station and 

drenched the Eiffel Tower in fireworks. Thirty-foot operatic 

zombies have sung his arias, 50-foot neon stick-men have 

danced to his synth pop, deserts have filled with human 

penguins at his bidding, laser instruments have strafed 

the world’s most recognisable skylines and all the while 

the numbers got bigger, breaking his own records over 

and over again. One million people in the Place de la 

Concorde on Bastille Day 1979. One and a half million in 

Houston, 1986. Two and a half million at Paris la Defence 

in 1990. Three and a half million for the 850th birthday 

of Moscow in 1997, the joint biggest concert ever staged. 

“A man standing in front of a laptop is not very sexy,” 

Jarre has said. “I think people expect a little more from 

a live show.” They do now – the retina-scorching laser 

and firework blitzes of The Chemical Brothers, Daft 

Punk, Avicii and Calvin Harris owe everything to Jarre’s 

dazzling displays. At the same time, his recorded work 

has been just as pioneering as his visual extravaganzas, 

popularising and moulding electronic, ambient and newage 

music from his breakthrough work with analogue 

synths on 1976’s Oxygène to 21st-century collaborations 

with the likes of M83, Gorillaz and Air. 

Not bad for a guy who started off making 

experimental advert music in his kitchen. Composing 

music for international magic festivals, art-house films 

and low-budget ballets in a studio he built in his flat 

just off the Champs-Élysées in the early 1970s, Jarre 

discovered pioneering synths with sound effect and string 

settings and used them to construct Oxygène, a six-part 

10 | OBSERVE

masterpiece of bubbling melodic electronica that slipped 

neatly into the progressive instrumental slipstream of 

Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and sold 12 million copies, 

hitting number two in the UK charts and becoming the 

best-selling French record of all time. 

Jarre has never thought small since. Following the 

release of the more classically minded Équinoxe in 

1978, he planned the first outdoor performance of his 

life for the Place de la Concorde in Paris the following 

year, drawing a million fans stretching the length of the 

Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe to witness an 

audio-visual spectacular of fireworks and fountains that 

was, until Jarre’s ambitions grew, the world’s biggest-ever 

live show. On Danish radio in 2005 he explained his 

mentality: “At a very early stage I realised that it’s a real 

problem to perform electronic music on stage because 

electronic instruments are not particularly convincing on 

a visual point of view: somebody behind his computer, 

it’s not particularly visual. So I was inspired by the opera. 

And what was the opera in the 19th century? It was the 

idea for a musician to join and to work, to collaborate 

with a stage director, with carpenters, painters, graphic 

artists to have a visual correspondence to their work. 

That’s what I tried to do with the tools of my generation: 

electronics and video and lights.” 

His visions only grew wider and more vivid, art on the 

most immense scale imaginable. To celebrate the 150th 

anniversary of Texas and the 25th birthday of NASA in 

1986 he staged Rendez-vous Houston, a mammoth show 

involving 2,000 video screens, some 370 metres high 

and covering entire office blocks, stretching across a vast 

swathe of downtown Houston and a citywide rooftop 

firework display. For the turn of the century celebrations, 

he concocted a show called The Twelve Dreams Of 

The Sun, based on Egyptian mythology and humanity’s 

relationship with the sun, and performed it before the 

Giza pyramids on Millennium eve. If anyone was ever 

going to build a projector big enough to beam visuals 

onto the Moon, it was Jarre. 

Musically, he’s taken just as many risks. In the wake of 

the huge success of Oxygène and Équinoxe and having 

pioneered sampling on 1981’s Magnetic Fields, he 

decided to release just a single copy of 1983’s Music For 

Supermarkets, auctioned for 69,000 francs, the master 

tapes destroyed. Of late he’s released concept albums 

about cartoon love affairs (Téo & Téa), a re-recorded 

version of Oxygène and a two-album project called 

Electronica, on which he collaborated with guest artists 

from across the electronic spectrum – Air, M83, Fuck 

Buttons, Little Boots, Tangerine Dream, Massive Attack, 

Pete Townshend, The Orb, Gary Numan, Primal Scream, 

Pet Shop Boys, even Edward Snowden – to document the 

history of the genre, and perhaps to reclaim the music he 

largely invented. 

“At a very early stage I realised 

that it’s a real problem to perform 

electronic music live” 

“I’ve wanted to tell a story for a while regarding 

electronic music history and its legacy from my point of 

view and experience, from when I started to nowadays,” 

he told Billboard. “I planned to compose for and 

collaborate with an array of artists, who are directly or 

indirectly linked to this scene, with people I admire for 

their singular contribution to our genre, that represent a 

source of inspiration for me over the last four decades I 

have been making music, but who also have an instantly 

recognisable sound. At the outset, I had no idea how this 

project would evolve, but I was delighted that everybody 

I reached out to accepted my invitation.” 

It’s a fitting idea because, for Jarre, music has been a 

means to unite vast crowds, entire cities, musical genres 

and even international communities. The first Western artist 

to be invited to play in China, his spectacles have often 

involved musicians, performance artists and choirs from 

across the globe performing genres from every continent. 

“I’ve always been involved in ethnic music,” he said 

in 2007, “although I thought the way a lot of people 

have been using ethnic music was a little superficial. 

Sometimes it works, like the Brian Eno stuff, it worked the 

first time, but for me what was more interesting was not 

making a particular statement about recording in Africa 

or in China, but taking some sounds and having exactly 

the same attitude as when you were in front of a Moog 55 

or a modular system, replacing the oscillators with a bank 

of actors or people, treating them through the Fairlight or 

the EMS synth, and establishing an orchestration using 

only voices.” 

With a message of global acceptance and 

understanding to convey, the small details have been as 

absorbing as his broadest brush strokes. In the shadow 

of the Eiffel Tower during his show in 1995, two men – 

one in a white body suit, the other 

in black – painted each other the 

opposing colour; later a parade 

of 20-foot rhumba puppets 

danced across the stage like an 

oversized Muppet Lou Bega gig. 

At Giza, Jarre’s signature tune, 

Oxygène IV, was accompanied 

by a troupe of Egyptian doumbek 

players, among over a thousand 

local musicians and artists that performed that night. 

Jarre’s shows throw their arms around the world. 

At bluedot he is planning to throw his arms around the 

universe and, in doing so, give everyone hope for the 

future. “When you see the recent movies like Gravity, 

Interstellar and The Martian, for me, there is a revival 

of space exploration, but beyond that a dream of what 

the future could bring us,” he told BBC 6Music recently. 

“The past 10 to 15 years we have had quite a dark 

perspective of the future. From a creative point of view 

we have to reinvent a vision of the future for younger 

generations. I hope this project I am going to put on 

stage, in a modest way, could contribute to this vision.” As 

always with Jarre, the location is key. “That a place such 

as Jodrell Bank carries such an emotional context is very 

exciting. The fact that you are playing close to such a 

unique piece of architecture, but also a symbolic link to 

communications, to connections… it’s something very 

poetic within itself.” 

jeanmicheljarre.com 

WRITTEN BY MARK BEAUMONT 

PHOTO BY CONSTANTIN MASHINSKIY 

LOVELL STAGE 

SATURDAY 


GWENNO 

When polka-dotted trio The Pipettes were 

singing about pulling shapes and kissing 

boys a decade ago, you’d have got long 

odds on one of their members one day 

being at the vanguard of Welsh music, 

after releasing a sci-fi-themed electro album sung in her 

native language. 

But, after a musical career that’s also taken in stints as 

Elton John’s keyboardist and appearing in Lord Of The 

Dance, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by GWENNO’s 

resurrection as a true one-off whose championing of 

Welsh-language music has thrown a spotlight on a scene 

that is as vibrant as it is proud of its nationality. 

“It was always there,” says Gwenno Saunders of her 

interest in her Welsh identity. “I feel sometimes that if you’re 

from a smaller culture or a minority people it’s something 

you grapple with for a while. It took me a very long time to 

be confident with where I was from and what I was. It’s been 

quite a personal journey and it’s mainly to do with confidence 

and becoming comfortable with your own skin.” 

All this new-found confidence has manifested itself in 

Gwenno’s first solo album, Y Dydd Olaf, which saw her 

expand the ideas and promise of a string of EPs for the 

Welsh label Peski, gaining fans and a re-release on the 

legendary Heavenly record label along the way. 

Sung entirely in Welsh and Cornish, Y Dydd Olaf takes 

its inspiration from Owain Owain’s 1976 sci-fi novel of the 

same name, but it is actually a very modern kind of protest 

album, taking in topics such as media manipulation and 

the squeezing of minorities. 

“The novel is about a dystopian future where robot 

overlords take over the world and turn the human race into 

clones,” she explains. “The protagonist writes everything 

in his diary in Welsh because the robots can’t understand 

the language. It’s incredibly contemporary: Welsh isn’t 

allowed to be an advertising language on Twitter and 

when you write it in on Facebook it goes all weird.” 

Owain, who had worked as a nuclear scientist at 

Windscale, died in 1993 but his influence is still being felt 

and is set to grow when his novel is republished, thanks to 

Gwenno’s determination to weave the issues it deals with 

into her work. 

“I’d written a lot of the album before I discovered the 

book because I was reading a lot of Welsh science fiction, 

which is generally all about cultural identity and where 

that fits in the future,” she says. “I found it really interesting 

and then, when I came across the book, it just really tied 

into what I was trying to say and it inspired a few of the last 

songs that I wrote. It never got any coverage when it was 

published and I loved that, because it felt undiscovered 

within Welsh-language culture. Those works are generally 

overlooked because they don’t fit in and are ahead of their 

time. It was just so ahead of the game.” 

Musically, the sound Gwenno has adopted and 

developed seems a long way from her former band’s retrokitsch 

stylings, and she admits her transformation might 

confuse those who remember The Pipettes’ indie-pop take 

on The Shangri-Las. 

“It took me a very long 

time to be confident 

with where I was from 

and what I was” 

“With The Pipettes I was joining the most English band 

imaginable. It was really interesting because I’d never met 

anyone from Brighton or the south east before,” she says. 

“It was fascinating and incredibly exciting, but it was a 

bit of rebellion and escapism and all those things you feel 

when your identity doesn’t fit in with the general narrative. 

“I’ve loved electronic music since I was a teenager. 

Harmonia and Broadcast were massive influences, as was 

I Hear A New World by Joe Meek. But there are a lot of 

soundscapes and abstract sounds that people in Wales 

make, too.” 

Given her love of sci-fi and the themes running through 

her album, it’s hardly surprising Gwenno cannot wait for 

bluedot and one man in particular. 

“It’s all about Jean-Michel Jarre,” she sighs, happily. 

“Jodrell Bank looks like an incredible venue to play and, 

for me, it looks like the perfect festival when you look at 

the themes I’ve been pursuing. It’ll be an honour to play.” 

gwenno.info 

WRITTEN BY JAMIE BOWMAN 

ORBIT STAGE 

SUNDAY 

12 | OBSERVE

If bluedot were looking for a house band, how about 

one that uses terms like “algorithmic generative 

music environment” and whose latest set of songs 

will accompany a new space exploration computer 

game? For Sheffield four-piece 65DAYSOFSTATIC, 

a visit to Jodrell Bank seems entirely natural for a set of 

friends whose 15-year journey has seen them explore the 

extremes of both guitar and electro with a wide-ranging 

vision and desire to head into the unknown. 

This year sees the band embark on their most ambitious 

mission yet with the release of No Man’s Sky – the official 

soundtrack to a computer game that will involve players 

exploring a universe of almost infinite possibilities, all to the 

accompaniment of soundscapes and melodies generated 

by 65daysofstatic. 

They’re no strangers to the concept of soundtracking 

deep space after a previous project had the band 

composing and performing an alternative score for cult 

sci-fi classic Silent Running, but No Man’s Sky raises the 

bar for 65daysofstatic. As they prepare to introduce it to 

the live arena, the band’s Paul Wolinski helps us make 

sense of it all. 

How did you come to be soundtracking such an 

extraordinary-sounding computer game? 

Paul Wolinski: “We were on tour when Hello Games, the 

makers of No Man’s Sky, emailed us asking if they could 

use one of our old songs, Debutante, to soundtrack a trailer 

they’d made for the game. We saw some concept art and 

they told us about the game and it was so immediately 

compelling and exciting. We’d been looking at doing some 

soundtrack stuff for a while, so we said yes and asked 

them if they had anyone on board to do the soundtrack 

yet. We had a meeting and it turned out that during a lot of 

the early development for the game they’d been using our 

back catalogue as the mood music anyway, which was 

very flattering to hear because I was all prepared to give 

them the hard sell in the meeting.” 

How was the experience different to composing and 

recording a normal set of songs? 

PW: “It was an enormous challenge, but what made us 

ready for it was our track Sleepwalk City. As we wrote 

it for the Wild Light record we were also preparing for a 

sound installation in Sheffield, which was part performance 

and part creating a sound loop across 18 speakers. The 

performances changed each time and the song became 

something different from the one that existed on the record. 

It helped us think past the idea of there being one definitive 

version of a song. On the record it was seven minutes long 

and had a narrative arc, but in the installation we built the 

song using the same elements but in a different way. It was 

always changing and always infinite and we could have 

just left it switched on.” 

“We wanted to write a soundtrack album that worked 

in its own right as a record even if you’d never played 

the game. For that we needed a song that existed in 

a pretty standard, linear form, but then we also knew 

that it would exist as music that would respond to 

the player’s actions. While it’s not technically infinite, for 

the player there is no limit to what they might do when, 

or with what combination. It was about adding the 

ingredients and sounds and textures and using them to 

write normal songs, but also be building blocks for the 

logic of the game.” 

65DAYSOFSTATIC 

What challenges will you face when trying to 

replicate No Man’s Sky live? 

PW: “It’s exciting to think about playing it live. With 

our normal records we always have one eye on the live 

performance. It’s perhaps a bit less subtle than what you 

produce on record, but it can be more exciting. We like to 

take advantage of the form. The deadlines were tight and 

we didn’t even have time to consider how we would create 

this stuff live.” 

“We don’t just want 

to show off the 

technology because 

we can wield it” 

“We’ve made that mistake before in making studiobased 

records and that was a tough learning experience, 

because we didn’t enjoy touring. We had to make lots 

of compromises with the songs and it never felt very 

satisfying touring the record. Since then we’ve always 

paid more attention and we’ve got so used to doing 

that, so the songs make sense in a live performance. 

Technology has moved on so much in the last six or 

seven years that what we are able to pull off on stage 

has increased.” 

It’s extraordinary to think how the band’s sound is 

continuing to evolve in tandem with new technological 

innovations. 

PW: “We do rely a lot on technology, but always want 

to perform shows where that is not the central theme. 

The computer game is a good analogy for this: they’ve 

got this incredible mathematical game with this infinitely 

large universe, but that’s not why they’ve made the game. 

They’ve made the game because they want to give the 

player an experience of isolation and wonder, of being 

alone in this giant universe. That’s what they started 

with and they filled in the vision with technology rather 

than starting with the technology. We’re trying to do the 

same thing: we don’t just want to show off the technology 

because we can wield it. It’s more about creating a live 

show by any means necessary. As technology moves on, 

the more useful it becomes for us to produce that vision.” 

What are you looking forward to at bluedot? 

PW: “It’s a great line-up and I’m very excited about the 

Algorave. I think I’m going to do a short live-coding set. 

It’s really forward thinking and that, for me, is the real 

forefront of electronic music. People type code and the 

code becomes music. It’s super-geeky and it sounds like 

it might not be very interesting, but actually it’s really 

compelling. I can’t think of a more perfect festival for 

65daysofstatic to be playing.” 

65daysofstatic.com 

WRITTEN BY DAMON FAIRCLOUGH 

PHOTO BY DANNY PAYNE 

LOVELL STAGE 

SUNDAY 


14 | OBSERVE

AIR 

coming back to life.” That’s how 

Jean-Benoît Dunckel describes AIR in 

2016. 

This year, he and Nicolas Godin are 

“Ghosts 

revitalising a project that germinated 

when they met as teenage school kids in Versailles in 

the late 1980s. After 21 years and seven albums (eight if 

you include 2000’s teenager-slaying soundtrack for Sofia 

Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides), last month these masters 

of heart-prodding electronic music released Twentyears, 

a meticulously collated anthology of singles, rarities, 

remixes and unreleased tracks. 

The pair formed Air in 1995, splintering into a duo after 

three years playing in Orange with disco musician Xavier 

Jamaux and Alex Gopher, who’s now a house DJ. Dunckel 

and Godin had busied themselves with solo projects since 

2014’s limited edition release for Lille’s Palais Des Beaux 

Arts, Music For Museum, but are now back together and 

on the road. 

As part of an eclectic interview conducted via email, 

Dunckel describes the shows – during which the now 

46-year-old pair bob side-by-side behind their keyboards, 

triggering twinkling choruses and heady waves of 

electronic noise like Venus, Cherry Blossom Girl and Kelly 

Watch The Stars – as “energetic”. He adds that they wear 

all white onstage too, which chimes nicely with his ghostly 

metaphor. 

His comparison – and the astronaut-hued outfits – 

shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Air have been 

dabbling in space and science fiction since the release of 

their 1998 debut album Moon Safari. The video for that 

record’s Sexy Boy featured an animated monkey flying 

to the Moon. Dunckel puts the duo’s fascination with 

galaxies far, far away down to the fact that human beings 

are “stardust”, and has understandably fond memories of 

recording Air’s most recent album, the first original score 

for Le Voyage Dans La Lune, in 2012. 

The 1902 silent short, directed lavishly by George 

Méliès, charts the journey of a team of astronomers to the 

Moon and is often held up as the first ever science fiction 

film. “I was impressed because it’s from 1902,” says 

Dunckel, “it’s people from another age moving in front 

of your eyes.” But he reserves highest praise for Méliès’ 

“simple magic effects, such as when the characters just 

vanish into the background”. 

An extra quirk came with the fact that Méliès is 

buried close to Air’s Paris studio, but Dunckel’s answer 

as to whether that brought them any closer to the man 

who made the film is short and simple: “Non.” His 

response when asked whether he thinks the band will 

draw inspiration from outer space in the future is exactly 

the same. 

Indeed, Dunckel won’t be drawn on Air’s future at 

all: “It’s hard to see the future because it’s constantly 

changing depending on the present, which is unstable.” 

If these childhood friends are going to hide out in their 

wood-panelled studio to cook up an album to follow 

Le Voyage De La Lune, you get the feeling they’ll do so in 

secret, content to let the intrigue build. 

But to pick away at that answer, and many of Dunckel’s 

others, is to reveal a portrait of a band revelling in a rich 

history, still intent on eliciting feelings from anyone who 

listens. Never mind ghosts coming back to life, Air are 

exactly where they were back in 1995: lost in their own 

world of space and sound. 

You started Air in 1995, how did you want the band to 

come across back then? 

Jean-Benoît Dunckel: We presented the band to the word. 

We particularly wanted to explain that we were not DJs 

and that we were playing everything. 

What are the main things you have learnt about yourselves 

since those days? 

JBD: That you can’t make omelettes without breaking 

eggs, that it’s hard to achieve something without reaching 

every goal. I was thinking that I had a blurry vision of 

a perfect career but I had a perfect vision of a blurry 

career. 

Did you have any disagreements over the tracklisting 

for Twentyears? 

JBD: No the best of was fun to do. It’s an audio travel 

in time. It was interesting to see the different turns of the 

sound. We mutated, we incorporated more voices, and at 

the same time, we started to be more experimental. 

Did you discover anything about yourselves while 

collating it? 

JBD: I understood how right and inspired we were. 

The third disc on Twentyears is full of remixes – what are 

your favourites? 

JBD: I like the Bowie one [A Better Future]. It was impressive 

to have a David Bowie song sung a cappella. 

You’ve also worked with Jean-Michel Jarre on the track 

Close Your Eyes for the 2015 compilation Electronica 1: 

what are your memories of that? 

JBD: Good memories. Jean-Michel is a friendly, clever 

person. We also discovered his studio. It was electronic 

pornography. So many keyboards. 

You once called your Paris studio a “Star Wars spaceship 

with the equipment of Stevie Wonder”. What’s it really 

like inside? 

JBD: It’s a recording studio full of electronic keyboards 

and instruments. There’s lots of wood so it feels like you’re 

in California. 

What are the biggest changes – musically, personally and 

in the environment the band exists in – since you began? 

JBD: We spent so much time in the studio and learnt 

many recording techniques. But the more I was learning 

things the more I thought I should unlearn how to record. 

Because inspiration is the most important thing. It’s about 

how to translate a feeling. 

“Computers are just 

tools. It’s just about 

capturing the human 

feeling through 

melodies and rhythms” 

Can you describe the connection between the two of you? 

JBD: We are very different with a lot of common tastes. 

We’re complete. 

Do you know each other’s secrets? 

JBD: Yes, a little bit. 

You’ve previously spoken about having an obsession with 

making “timeless” music. Is that still the case? 

JBD: We were not into the fashion of music. We didn’t 

want to be played in clubs or on the radio. We wanted to 

become a cult band, [making] necessary music to make 

the people feel high and at peace. 

In 2009, you told Pitchfork: “We play the machines 

and the machines play us”. How do you assess using 

electronic keyboards and computers to make emotional 

music? 

JBD: Computers are just tools. It’s just about capturing 

the human feeling through melodies and rhythms; 

I like to record me playing and not program anything. 

Also, computers show us some ways of editing music. 

Machines play right at the same tempo. Humans don’t.” 

How do you want people to react to Air? 

JBD: I want people to caress themselves by listening to 

our records. But maybe they’ve got something else to do. 

I hope they’ll space out. 

The Moon, space and travel have often crept into your 

work, why the fascination? 

JBD: Because we’re stardust, that’s what we really are: 

turning on a planet during a short lifetime, and the only 

way to feel really at peace is to never forget that 

aircheology.com 

WITTEN BY BEN HOMEWOOD 

PHOTO BY LINDA BUJOLI 

LOVELL STAGE 

SATURDAY 


LET’S EAT 

GRANDMA 

LET’S EAT GRANDMA don’t give a fuck what 

you think about them. In fact, they actively enjoy 

messing with your impressions. 

“It’s interesting how you can almost manipulate 

how people perceive you,” says Rosa Walton, 

before slyly admitting the duo have “maybe” been having 

a bit of fun with things. 

“Noooothing!” drawls her bandmate and best friend 

since the age of four (they’re both now 17), Jenny 

Hollingworth, when pressed for what antics they’ve 

been up to lately. “I dunno,” chimes her partner in crime, 

angelically. The phone line crackles as they fall about 

shrieking with laughter with the kind of ear-splitting, 

mischievous glee that takes a sledgehammer to their sweet 

and innocent illusion. 

The two Norwich teenagers are unlike anything else 

around at the moment. Their debut album, I, Gemini, builds 

a strange, surreal world where xylophone solos collide 

with thumping beats and rap breakdowns (Eat Shiitake 

Mushrooms) and fairy tales get reimagined into stories 

that would give kids nightmares (Rapunzel). Musically, it’s 

complex and creepy, full of layers of saxophone, cello, 

synths, recorders and more that bend jazz, R&B and lofi 

pop into Let’s Eat Grandma’s own twisted sound. It’s 

undoubtedly one of the year’s best records and certainly 

one of the most unique. 

The main theme of the record is escapism – from 

school, growing up, friend drama and the mundanities of 

life. “I think the whole thing of being a child is kind of 

like escapism,” Jenny muses. “You wouldn’t see it in 

such a dark way, but children are bored by reality. They 

create worlds and play games and pretend stuff. 

We were really fed up with everything [when we wrote 

these songs].” 

Although the two multi-instrumentalists are both enrolled 

at music college, they say they never really thought about 

making a career out of music, but chose to study it simply 

to learn more about the process. Not having the pressure 

of years spent in their bedrooms dreaming of platinumselling 

albums and festival headline slots like most bands 

is part of what’s allowed them to express themselves so 

freely on this record. 

“Because we got the opportunity to start writing without 

bearing in mind being cool or getting lots of viewers and 

stuff, it made us start on a roll of not really caring and 

we’ve kind of stuck to it,” explains Jenny. “If we’d never 

made this and I was starting another band or whatever, 

I might have thought more about what would sell so that 

it wouldn’t go wrong. But if you’re just starting something 

and not even thinking about a career then you naturally 

end up making something that’s a bit more…” She pauses, 

finishing her sentence through stifled giggles, “Organic!” 

“It’s interesting how you 

can almost manipulate 

how people perceive you” 

The duo were recording some of the songs that make up 

the album two summers ago, but they didn’t realise that’s 

what they would one day become. Instead, they were just 

excited to actually hear what their creations sounded like 

and add all the layers to them that they couldn’t when on 

stage. “We’d need to be octopuses to do everything we 

wanted live,” laughs Rosa. 

Recorded in a converted former nuclear bunker in their 

home city, the duo say their experiences in the studio also 

informed just how dark and creepy the record turned out. 

And some of those experiences, assuming they’re not 

manipulating us right now, were downright weird. 

“I actually had an out-of-body experience while we 

were recording,” reveals Rosa. “Jenny and our manager 

and our producer were outside. I was working on the 

keyboard part for Sleep Song, which is quite hypnotic, 

and I could feel myself going into a different zone. And 

then I was above myself and I could see my hands playing 

the keyboard and hear voices of people I knew saying 

odd combinations of words. That’s what inspired the lyrics. 

It was a really creepy place.” 

Later, Jenny had her own strange encounter, where, 

also alone in the studio, she thought she saw a ghost of 

a young girl. They admit maybe they were a “bit paranoid” 

after what happened to Rosa, but it was still enough 

to freak Jenny out. Especially, she says, because the 

ghost “looked a bit like Rosa”. “Having experiences 

like that inspired the darker side to the album,” 

she concludes. 

Let’s Eat Grandma’s impish side comes out in other 

ways on the record, too. Well aware of how people will 

presume their music sounds from seeing a photo of two 

young women with flowing long hair, they conclude I, 

Gemini with a little ode to that baseless assumption – a 

ukulele version of opening track Deep Six Textbook. It’s a 

big fuck you to those people who immediately pigeonhole 

them as demure and folky. 

“Exactly!” screams Rosa. “I think it’s like, ‘This is what 

you expected us to sound like, so we’re going to give it to 

you at the end so you feel a bit more secure’.” 

“We’ve literally spent the whole album throwing people 

off and then, right at the end, it’s like, ‘LOL’,” Jenny adds, 

as the shrieks of laughter start up again. Get ready to be 

messed with 

letseatgrandma.co.uk 

WRITTEN BY RHIAN DALY 

PHOTO BY FRANCESCA ALLEN 

NEBULA STAGE 

SATURDAY 

16 | OBSERVE

RHAIN 

It took me over a year to finally see RHAIN perform 

live, after hearing about a newly arrived star from 

many highly enthused musical confidantes. Months 

of near misses and perpetually unaligned diaries 

followed until, finally, we were in the same room. 

Mine just two of four hundred or so eyes frozen upon the 

glittered, piano-gliding geisha who had just stunned a 

room full of noise and techno heads in Bristol’s Arnolfini 

art gallery to silence. 

Serpentine and often dizzying song dynamics are 

tempered with crystalline vocals that can flit from 

emphatically empowered to fragilely brittle in the blink of 

an eye. The live session of Humdrum Drivel that has been 

on YouTube for a couple years now is a great introduction 

to this, but when you are in her presence it really hits you. 

Stirring falsetto just doesn’t grab the back of your neck 

through laptop speakers. 

Although brief, the artist formerly known as Rhian 

Teasdale acknowledges that her time living in Bristol was 

an important one in terms of how she now thinks about 

being able to balance work and art. “It was great being 

surrounded by people my age, interested in doing more 

than just going to work, then eating dinner and then bed,” 

she explains. “People who had loads of aspirations away 

from their job and were very self-motivated… I found the 

whole scene very inspiring.” She is now back within her 

creative womb of the Isle Of Wight, from where she is 

Skyping me. 

Fittingly, festivals are on the agenda when we speak. 

She has just returned from Barcelona’s indie Mecca 

Primavera Sound and is understandably frazzled from a 

week of sun, sea and… well, sound. Her catchment meant 

she cut her teeth at Bestival and the Isle Of Wight Festival, 

so the late-starting, city-dwelling set-up of Prima’ was a 

bit of a departure from sprawling countryside happenings, 

where the music wakes you up in the morning. “It felt 

completely different to me in terms of that it all starts a lot 

later, you’re not on site all weekend so get to touch base 

with reality a little bit, although the reality is Barcelona, 

which is not quite reality.” 

“It’s like you’re going fishing and you 

cast your net out, some people just 

walk past and stop and take a listen” 

We discuss how she usually spends hours wandering 

around the fields stumbling upon new acts, and how her 

most recent festival experience didn’t really lend itself to 

that. “I slept a lot,” she concedes through laughter. “At 

UK festivals you’re kind of forced out in the arena at 

midday onwards, there’s no choice but to watch people! 

I don’t think I saw and discovered as much new music as 

I normally would do at a festival. I think you’re reliant on 

using your friends as arbiters a little bit.” 

When the shoe, or flip-flop, is on the other foot, 

though, she knows that she can benefit greatly from the 

collective thirst for new music at a festival such as bluedot. 

“It’s like you’re going fishing and you cast your net out, 

some people just walk past and stop and take a listen. 

If they like you and they take the little bait that you give 

them, then they stay for the rest of the show [and] hopefully 

they like you forevermore.” 

There is also a sense of ‘pressure off’ for a new artist 

playing at a festival. Gig-goers at a standard gig, where 

a new artist may be supporting a touring act or headlining 

a local bill, are often more likely to have done a little 

research to find out who they are paying their ticket money 

to see, whereas in a tent in the 

middle of the countryside, you 

could literally be anyone. 

Rhain is playing just a handful 

of festivals this year – enough 

for her develop and get used to 

playing consistently and also just 

the right amount for her not to get 

sacked from her job for taking too 

many weekends off. Her fellow 

Caulkheads and frequent collaborators, Plastic Mermaids, 

are also going to be there for most of them, giving her 

the chance to perform on stage among their kaleidoscopic 

magic, which she embraces as it gives her a chance to 

be on stage without the sole focus on her. “When you 

perform on your own it’s very raw,” she says. “It’s nice to 

look around on stage and have your friends with you.” 

Hopefully, there will be plenty of friendly faces staring 

back at her from the crowd as well 

rhainmusic.com 

WRITTEN BY JOE HATT, 

FROM HOWLING OWL 

NEBULA STAGE 

SUNDAY 


PUBLIC SERVICE 

BROADCASTING 

“It was like walking 

round a big James 

Bond villain’s lair with 

men in white coats 

walking about” 

J. Willgoose, Esq. is having a good day. He’s 

excited. Last year the second album from his 

band PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING reached 

number 11 in the charts, they played barnstorming 

sets at many of the top festivals and were taken 

into the hearts of record collectors who like their music 

considered, intelligent and with a sense of humour. 

Today, though, Willgoose is enthusing over a new airconditioning 

system that’s been installed in his garagecum-studio. 

“It’s one of those spaces that gets cold 

in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer,” he 

says over the phone from his London base, “not conducive 

to productivity.” 

Productivity is important to Public Service Broadcasting. 

Although two albums and a smattering of EPs in a sevenyear 

career may not seem prolific, work rarely ceases. 

Last year’s The Race For Space saw the band move up 

an echelon in the indie-rock hierarchy and this seems 

to be due to Willgoose sensing the correct moment. “As 

soon as I finished the first album [2013’s Inform–Educate– 

Entertain] the panic set in and I thought, ‘Oh God, I’d 

better get moving on the next one’, so it was pretty much 

the day I finished it that I began on The Race For Space,” 

Willgoose says, before revealing how the wheels were 

put in motion for the critically acclaimed concept album. 

“I phoned up the BFI [British Film Institute] and asked if 

they had any high-definition NASA stuff. They said, ‘No, 

but we’ve just inherited a whole load of Soviet films that 

you can use’. ‘Yes please, thank you very much, that 

would be amazing!’” 

While other musicians will take inspiration from personal 

experience and maybe write some ditties on the road to 

be taken into the studio at a later date, PSB’s first port 

of call is the BFI. In this case Willgoose’s idea for the 

album was the US versus USSR pissing contest that was 

the Cold War, and the each superpower’s obsession to 

beat the other via exploration of our cosmos. “The 

idea was always to set the US and Russia against 

each other and tell that story of the ‘golden period’ of 

the space race,” he explains. “I was really worried about 

18 | OBSERVE

eing able to get the Russian stuff, but I made one phone 

call and got an absolute treasure trove. I didn’t want it 

to be another collection of songs about Apollo because 

we’re all so familiar with that, down to the bleeps and 

the static; it’s all been used a lot, so I wanted us to do 

something new.” 

What followed were two years of poring over the 

BFI’s collection, as well as sourcing NASA material, 

to develop an album that not only tells the emotionally 

charged story of an incredible period of history, but 

combines it with a soundtrack of pulsating guitar riffs, 

sublime songwriting and bandmate Wrigglesworth’s 

purposeful drumming. 

Part of the process for Willgoose is to achieve balance, 

not only in this case with the two sides of the story, but 

making sure both the audio and visual elements of the PSB 

package are adequately represented: “It feels like a lot 

of work, there’s a heavy visual element to our live show; 

that and the fact there’s the footage. But I’ve always been 

keen that the music is the main thing, and that has to stand 

up on its own and it has to be as emotionally resonant 

as possible.” 

slightly more sure-footed ground now, so we should be 

able to relax and enjoy it.” 

It certainly seems like a match made in heaven: PSB 

with a debut album named after the trio of Reithian BBC 

principles and bluedot with their mission statement of 

“Observe. Explore. Experiment”, coupled with a full airing 

of that perfectly themed second album. After forming 

a close relationship with Jodrell Bank custodians Tim 

O’Brien and Teresa Anderson since their last appearance, 

and once again visiting the site to record the fantastic 

video for Sputnik, Willgoose praises the work that has 

gone into the festival’s curation. “I think it’s something we 

fit into really well, and they’ve thought really hard and 

are working to create not just another festival line-up,” 

he says. “They’ve definitely put a different spin on it and 

changed the focus of it. I’m really excited about playing, 

I think it’ll be one of the highlights of the summer for us.” 

With so much going into the studio side of the PSB 

output listeners might wonder what to expect from the 

band’s live show. Willgoose sums it up nicely: “A fair 

amount of audio-visual wizardry with some homemade 

charm to it and pretty rollicking rock…” he hesitates as 

his English reserve gets the better of him. “It’s a loud 

show, we definitely step it up in terms of musical intensity, 

and, hopefully, a fair amount of humour to undercut the 

incredible pretentiousness of it all.” 

And with that Willgoose gets back to the pleasantly 

controlled temperature of his studio and his quest to reach 

even loftier heights with album number three 

publicservicebroadcasting.net 

WRITTEN BY SAM TURNER 

LOVELL STAGE 

FRIDAY 

“I didn’t want it to be 

another collection of 

songs about Apollo 

because we’re all so 

familiar with that” 

The Race For Space has recently had the remix treatment 

by the likes of Field Music, Dutch Uncles, Vessels, Maps 

and more, but it’s not just other artists the duo have 

befriended, having also won over the European Space 

Agency. “They got in touch with us after the album got 

released to say they were really enjoying it, and obviously 

I was really glad to hear that,” Willgoose reveals, 

excitedly. “We managed to get a tour of their facility in 

the Netherlands, which was amazing, to see behind the 

scenes, look at a couple of satellites. It was all top secret; 

we had to give our phones in. It was like walking round 

a big James Bond villain’s lair with men in white coats 

walking around.” 

PSB’s immersion into the world of space travel bodes 

well for their Friday slot at bluedot. It will not be the first 

time the band has performed in the shadow of the iconic 

Lovell telescope, however, as they appeared at 2013’s 

Live From Jodrell Bank series in support of New Order. 

Willgoose reveals he was “fairly terrified” on the day. “It 

was by far the biggest crowd we’d played to at the time,” 

he recalls, “and I was hoping that the computer wouldn’t 

blow up and looking out and thinking, ‘God, that’s a lot 

of people. I hope they don’t all hate us’. I think we’re on 


lovell stage highlights 

UNDERWORLD | FRIDAY 

Rick Smith and Karl Hyde have been making music together in various 

forms since coming together in Cardiff in 1980. As UNDERWORLD 

they have collaborations with Danny Boyle, the opening ceremony of 

London’s 2012 Olympics and eight incredible albums to their name. 

Earlier this year they released a dazzling ninth – Barbara Barbara, 

We Face A Shining Future. This is rave as it should be: hedonistic, 

relatable, life-affirming and with a lightshow that’s like journeying 

into the centre of the sun with two near 60-year-olds as pilots. 

BETH ORTON | SATURDAY 

After collaborations with William Orbit, Red Snapper and The 

Chemical Brothers early in her career, BETH ORTON knows how 

to puppeteer a crowd using the peaks and troughs of electronic 

music. Comfort Of Strangers signalled a shift to a folkier sound in 

2006 but, 10 years later, new album Kidsticks, co-produced by 

Andrew Hung of Fuck Buttons, puts the focus firmly back on robot 

groove. Electronics crunch and swirl, while the Norfolk-born singer’s 

unmistakeable voice shrouds everything in spook-out atmosphere. 

LANTERNS ON THE LAKE WITH THE 

ROYAL NORTHERN SINFONIA | SATURDAY 

LANTERNS ON THE LAKE are a band that thrive on skyscraping 

melodies and rousing arrangements, so adding an orchestra to 

recreate the tracks from their first three albums is an idea that can 

only result in songs that sound even more lush and epic than before. 

With the massed ranks of the ROYAL NORTHERN SINFONIA by 

their side, the Newcastle quintet are taking the sweeping songs of 

last year’s Beings and beyond to grand new heights. 

CARIBOU | SUNDAY 

CARIBOU is probably the most perfect headliner for the closing 

night of bluedot. Ontario-born multi-instrumentalist Dan Snaith, 

who has also recorded as Manitoba and Daphni over the past 

15 years, released his finest album to date in the form of 2014’s 

Our Love. It added a personal and very human element to his 

intelligent dance music. And Snaith really is intelligent – he was 

awarded a doctorate in mathematics from Imperial College London 

in 2005 for his thesis on overconvergent Siegel modular forms from 

a cohomological viewpoint. 

20 | OBSERVE

nebula stage highlights 

HENGE | FRIDAY 

HENGE call their music “cosmic dross”, dress up when they play (silver 

bodysuits, demented Shrek masks and furry epaulettes) and believe 

they come from space. They seem, frankly, like a bunch of maniacs. 

One thing though, guys, “dross” might not be the right word for 

songs like In Praise Of Water, which is as aggravating as a busted 

mobile-phone alarm clock and contains tinny lines like “Charge up 

so I can exist in a human capacity” and yet is somehow danceable 

and addictive. 

POST WAR GLAMOUR GIRLS | SATURDAY 

POST WAR GLAMOUR GIRLS are grim and stylish in a similar way 

to The Fall or Wild Beasts, with a good bit of Pixies’ volume 

chucked in and the freaky dual vocal attack of Alice Scott 

and James Smith. Fresh from recording a live album in 

Wakefield and a third studio set tentatively titled Swan 

Songs, they’ll crash onto the stage armed with a fistful of 

new songs to go alongside the twisting, jerking likes of Little Land 

and Jazz Funerals. 

THE LUCID DREAM | SUNDAY 

Where the revival of psych in more mainstream circles in 

recent years has produced by-numbers sounds of dirge repetition, 

Carlisle’s THE LUCID DREAM stand as a beacon for diversity and 

invention. Third album Compulsion Sounds, due out in September, 

promises to continue their experimental approach, while recent 

new track Bad Texan keeps its kraut, drone and garage influences 

bound in a tight coil that’s constantly threatening to spring apart for 

the whole of its six-and-a-half glorious minutes. 

BODY CLOCKS | SUNDAY 

Dig into the calmer recesses of the line-up and you’ll find BODY 

CLOCKS, aka Josef Kašpar and Joe Craven, two 

kids from Bristol who appear to have been raised on 

Caribou, Kiasmos and those Ministry Of Sound chillout 

compilations that get so heavily advertised on TV in Ibiza’s 

off-season. Debut single Still Life is shrewdly titled, a drifting instrumental 

made from shy-sounding beats, wispy electronics and what sounds like 

a breeze bottled on a summer’s evening. Head for their set when 

your tired feet can take it no more. 


DOT TALKS 

Jodrell Bank is at the heart of our quest for knowledge of the cosmos, 

looking far out into space and back in time, always discovering 

more about our universe. bluedot recognises this outward-looking 

aspect of human nature with the DOT TALKS, an array of lectures and 

panels in which leading researchers will tackle the universe’s biggest 

topics, including the hunt for gravitational waves, dark energy, the 

Big Bang, the search for life elsewhere, the future of genetics and the 

challenge of climate change.. 

HEARING BLACK HOLES COLLIDE 

STUART REID 

On 14th September 2015, two giant laser interferometers 

known as LIGO – the most sensitive instruments ever 

built – detected gravitational waves from the merger of 

a pair of massive black holes more than a billion light 

years from the Earth. The resulting collision threw out 

a gravitational signal with energy ten times greater 

than the combined light power from all the stars and 

galaxies in the observable universe. Join Professor 

STUART REID as he recounts the inside story of this 

remarkable discovery, hailed by many as the scientific 

breakthrough of the century. 

EXPLOSIONS ON THE SUN 

PHILIPPA BROWNING 

Our own magnetic field shields us from a lot of the 

‘space weather’ that bombards the planet, but not even 

that can protect us from the effects of solar flares, the 

most energetic explosions in the solar system. PHILIPPA 

BROWNING, a leading expert in the physics of the Sun 

working at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, will 

discuss some of the most recent work on the active Sun 

as she aims to explain why the outer atmosphere of the 

Sun – the solar corona – is heated to millions of degrees, 

and how the resulting ejection of high energy particles 

impacts on Earth’s magnetic environment. 

GENETICS: A BRAVE NEW WORLD? 

MATTHEW COBB 

A new genetic technology called CRISPR has taken medical and biological 

research by storm, as it allows scientists to change the DNA code of 

any organism – including humans – precisely, quickly and cheaply. 

The long-running ethical debate about human gene therapy has now 

become incredibly pressing – the world’s first CRISPR baby will be born 

in the next few years. MATTHEW COBB, Professor of Zoology at the 

University of Manchester, will describe the excitement about this revolution 

in science, as well as highlighting the need for the widest possible debate 

about potential applications of this new ‘life editing’ technology. 

22 | EXPERIMENT

HOW TO BUILD A MARS ROVER 

CATHERINE BATESON 

The human race has long had a fascination with Mars, with 

our search for life elsewhere in the universe focusing closely 

on our nearest planetary neighbour. Since the Curiosity rover 

beamed back images of the dry and dusty red planet in 

2012, the energy for this endeavour has been renewed. 

Join CATHERINE BATESON of Airbus Defence and Space 

to discover how we in the UK are building the first European 

rover to send to Mars and continue the search for life. 

OBSERVING CLIMATE CHANGE 

KEVIN ANDERSON 

As one of the most active academics in the field of 

energy and climate change, KEVIN ANDERSON’s work 

on carbon budgets (with his colleague Alice Bows) has 

been pivotal in revealing the widening gulf between 

political rhetoric on climate change and the reality of 

rapidly escalating emissions. His work has shown that 

there is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in 

global mean surface temperature at below 2°C, despite 

repeated high-level statements to the contrary. Join this 

esteemed researcher as he puts his case for a radical 

reframing of the climate change agenda. 

DALLAS CAMPBELL 

TV presenter DALLAS CAMPBELL has been involved in several out-of-this-world 

projects, from abseiling off the world’s tallest building in Dubai to helping Dara 

O’Briain and Brian Cox broadcast Tim Peake’s historic live launch to the International 

Space Station on Stargazing Live. Dallas will be hosting two fascinating talks at 

bluedot that cover his wide range of interests: All About Mars will be a fascinating 

focus on the red planet, and a journey from humble post-war beginnings to cuttingedge 

technology in The Story Of The Spacesuit, looking at innovations that will 

sustain future astronauts in the far reaches of the cosmos. 

FURTHER DOT TALKS… 

How Britain Won The Space Race. Living With A Comet. Life In Extreme Environments. 

Human vs Robotic Space Flight. SKA Fast Radio Bursts. From Dark Matter To White 

Noise. Citizen Science In The SKA Era. Where Did Our Sun Come From? Galaxy Clusters. 

Miniaturized Satellites. Adventures With Cosmonauts. Exploring Astrobiology. 

Testing Einstein With Pulsars. Images Of The Universe. Hunt For Earth-2. 

Deep Oceans. Alien Life: The Search Continues. 


SIGUR ROS - LIVE AT JODRELL BANK 2013 BY TOM MARTIN

MERCURY REV 

M 

usic, rum, drugs, spirituality and isolation. 

Sounds like quite a cocktail, doesn’t it? 

MERCURY REV guitarist Sean Thomas 

Mackowiak served himself a large one 

every year from 2009 to 2014, by spending 

months on end in Guatemala while his band were on 

a self-imposed break. The 49-year-old, whose 100mph 

personality led to him being nicknamed Grasshopper as 

a child, sums it up with one word: “Craziness.” 

“It’s kind of like the Wild West,” he continues down 

the phone from his home in Kingston, upstate New York. 

“There’s lots of drugs and weird stuff going on, Mayans 

doing ayahuasca ceremonies, ecstasy in the cities. I 

dabbled here and there.” 

The rum and spirituality came as a package. 

Grasshopper got involved with a Mayan ritual 

celebrating the legendary Maximón, who, the story 

goes, travelled to Guatemala and became a god prior 

to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and Christianity in 

1492. “Maximón watches over people with problems,” 

Grasshopper explains. “The people celebrate with 

effigies of him in a suit, hat and tie. You buy him cigars 

and pour rum down his throat. I went to ceremonies with 

shamans, too.” 

Away from drugs and effigies, he found time to explore. 

The volcanic Lake Atitlán – which he excitedly notes was 

praised by Aldous Huxley in his 1934 travel book Beyond 

The Mexique Bay – was a favourite spot. “It’s a really 

simple life, a place you can be left alone. That tied in with 

me recharging.” 

The recharging was necessary. Grasshopper and 

singer Jonathan Donahue began making music together 

in Buffalo, New York in the late-80s, and their first proper 

gigs as Mercury Rev included an appearance at the 1991 

Reading Festival alongside the ascendant Nirvana, and 

a support slot at Yale University with Bob Dylan, who 

watched in a hoodie from the side of the stage. 

Their odd trajectory continued as they quickly became 

submerged in a toxic world of infighting, chaos and drugs. 

“Our relationship gets 

stronger the more we 

go through: with all these 

battle scars you feel you’re 

gonna make it together” 

Legend has it that either original vocalist Dave Baker or 

Donahue once tried to gouge Grasshopper’s eye out with 

a spoon. The UK press lapped them up just as much as 

it did Nirvana, Mudhoney or Dinosaur Jr., and a 1991 

interview in Melody Maker revealed how Grasshopper’s 

mother had said one of their gigs was so good it “induced 

orgasm”. Years later, Frances Bean Cobain would admit 

she was “more into” Mercury Rev than her late father’s 

band. 

After 1993’s wild second album Boces – complete 

with a children’s choir, trippy field recordings and jazz 

– irreconcilable slanging matches forced Baker out and 

prompted a shift towards a mellower, rootsier sound. 

Even so, the mid-90s saw Grasshopper resort to visiting a 

Spanish monastery in search of his sanity, while Donahue 

suffered a heroin-induced breakdown. 

Their fourth album, Deserter’s Songs, belatedly brought 

mainstream success in 1998, resulting in 10 exhausting 

years spent working constantly, making the most of 

newfound stability. But, once they’d finished touring 

2008’s Snowflake Midnight, they resolved to take time 

off. “We needed a breather to reconnect and reignite the 

engines,” says Grasshopper. 

He and Donahue are best friends who – if you believe 

a couple of 90s interviews with Melody Maker and 

NME – met as kids at summer camp for delinquents 

when Grasshopper was throwing dead squirrels and 

rats into a lawnmower. They live 90 miles north of 

New York in the shadow of the Catskill Mountains, in a 

town where lost bears are often seen rifling through 

rubbish bins. They hung out a lot while on their break, 

playing the odd festival and tentatively working on new 

music, but personal circumstances turned relaxation into 

more turbulence. 

“My mother had Alzheimer’s disease, so I was taking 

care of her,” Grasshopper says in his slow drawl. “Then, 

in 2011, Hurricane Irene wiped out Jonathan’s house and 

washed everything away, so we lost a lot of music. It was 

a big kick in the stomach.” 

For a band that has always run on the telepathic energy 

between its two main creative powers, this represented a 

real stumbling block. Both were approaching 50, could 

they still hack it? 

“Our relationship gets stronger the more we go through; 

with all these battle scars you feel you’re gonna make it 

together. You have that bond,” Grasshopper answers. 

Still, they took until 2013 to start work on The Light 

In You in their basement studio. Released last September, 

it’s their first album without long-time producer Dave 

Fridmann and mashes together earthy soundscapes with 

rock ‘n’ roll, boogie and soul. Grasshopper reckons this 

shouldn’t surprise people, given they released a version 

of Sly And The Family Stone’s If You Want Me To Stay as 

far back as 1992. 

Donahue and Grasshopper’s ingrained communication 

methods don’t allow for giving each other advice (“we’ve 

never done that”), so both men dumped their baggage 

into the record. It charts the story of a character who’s 

devastated at the outset, but who is saved by the 

restorative power of music by the end. 

The plaintive Amelie references Donahue’s addiction 

(“I’ll break the habit… It’s my last score”), You’ve Gone 

With So Little For So Long is dark and symphonic and the 

giant brushstrokes of Central Park East paint a vivid picture 

of isolation. You can almost feel the rain and wind gusting 

through Autumn’s In The Air, which acts as a bridge to 

the relatively bonkers grooviness of Are You Ready? and 

Rainy Day Record. Both feel outlandishly upbeat and the 

latter finds the usually maudlin Donahue rapping about 

listening to his favourite albums on vinyl (“Talk Talk, Felt, 

Romeo Void/Give me The Fall ‘I’m totally wired’”). 

Grasshopper remembers the studio time as almost 

wordless: “Neil Young used to say this a lot, but it felt 

like the songs were being transmitted to us and we were 

just playing them. We didn’t need discussion.” While 

there wasn’t much conversation, there was rediscovery, 

of both resilience and the transportive power of Mercury 

Rev’s sound. Grasshopper compares it to a drug, and has 

research to back him up: “I was reading about a study 

of musicians’ brains that said, while they were playing, 

scans of their brains looked very much like they were in a 

dream state like drugs would induce.” 

Mercury Rev have been chasing this feeling for 30 

years; indeed, they believe it’s the reason they exist at 

all. The toll of pursuing it ultimately led to a seven-year 

break, but still they carry on. “Jonathan and I are both 

on a search for meaning, asking, ‘What are we gonna 

make of our time on earth?’,” Grasshopper continues. 

Suddenly, birdsong is audible in the background, as if to 

chime deliberately with his mysticism. “It’s about visceral 

energy and electricity. We try to get people to that place 

we go when we make music, to lose themselves.” 

Before he hangs up, Grasshopper admits he’s unsure 

how they’ve made it this far. “It’s weird, you blink your 

eyes and you’re 18, you blink them again and you’re 49. 

We’re stuck in a space-time continuum.” 

Somehow, Mercury Rev continue 

mercuryrev.com 

WRITTEN BY BEN HOMEWOOD 

ORBIT STAGE 

SUNDAY 

26 | OBSERVE

LONELADY 

LONELADY is on the move. 

“I’m packing down my studio at the moment,” 

she explains, “so I’m surrounded by boxes and 

cables and God knows what else.” 

The studio she refers to is also her home: a 

flat in a Manchester tower block. It’s where she recorded 

her two albums for Warp – where the tight, tachycardiac 

pop of 2010’s Nerve Up transformed into the deeper 

post-punk pulse of last year’s Hinterland. It’s where her 

fascination for the bleak backdrops of un-regenerated, 

outlying Manchester became an obsession that mutated 

into her muse. And it’s where her own personal 

metamorphosis – from LoneLady to Julie Campbell and 

back again – occurs daily. 

As a jocular aside, we suggest that perhaps she’s 

decamping to “a garden suburb in Cheshire or something”. 

“No,” she replies, recoiling at the very idea. 

“Absolutely not.” 

No one who knows the desiccated urban groove of 

Hinterland could be surprised at Campbell’s emphatic 

denial. Hers is sparse and anxious music that resonates 

with the reflected echoes of Manchester’s forgotten 

zones. If she ever found herself pruning roses around a 

quaint cottage doorway, it would surely be a sign that her 

musical powers had gone absent without leave. 

With this in mind, we ask Campbell what Manchester 

means to her. 

“Hinterland is obsessed with that question,” she 

says. “I’ve never lived anywhere else and I try to make 

something creative out of the resources I’ve got. Those 

resources are Manchester’s post-industrial outskirts, the 

canal towpaths, the industrial landscapes – that’s what 

I find inspiring.” 

If the album’s title refers to the Manchester that lies 

beyond the buzz and bling of its busy central districts, 

does it also hint at a more personal sense of isolation? 

“Yes,” agrees Campbell, “it’s tied to that idea of always 

feeling like an outsider. That translates to the city, too. I 

don’t really want to be in the centre of Manchester; there’s 

nothing to do there but shop and spend money. When I 

was writing the record I found myself walking a lot – long 

walks through the slightly dilapidated outskirts – and that 

reflected how I was feeling at the time. All that fed into the 

music. It’s about where you feel you belong, and I belong 

in these supposedly unremarkable, bleak landscapes.” 

It’s clear then that specific physical spaces matter a lot 

to Campbell, but where on pop’s timeline might we find 

her musical influences? 

“It’s about where you feel you belong, 

and I belong in these supposedly 

unremarkable, bleak landscapes” 

“I’ve always been influenced by post-punk. I still love 

those bands – Wire and Gang Of Four are key ones 

for me. I used to really love early REM and I think that 

informed my early music as well, but when I discovered 

the British post-punk bands I really felt like I’d come home. 

Particularly the northern bands – I felt I recognised the 

musical language they were using.” 

The debut LoneLady album, Nerve Up, shares a spiky 

dance-pop skeleton with Hinterland, but, although the 

rhythmic scratch and scrape of both records is clearly 

rooted in the sound of those early-80s innovators, 

Campbell also credits necessity as the mother of Nerve 

Up’s invention. 

“That first record was very much informed by the 

minimal set-up I had at the time,” she says. “I was having 

to be resourceful and it meant I couldn’t do loads of 

overdubs, I just had to be really inventive, and I think that 

formed the blueprint for an economical sound.” 

By playing every instrument except for drums herself, 

Campbell retains creative control over her output, 

although in the case of Hinterland it took a trip way 

beyond Manchester for the final elements to be applied. 

“I’d been working on it alone for a good 18 months 

and going absolutely stir crazy – my studio is also my 

bedroom, so it was a very immersive, internalised process. 

It was really helpful to finish 

off the record somewhere 

dramatically different, so I 

ended up working with Bill 

Skibbe in Michigan. 

“I sent him the record and 

said, ‘Look, this is finished. I 

don’t want anyone meddling 

with the sound or anything’. 

He was really sensitive to 

that and said we should just underpin it with some subtle 

processes to give it a bit more oomph. We did it back to 

front, really. I pretty much finished it at home and then 

went into a studio just to do the finishing touches.” 

The completion of a record capable of elbowing its 

way into almost every album of the year list is one thing, 

but turning such a self-created work into a powerful stage 

experience is another. Yet LoneLady toured Hinterland to 

great acclaim during 2015 and, although she says she’s 

now back in a writing phase, she’s still keen to get out 

there and play. 

“After I finished the record,” she says, “I had to pull it 

apart again and look at all the arrangements. It would 

have been all too easy to just play backing tracks from 

a laptop, but I really didn’t want to play live like that. I 

wanted to keep it tactile and real. So, at the moment, the 

band is a four-piece, which is the most people I’ve ever 

had on stage. 

“It’s gone pretty well. The live shows last year felt really 

energised and I was getting a lot of that back off the 

audience, too, which is a good sign.” 

For an artist who spends most of her time in her 

own head, Campbell seems surprisingly ready to head 

out to bluedot. 

“I really like it on the road,” she says. “I like the 

camaraderie in the van and stuff like that. It’s a lot more 

fun than being a solo artist, which is quite hard work a 

lot of the time.” 

So if you want to get a taste of this exhilarating live 

experience, now is the time to do it – because LoneLady, 

as we said, is on the move. And, as long as there’s a 

rain-stained concrete vista to enjoy, who knows where her 

circuitous civic wanderings will take her next? 

concrete-retreat.tumblr.com 


ORBIT STAGE 

SATURDAY 


MI MYE 

When Jamie Lockhart, the driving force 

behind cinematic lo-fi folk group MI MYE, 

first moved to Wakefield as an 18-year-old 

pop music student, he knew nothing of the 

area’s rich musical history. In many ways, 

his childhood in the small fishing village of Skerray, on 

the north coast of Scotland, was like a smaller-scale 

version of the Yorkshire city’s creative community. 

Growing up in such isolation was, he says, “amazing”. 

“There was so much space and I could make so much 

noise,” he explains. It was through his parents that he 

was able to interact with other musicians, taking full 

advantage of those who came through town to perform 

at the village hall that they ran like “a little arts venue”. 

“Throughout the summer there would be different bands 

and musicians coming through all the time,” Jamie recalls. 

“They would all stay at our house and I would bug them 

about how they did stuff.” 

Down in Wakefield, he discovered a similar attitude. 

“The gigs were great and you could try stuff out, people 

were always really supportive,” he says. “It’s still the 

same with lots of really cool people doing cool stuff, not 

just with music, but with lots of different things.” 

Mi Mye, his solo project turned full band endeavour, 

may not yet be a household name, but Jamie has rubbed 

shoulders with some of the biggest names in both 

alternative and mainstream music as a producer and 

engineer. There have been lessons to learn from all of 

them, he says, whether that is just marvelling at The Cribs’ 

ability to get things done “in one take”, or to remember 

“Lots of people told me about 

Hemingway and how he would write 

the most precisely worded 

sentences to get the story across” 

not to take things so seriously and have a laugh like 

Pulled Apart By Horses do. “I also stole their guitar tuning 

for a lot of the new Mi Mye record,” Jamie admits. 

Perhaps his most surprising collaboration of all was 

with Ellie Goulding. “[She] was so precise with her vocals 

in the studio, it made me understand just what level you 

have to be at,” he says. 

With Mi Mye, Jamie has made three studio albums, 

with the fourth, The Sympathy Sigh, due for release 

in August. On it, he decided to bring his bandmates 

fully into the fold and work as a 

whole band from the very start, 

as opposed to drafting them in 

for bits and pieces. Jamie also 

changed the way he approached 

his lyrics, opting to switch from 

stream-of-consciousness musing 

to something more direct, 

taking influence from Ernest 

Hemingway’s The Old Man And 

The Sea for the process. 

“Lots of people told me about 

Hemingway and how he would 

write the most precisely worded sentences to get the 

story across,” Jamie explains. “He would make sure it 

was as straightforward and meaningful as possible.” 

One of Jamie’s strongest attributes as a songwriter 

is his ability to weave stories, so the challenge in adjusting 

his approach was not to lose that knack and to tell those 

tales “in a different way”. To do this, he also broadened 

the horizons of what he allowed himself to write about. “I 

didn’t feel it had to be about love or loneliness, so I had 

everything else to write about,” he says. 

As a result some of the themes of the album are more 

thought provoking and complex. Religion and work crop 

up time and again, with the songs exploring the idea 

that either notion has “a right to part of you and have a 

control over you”. Methadone Church, Jamie says, is “a 

play on the dependent nature of both; a juxtaposition of 

something demonised and despaired of with another that 

centres so largely around the idea of salvation.” There’s 

Determan The Extent, too, which he says is about being 

“so tired from working too hard”. 

Mi Mye’s songs are full of an intense energy – 

simultaneously sparse and stirring – but Jamie’s decided 

to bring them even more to life, and embody that 

bustling creative spirit of Wakefield even further, with 

a short film to accompany each track. The clips were 

made in collaboration with Jamie’s father, filmmaker and 

artist Gavin Lockhart, and stem from stories created by 

the band. “For each song we wrote a short paragraph,” 

Jamie explains. “These paragraphs weren’t always 

necessarily about the song, but sometimes about an 

idea that happens when you hear a part of [something]. 

We thought it would be a cool thing to make a short 

piece of music based on each paragraph and 

the song, and then [use] both of those as inspiration 

[to make] short films for each. I wanted to play with the 

fact that a song can seem to be about so many things to 

different people.” 

mimye.bandcamp.com 

WRITTEN BY RHIAN DALY 

PHOTO BY FRANCESCA ALLEN 

ROOTS STAGE 

SATURDAY 

28 | OBSERVE

BEYOND THE 

WIZARDS SLEEVE 

BEYOND THE WIZARDS SLEEVE is a Robert 

Crumb cartoon that never got drawn and 

instead found life as two humans making discopsych. 

Erol Alkan, thrower of the legendary 

Trash parties in the 00s, met Richard Norris, 

of chart-harassing 90s techno outsiders The Grid. They 

compared notes, then swapped records and mixes. 

As their name suggests, the product of this exchange 

is sexy and cosmic, mined from a treasure trove of 

ear-expanding jams. Their various ‘reanimations’ gave 

a danceable thump and fluorescent buzz to the guitar 

music of the new century. Remember the fictional band in 

LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge who sold their 

guitars and bought turntables, sold turntables and bought 

guitars? Alkan and Norris ran the pawn shop. They 

taught a new generation to hover more slowly, and see 

lurid crap in the bargain bin for its true potential. They 

arrive at bluedot with a first album of original music, 

The Soft Bounce, up their, err, sleeves. They will also be in 

conversation with BAFTA Award-winning director Kieran 

Evans before a screening of his short film And So To 

Sleep, an elegant monochrome affair that accompanies 

their new album. 

How did it feel rediscovering Beyond The Wizards Sleeve, 

from the perspective of making original material? 

Erol Alkan: “It was an unexpected joy. I’ve been frustrated 

with original music in the past. I perhaps placed an 

unhealthy expectation on what it should be. This time 

around, that part of my brain was quite relaxed.” 

Richard Norris: “When we started BTWS we were 

checking out each other’s musical taste, with an accent on 

outsider music. We’d make compilations and swap them, 

then started DJing seven-hour back-to-back sessions. The 

next step was to edit, stretching out sections or losing the 

cheesy chorus, and from then we got asked to remix tracks. 

The jump towards making our own stuff felt natural. It took 

a while for a number of reasons, but after reanimating the 

entire Temples album [2014’s Sun Restructured], where we 

added a bunch of new parts, it felt right to finally bring our 

own music out.” 

EA: “You can instantly feel when something is right, and 

know you are onto something if you get goose bumps. It’s 

hard to separate the spectator side of yourself from the 

creator, but you need to.” 

You guys were arguably curators-in-chief when the remix 

at the top of Hype Machine was the coolest thing around. 

Do you ever feel that ‘you might also like…’ algorithms are 

stepping on your turf, or are they mechanical allies? 

RN: “I’ve been down many a YouTube wormhole and come 

up with all kinds of tracks I didn’t know I was looking for. I 

love the endless nature of this.” 

EA: “You need to take it with a pinch of salt and expect 

the algorithm to get it wrong, but you can be pleasantly 

surprised. I’m all for it – humans get things wrong all the 

time. I’m enjoying discovering music, new or old, pulling 

at the threads of a new genre or sound, and it leading to 

undiscovered music. The digital age has gifted this to us 

and it’s a wonderful thing. Sharing it with others is the true 

joy, and when others share it with you.” 

RN: “I don’t think they’ve come up with an algorithm 

that I can ask, ‘Hey, play me some music, based on my 

taste, that you know about as I’ve been buying records 

from you for decades, that I’m likely to enjoy this week’. 

You aren’t going to be able to replace that [human touch] 

with a computer.” 

Erik ‘Ripley’ Johnson of Moon Duo (also on the bluedot 

bill) was an IT systems administrator before his music 

career took off. Are either of you any good at thinking 

scientifically? 

RN: “I think Erol is more equipped to answer this one – he 

was an ace with computers from a young age.” 

EA: “I was quite advanced at maths. At 13 I was fixing 

the computers at school and had learned machine code 

and ASCII so could write programs and hack games. 

Maths has played a big part throughout my life; I see 

and hear the maths in music, much like when people say 

they can ‘hear the colour of sound’, which I feel is quite 

common. I started producing music on computers by the 

age of 15 and recently found a cassette of my first track 

made on an Amiga.” 

“You need to take it 

with a pinch of salt and 

expect the algorithm to 

get it wrong, but you can 

be pleasantly surprised” 

What do you find most interesting out there on the 

boundary between science and psychedelia? 

EA: “This may not count, but it’s the embrace of the 

Zodiac; maybe our lives are written in the stars before 

we are even born.” 

Along similar astral lines, in your previous life with The 

Grid, Richard, you worked with Sun Ra. What was that 

like? 

RN: “He sent us a collage he’d made himself with the stars, 

moon and sun on it, plus some incense and a DAT tape. 

Unfortunately it got confiscated at customs, never to be 

seen again, so he had to re-record the DAT. I still have 

it – he’s talking for a long time, his own space wisdom, 

bits of the Bible, bits of ancient knowledge. You can hear 

a synth burbling away and a sax player in the next room. 

What a guy.” 

Richard, you’ll also be playing at bluedot with Martin 

Dubka as CIRCLE SKY. With Erol, your sets have this 

almost collegiate intimacy. Are Circle Sky’s live analogue 

adventures going to be more about full-body annihilation? 

RN: “The writer John Higgs has been talking about the 

dearth of non-dystopian futures in culture. The futures of 

days past seemed much more optimistic, and he argues 

that we need positive imaginings of the future to move 

forward. I agree. So it may be visceral, but not alienating… 

more of a hypnotic acid-house party – everyone can join 

in. A great live electronic show is all-encompassing – you 

can get fully immersed, it surrounds you and draws you 

right in. The ebb and flow, the sound, the lights, all have to 

work together. It’s also fun to have things that will evolve 

and change every night. Circle Sky tracks mutate as we 

go along.” 

That sounds a bit like early Factory Floor, when they were 

still about this wild texture and big throbbing pulse. 

RN: “Huge pulses are our lifeblood! We hooked up as I 

saw Martin play a few live analogue/modular sets that 

really blew my mind. I’d never heard such a well-crafted, 

throbbing noise played on this gear before. He made 

the whole thing up on the spot, but it sounded like 

finished tunes. Our sound together mixes this with my 

hardware, plus a bunch of lights, films and lasers. 

We’re playing in a dome [the Nebula Stage] at bluedot. 

Hopefully it will levitate!” 

soundcloud.com/beyond-the-wizards-sleeve 

WRITTEN BY EDGAR SMITH 

ORBIT STAGE 

SUNDAY 


orbit stage highlights 

MOON DUO | SATURDAY 

Initially formed as a side-project by Wooden Shjips guitarist Erik 

‘Ripley’ Johnson and his partner, Sanae Yamada, MOON DUO 

have since become a stripped-down psych-meets-Suicide force of 

their own. Over several EPs and three albums – the most recent 

being 2015’s critically acclaimed Shadow Of The Sun – their 

minimal, primal drone ‘n’ roll has been honed to perfection. The 

addition of drummer John Jeffrey in 2013 added a garage-rock 

attack to their previously metronomic krautrock keel, taking them 

into previously uncharted rhythmic realms. 

DJ SHADOW | SATURDAY 

Exactly four weeks after the release of his fifth album, a man who 

scratched and sampled his way to the forefront of hip 

hop’s global consciousness will perform in support of 

a record he considers to be a significant departure. 

DJ SHADOW has stressed that a handful of songs on 

The Mountain Will Fall are totally sample-free, while the album 

also features collaborations with Run The Jewels and Nils Frahm. 

Whatever he does, the Californian (real name Joshua Paul Davis) 

will bring booming beats and head-spinning dexterity. 

FLOATING POINTS | SATURDAY 

When he’s not gaining a PhD in neuroscience, FLOATING POINTS 

(aka Sam Shepherd) melds together influences from classical, 

jazz, electronica and soul. It’s a clever, complex and left-field 

combination, one that can be beautiful and thought-provoking 

one minute and encouraging you to get up and move the next. 

Shepherd’s live shows come with orchestral backing, hypnotising 

visuals and new takes on songs from his debut album (last year’s 

hugely acclaimed Elaenia) via the freedom of his often improvised 

performances. 

BRITISH SEA POWER | SUNDAY 

BRITISH SEA POWER are no strangers to Jodrell Bank. In 2011, they 

performed at Transmission 001 on site, the Lovell telescope adding 

an extra element of awe to their already bold live show. Their return 

five years on promises to be just as inventive – the band’s most 

recent release, Sea Of Brass, saw them reimagine their older songs 

with the aid of brass bands, while their gigs can feature anything 

from sudden attacks of foliage to seven-foot polar bear guests. 

30 | OBSERVE

oots stage highlights 

BARRY HYDE | SATURDAY 

As frontman with Sunderland post-punk yelpers The Futureheads, 

BARRY HYDE briefly found fame in the mid-00s with a cover of 

Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love. His debut solo album Malody, 

released via PledgeMusic, couldn’t be further removed. Instead of 

four-part harmonies, it is a melodramatic collision of piano, violin, 

cello, double bass, saxophone, pedal steel and trumpet. Hyde has 

described this incredibly candid record as “bipolar” and revealed 

how the making of it played a massive part in his recovery from 

serious mental health problems. 

FENNE LILY | SATURDAY 

Before Laura Marling discovered effects pedals and the deeper 

recesses of Neil Young’s back catalogue, she was making music 

like FENNE LILY’s. So far the 19-year-old has only released one 

song, but Top To Toe is wracked with more than enough emotional 

turmoil to be going on with. As her guitar gently weeps in the 

background, she sighs out resigned-sounding lines like, “You tell me 

I’m a child and take my light”. There’s only one way to find out why 

she sounds so fed up. 

ALTAR HANGLANDS | SUNDAY 

Named after the beautiful and quaint setting of the Castor 

Hanglands, ALTAR HANGLANDS is the work of Leeds-based singer 

Harry Ridgway. Harry began this project at the beginning of the 

year and has come up with a sound that is rich with emotion and 

tranquil melodious simplicity. His quivering and soothing vocals 

float up upon his delicate, fragile, acoustic guitar. After completing 

a sold-out tour of Germany, Ridgway will be looking to capitalise 

on the poignant and serene setting that bluedot creates for him. 

BLAIR DUNLOP | SUNDAY 

Cult hero BLAIR DUNLOP takes the intimacy and emotional honesty 

that has vitalised the folk tradition from time immemorial and sets of in 

a contemporary direction. His first two LPs have sent murmurs of firm 

approval throughout audiences and the biggest titles in music media 

alike. Having recently created his own label, the young singersongwriter 

is set to cross the threshold into the next phase of his 

promising career. Catch him at this exciting stage in his journey on 

the Roots Stage. 


THE INFINITE MONKEY CAGE 

When is a strawberry dead? 

You’ve probably never considered 

this before, even as you’ve chewed and 

digested one, washing it down with a 

dollop of cream and a slurp of Pimm’s. 

Thankfully, you don’t have to give it much thought as the 

plight of this most summery of fruits is a regular topic 

for discussion on the award-winning BBC Radio 4 show 

THE INFINITE MONKEY CAGE. Running since 2009, the 

massively popular show is steered through conversations 

that cover the whole gamut of scientific thinking with an 

irreverent yet respectful touch by its hosts, comedian 

Robin Ince and astrophysicist Brian Cox. The pair are 

regularly joined in these scientific diversions by academic 

and comedic guests – including some who are both 

academic and comedic – to pick apart the latest theories 

in our understanding of the world in a way that’s easily 

accessible and quite funny. Reality, climate change, the 

maths of love, artificial intelligence and race are all on 

the agenda, as well as the regular staples of quantum 

theory and cosmology. And strawberries. 

So how does a radio talk show about science come 

to command a global army of fans (‘Monkey Cagers’), 

regularly fill out auditoriums on live tours and become one 

of the BBC’s most downloaded podcasts – all without the 

aid of pretty pictures of stars and galaxies? Undoubtedly 

Brian Cox’s star appeal (geddit?) is a major factor, as 

is the stature of their guests: Richard Dawkins, Stephen 

Fry, Patrick Stewart and Alan Moore have all ventured 

inside the Cage at various points. But to dismiss the 

show’s popularity as being solely down to Cox’s celebrity 

presence is to miss the point about our own curiosity and 

desire for knowledge. “That’s a real underrated thing,” 

says Robin Ince in response to this question about human 

inquisitiveness. “There’s been a huge presumption of the 

stupidity of people and the lack of curiosity, but if you 

give them something to be curious about, I think more 

often than not they will rise to that.” 

There’s also a lot to be said for the hosts’ chemistry in 

why the Monkey Cage proves so popular, which brings a 

Pythonesque edge to proceedings. Ince frequently pokes 

fun at Cox’s ‘rock star’ past and newfound popularity 

as the poster boy for popular science, while Cox seems 

to enjoy being let off the leash to tackle new problems 

and quiz guests with youthful glee. English and Drama 

graduate Ince also acts as a bridge for the lay listener 

without a scientific background: what he calls a “keen 

idiot” – someone who’s very interested in science, but 

doesn’t know very much about spontaneous symmetry 

breaking in the electroweak sector of the standard model. 

Put simply, the beauty of the Monkey Cage is that they 

make ideas just exciting enough that you want to go the 

next step yourself. 

“One month you’re getting letters 

from farm labourers, the next month 

you’re getting a note from someone 

who’s won a Nobel Prize” 

“You can be serious without being po-faced, and you 

can also be frivolous sometimes with big ideas,” says 

Ince. “And we’re not trying to do anything more than just 

excite people as much as Brian and I are excited by the 

idea ourselves, and I think that’s why it works. Overall, 

the passion and the genuine excitement about ideas 

will infect people. What we’re hoping is that people go 

‘Oh, right, I need to know more about that’.” 

“We don’t really script it,” continues Ince in explanation 

of the loose, relaxed feel of the shows, which stops them 

feeling too weighty. “Basically, we sit down and decide 

what the various ideas and themes are going to be for a 

series, and then we just leave it. When we’re recording, 

we normally don’t get past the first section, but we always 

imagine there’ll be this almost narrative-arc of science… 

but then Brian asks the wrong question first and we’re all 

over the shop.” 

This is an approach that encourages you to open 

your mind to things you’ve not considered before – like 

gravity being a quirk of the curvature of spacetime rather 

than an actual force. It also attracts a fairly eclectic 

range of interested listeners, as Ince explains: “We get 

people who are your Radio 4 listeners – you know, a 

53-year-old listening to The Archers while painting their 

croquet set, or whatever it is – and we actually get truck 

drivers writing to us because they listen to it at night; 

they’ve either downloaded it 

or sometimes they’re listening 

to it on the late-night repeat. 

One month you’re getting 

letters from farm labourers, the 

next month you’re getting a 

note from someone who’s won 

a Nobel Prize.” 

It must be a fine line to 

tread, therefore, in treating 

their listeners with respect and 

not coming across as overly 

preachy. “We weren’t overly conscious about it [from 

the outset], but we wanted to make sure we didn’t talk 

down to people,” Ince confirms, which mirrors the way he 

views his stand-up routines. “I think, in terms of the way 

that I approach an audience, it’s the same; which is 

that I don’t presume. We wanted to make the kind 

of show – and I think I hopefully do the same in 

stand-up, and Brian does the same in his documentaries 

– which is, you give everyone enough information 

that they are able to get some kind of image, some 

kind of vision, some kind of understanding of what is 

going on.” 

With The Infinite Monkey Cage’s next appearance 

coming live on the main stage at bluedot, it would be safe 

to assume that the subject of Brian Cox running around 

on the dish of the Lovell telescope in a music video will 

be on the script. “Oh, of course I’ll be mentioning that 

D:Ream single no one remembers,” laughs Ince, who has 

his own reasons for feeling that this particular Monkey 

Cage will be a special one. “The last time I can remember 

having that sensation – that really physical sensation, in 

your mind, in your stomach – of seeing something of such 

beauty, was the Grand Canyon! And the Lovell telescope 

is something man-made by humans, and it’s remarkable. 

You are looking at a lot of human minds and a lot of 

endeavour, and you’re looking at something that came 

from a war; something that has the ability to pick up those 

radio waves, to understand pulsars and quasars, that’s 

rooted in some of the worst sides of humanity – but still, 

something that positive comes out of it.” 

Now, about those strawberries… 

infinitemonkeycage.com 

WRITTEN BY CHRISTOPHER TORPEY 

LOVELL STAGE 

FRIDAY 

32 | EXPLORE

“I Something in the revered author’s work had 

don’t like Alderley Edge,” said a friend 

of mine last night. “I don’t like it because of 

Alan Garner.” 

I could see in her eyes that she meant it. 

convinced her that an area of sought-after Cheshire real 

estate might harbour elemental forces that were better 

left untouched. It might not have been the glowing 

TripAdvisor review that Cheshire’s tourism chiefs would 

wish for, but there’s no denying the tribute to the power of 

Alan Garner’s extraordinary imagination. 

When Garner set his first novel, The Weirdstone Of 

Brisingamen, around Alderley Edge, he didn’t choose 

the sandstone escarpment’s environs on a whim. It was 

the landscape in which the stories he’d heard all his life 

were embedded. For him, it was an area rich in family 

history – vivid with a sense of generations walking the 

same paths, caressing the same stones. The book was 

the first transmission from a mind that was – and remains 

– attuned to stories that seem to seep out between the 

cracks in this very specific patch of earth. 

Since 1957, Garner has lived in Toad Hall – a medieval 

house a few miles south west of Alderley Edge, just beyond 

the shadow of the famous Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank. 

The telescope itself features in his 2012 novel Boneland, 

and Garner has spoken about the way the immense 

construction scoops up signals from the furthest depths 

of the universe’s past. As both an engineering wonder at 

the bottom of his garden, and a doorway opening onto 

a different perception of time, the telescope could almost 

have been built to form the backdrop to Alan Garner’s 

literary life. 

“When I found Alan’s 

work, it was a moment 

of connection. It was 

someone speaking the 

way I needed to be 

spoken to” 

FIRST LIGHT 

ALAN GARNER AND DEEP TIME 

It seems only right, then, that bluedot should pay 

tribute to Garner, which it will when the journalist and 

novelist Erica Wagner joins the director of the Jodrell 

Bank Discovery Centre, Teresa Anderson, for an onstage 

conversation about his work. Wagner has recently edited 

the book First Light, an anthology dedicated to writings 

about Garner by an eclectic array of contributors and, 

for her, it’s an opportunity to reconnect with a landscape 

and a subject that are both close to her heart. 

“I can’t wait,” she tells me. “It’s been too long since I’ve 

been to Jodrell and it looks like a fantastic festival. And 

also Teresa Anderson is one of those people who best 

demonstrates the idea that there really doesn’t have to be 

any kind of divide between the world of art and the world 

of science. One of the things I love about Jodrell is they 

really believe in breaking down those barriers, as do I.” 

While many British readers encounter Garner’s work 

at a young and impressionable age, Wagner’s story is 

different. Having grown up in New York, she moved to 

Britain 30 years ago, and it was while she was literary 

editor of The Times that Garner came into her life. 

“Garner isn’t really read in the United States in the 

way that he is here,” she says. “He’s considered a classic 

author here, someone who people read when they’re 

young, but I was not one of those people. So when The 

Stone Book Quartet was republished and sent to me at 

The Times, I was extremely struck by it. 

“The thing that drew me to Alan’s work, aside from 

his wonderful writing, was that the books occur in a real 

place. If we think about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, or Tolkien’s 

Middle Earth, or even George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, 

they’re fantasy places. There may be maps in the front of 

those books, but they’re not places you can go. But the 

map at the front of The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen is a 

map of Alderley Edge so, to me, he belongs to a much 

older and truly magical tradition of acknowledging that 

there is a spirit of place that is real. That was something 

I was already interested in, so when I found Alan’s work, 

it was a moment of connection. It was someone speaking 

the way I needed to be spoken to.” 

It was the beginning not only of a relationship with 

Garner’s work, but of a friendship that Wagner values 

to this day. 

“I went to interview Alan for the newspaper, and as 

a result I became very friendly with him and his wife, 

Griselda, and also got involved with The Blackden Trust, 

which they set up to support the educational work they’ve 

always been involved in. This is work that goes along with 

his writing, and includes the archaeological explorations 

that have happened around their house – a site that has 

been inhabited for at least the past 10,000 years.” 

When Wagner and Anderson hold their bluedot 

conversation, the book First Light will serve as both 

reference point and talisman, representing as it does 

the hold that Garner’s work has on so many minds. Not 

only were the likes of Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry and 

Philip Pullman eager to commit their thoughts to paper, 

but the book owes its existence to the individuals who 

contributed to its crowdfunding campaign. 

I suggest to Wagner that, although being a fan of a 

writer is one thing, editing an entire book dedicated to 

that one writer seems another order of fandom altogether, 

and I wonder what prompted such an act of devotion. 

“The simple answer is I was asked to do it,” she replies. 

“Alan turned 80 in 2014 and I had always been aware 

that there was a kind of network of people who felt very 

strongly about him. I would meet people in my literary 

world and say, ‘Do you know Alan Garner’s work?’ and 

they’d go, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ So I had quite a network of 

possibly unlikely people, but a lot of them were just names 

on my radar until this amazing project came about. 

“Then the wonderful crowdfunding publisher Unbound, 

together with The Blackden Trust, asked if I would edit 

this book. We had to raise the money but that happened 

incredibly quickly. It was wonderful to know, even before 

the book was published, that there were already these 

hundreds of people supporting it and eager to receive it.” 

But what is it about Garner’s work that so inspires 

people? Wagner is unequivocal in her response. 

“I think that there is no living writer like Alan,” she 

replies. “The way in which he has ploughed his own 

furrow, really doing something extraordinary with history, 

science and language, is just like nobody else. And 

perhaps that’s partly been his problem. At the beginning 

of the 21st century, everyone wants to say, ‘If you like X 

then you’ll like Y’, but he really is sui generis.” 

If anyone has the authority to make such a statement, 

it’s Wagner, but even my friend’s apparent unease at 

the thought of visiting Alderley Edge is testament to 

Garner’s singular vision. He is, so she says, a little too 

good at unearthing the mysterious power of place. But 

while she may not be impacting on the county’s visitor 

figures any time soon, it seems that many more are eager 

to make a Garner-inspired trip, and there’s no doubt that 

Alan Garner is a writer that Cheshire can be proud to 

call its own 


PHOTO BY JANIE AIREY 

CONTACT STAGE 

SATURDAY 


BE – ONE 

T 

he humble bee: life-spring of nature, ruiner of 

picnics, coloniser of Soleros and now, ticking 

off some species-wide bucket list, rock star. As 

anyone who’s ever been in The Fall will tell you, 

40,000 insects can make better bandmates 

than some musicians and, last year, Wolfgang Buttress set 

out to do just that. Tasked with building a pavilion on the 

topic of Feeding The Planet, Energy For Life for the Expo 

2015 exhibition in Milan, the Nottingham-based artist 

decided to focus on the plight of the bee, constructing a 

17-metre-high latticework sculpture called The Hive. 

“The honey bee is responsible for 30 per cent of 

the food we eat but it’s in crisis because of pesticides, 

the lack of biodiversity and monoculture,” he explains. 

“Rather than express it as a spectacle I wanted to express 

it as an experience. Inside this structure of The Hive was 

linked to a real beehive back in Nottingham and inside 

this real beehive we put things called accelerometers, 

which measure vibrations. Through these vibrations they 

send digital signals so we know what’s happening in 

real time inside the colony. We know whether the hive 

is busy, quiet, healthy, unhealthy. I had this idea that it’d 

be amazing if you could send these digital signals to a 

sculpture over in Milan and these would be expressed as 

light or sound. When you’re in The Hive, you’re inside the 

experience, you were feeling almost what it’s like to be a 

bee inside a hive.” 

But what, went the logical thought progression, if the 

bees were holding a jam festival? What if they could make 

the bees rock? Upon first lifting open a bee frame, Buttress 

was met with a low, visceral drone hum akin to a honeymaking 

Sunn 0))), and the musical possibilities struck him. 

“It was really deep, this amazing drone, and you get 

drones in cultures all over the world, from Aborigines to 

Eastern European music. It was an incredible sound, so I 

wanted to try to express this hum.” He gathered friends 

and the Nottingham hive’s owner – researcher Dr Martin 

Bencsik of Nottingham Trent University – into a studio 

streaming the sound of the bees and the magic that 

would become the mesmerising album Be One began 

to spark. Bencsik’s wife Deirdre, a classically trained 

cellist, noted that the bees were humming in the key of C 

and began playing along; Wolfgang’s daughter Camille 

started singing accompaniment. “Really quickly we had 

this amazing triangle of sound,” Wolfgang recalls, “the 

human voice, the sound of the bees, the sound of the 

cello, the most amazing sound.” 

Experimental rock artists swarmed (as it were) to the 

project. When guitarist Tony Foster played the bees’ 

music in Spiritualized’s studio, Jason Pierce offered 

his services on auto-harp, harmonium and guitar and 

helped recruit Sigur Rós’ string section Amiina to the 

cause. It’s a wonder no one asked noted pro-bee 

campaigner Liam Gallagher to get involved. “I didn’t 

know he was into bees,” Wolfgang says, “I’ll have to 

look into that!” 

With such star power in their backing band, the bees 

needed to assert their position at the top of the bill. So 

Buttress worked out a way they could actually play their 

own instruments. “We recorded a whole series of musical 

stems in the key of C, some violin parts, piano parts, a 

Mellotron, some vocals. In the Pavilion in Milan, at certain 

thresholds, certain frequencies, a noise gate would be 

opened by the energy of the bees back in Nottingham. 

Depending on the pitch it could be a violin, a guitar or a 

piano. We knew everything would be in harmony in the 

key of C, but it was completely fluid and fairly random 

in terms of human intervention. One of the most amazing 

things was the sense of letting go. In a way it was the 

bees who were choosing the symphony.” 

By then feeding the music the bees were making back 

into the hive, they created a cross-species version of 

Africa Express. “We think bees are virtually deaf, so we 

modulated some of the sounds, turned them back into 

vibrations, and then put an accelerometer back into the 

beehive to see how they would react to the music we 

were playing. If bees are scared or unhappy they tend 

to freeze, go very static and silent. But when we started 

playing the music back to them they started reacting 

back to it and you can hear some little tonal vibrations 

reacting to some of the music. This is the next part of the 

experimentation, to have this circular, almost jazz way of 

writing music with the bees. The sound of the bees would 

be played, the musicians would react to it, it’d go back 

into the beehive and the bees could potentially react to 

that, the whole thing is a circle.” 

“One of the most amazing things 

was the sense of letting go. In away 

it was the bees who were choosing 

the symphony” 

At bluedot, Wolfgang promises a “very immersive, 

slightly trippy” audio-visual 

experience whereby the 

album’s musicians play along to 

a live, surround-sound feed of 

bees accompanied by thermal 

images from the hive projected 

onto netting. 

Has he checked it’s not 

mating season? You might end 

up with every bee in a 10-mile 

radius descending on the gig. 

Wolfgang laughs. “That might happen, but when they 

do swarm, they don’t sting you. We collected a swarm 

recently to put them inside a cello, and they’ll swarm 

all over you but never sting you because the only thing 

they’re interested in is finding a new home or having sex. 

So if they do come in it’d be amazing, but they wouldn’t 

harm the audience.” 

It promises to be the buzz gig of the weekend (sorry), 

but what’s next for Wolfgang? The Beetles, surely? “We’re 

doing some stuff with the same musicians again, working 

with vibrations. The next one, the bass is coming from 

the earth, so we’re working with the national geological 

society, putting seismic meters into the earth to create 

the bass. Then we’re working with NASA on this other 

project where we’ve got two satellites on the sun 24-7 

and we’re getting signals from the flares on the sun, 

they’re creating the high end, the treble. The audience 

will be the interface between the bass of the earth and 

the treble from the sun.” 

Cosmic, dude… 

wolfgangbuttress.com 

WRITTEN BY MARK BEAUMONT 

ORBIT STAGE 

SUNDAY 

34 | EXPLORE

BRIAN ENO 

The ambient legend and renowned producer has designed a brand 

new installation especially for bluedot, to be beamed onto the iconic 

Lovell telescope. Conceived as ‘visual music’, the artwork is a constantlyevolving 

image-scape born from Eno’s continuous exploration into 

light as an artist’s medium and the aesthetic possibilities of generative 

software. He first created the piece to bring art to the increasing number 

of flat panel TVs and monitors that often sit darkened and under-utilised. 

At Jodrell Bank, it is being shown using large-scale projections to create 

an enormous outdoor visual installation. 

THE COLLIDE PROJECT PRESENTS: 

CONSTELLATIONS 

What can science learn from art, what can art learn from science? 

These questions will be addressed in a new way through the Collide 

Project, a brand new initiative for bluedot funded by Arts Council 

England. This will include a lead art piece entitled Constellations – a 

fiery star garden mapping real constellations of stars, created as a 

collaborative effort between arts specialists Walk The Plank and the 

astrophysicists at Jodrell Bank. Head to the Arboretum on Saturday 

and Sunday night after dark and marvel at this glimmering display of 

cosmic light. The project will also include nightly Star Tours of the piece 

and an associated panel discussion. 

KATENA LUMINARIUM 

Alan Parkinson’s immersive, womb-like KATENA LUMINARIUM offers 

you the chance to go and decompress if the sights and sounds of the 

festival become too much. The structure takes its name from the catenary 

curve, the shape of a chain suspended between two points, which 

was a motif that Gaudi used in his design of the Sagrada Familia. 

The catenary curve has a visual beauty that is echoed throughout 

nature, and its repetition throughout the brightly illuminated Katena 

Luminarium echoes the tranquillity of a Hindu temple. 

FILM 

Throughout the festival there will be screenings of classic and 

contemporary science fiction and space-themed films. This will include 

J.J. Abrams’ acclaimed recent reboot of the Star Wars franchise, 

The Force Awakens, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and 

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 

2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (the last 

Star Trek film to include all of the original cast) and Pixar’s moving and 

certainly not just for kids allegorical tale, Wall-E. 


MISSION CONTROL HIGHLIGHTS 

Hosted by the UK Space Agency, Mission Control is a celebration 

of UK’s achievements in the space sector in what is an important 

year, as Tim Peake became the first British astronaut to travel to the 

International Space Station. Panelists, keynote speakers and special 

guests will come together to discuss this milestone in British space 

exploration through a series of talks and workshops. 

The BBC had exclusive access to Tim Peake as he prepared for his 

mission to the International Space Station. This involved following 

Tim’s two-year training programme that took him across the world, to 

Moscow, Houston, Cologne and Baikonur. Supplemented by Tim’s own 

video diary, the result was a Horizon Special that revealed just what it 

took to be an astronaut. Producer Simon Winchcombe will introduce a 

special screening of the programme at bluedot, discussing how the 

show was made and taking questions from the audience. 

After dark, Mission Control becomes a playground for some the more 

intriguing elements on the bluedot bill, with a variety of DJ sets and 

cosmic musical deviations. 

DJ YODA GOES TO THE SCI-FI MOVIES 

DJ Yoda is a hip hop DJ and producer like no other. Globally respected 

for his turntablism, he performed at Banksy’s Dismaland and was firstchoice 

guest mixer on Dr Dre’s inaugural Beats 1 show. He is also 

able to chop and splice movies with the same dextrous style that he 

repurposes samples. Especially for bluedot, DJ Yoda will boldly go 

where no DJ has gone before and cut and paste his way through visual 

and audio samples of classic and cult science fiction films. 

HELLO MOON, CAN YOU HEAR ME? 

Music producers Jim Spencer and David Tolan joined forces with 

astrophysicist Tim O’Brien to remix sounds from space – including 

signals from spacecraft at the dawn of the space age and the death 

throes of an exploding star – to create a unique record released on the 

O Genesis label. The title echoes the recording of a voice bounced off 

the Moon, made more than 50 years ago at Jodrell Bank. They will talk 

about how the track was created, before it is played, accompanied by 

visuals from Dan Tombs. 

36 | EXPLORE

CONTACT STAGE HIGHLIGHTS 

HELEN KEEN: IT’S ROCKET SCIENCE 

Multi-award-winning writer, comedian and science enthusiast HELEN 

KEEN is the creator of the highly successful It’s Rocket Science show, 

an offbeat comic mash-up of space and science that attracted five-star 

reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe. She began her career by winning 

Channel 4’s New Comedy Writing Award, and has since been 

appointed an Innovation Fellow by Wired magazine, compèred the 

first-ever live comedy night at CERN (Large Hadron Comedy), and 

was invited to speak at the European Space Agency for their TEDx 

event. Helen will also host a space-themed panel quiz on the Sunday 

of bluedot. 

GO 8-BIT: WIFI WARS 

WIFI WARS is a live comedy game show where you’re invited to play 

along by logging in with your smartphone or tablet and compete 

in a range of games, quizzes and challenges. Hosted by comedian 

and regular videogames commentator Steve McNeil (Challenge TV’s 

Videogame Nation), an early version of the technology used in the 

show was developed by Rob Sedgebeer and was used in the live 

incarnation of McNeil and Sam Pamphilon’s Go 8-Bit videogaming/ 

comedy show. Perfect if you’ve always wanted to play Shooting Stars 

on your Amiga. 

JAMES VEITCH: DOT CON 

Suspicious emails: unclaimed insurance bonds, diamond-encrusted 

safety deposit boxes, close friends marooned in a foreign country. They 

pop-up in our inbox and standard procedure is to delete on sight. But 

what happens when you reply? JAMES VEITCH has spent the past year 

responding to as many scam emails as he can, and the correspondence 

leads to surprising, bizarre and usually hilarious results. Through a 

blend of traditional stand-up, interactive projections and music, Veitch 

turns the tables on these cyber con artists. 

ADAM KAY 

ADAM KAY is a comedian, writer and presenter with many strings to 

his bow, having sold out numerous Edinburgh Festivals and UK tours, 

won the London Cabaret Award, had over 10 million hits on YouTube 

(including the iconic London Underground Song) and had four number 

one albums in the iTunes comedy charts. He is also one of the country’s 

most sought-after comedy writers for TV, with numerous credits including 

as co-creator of BBC Three comedy Crims. 


The G’astronomy Village is no ordinary street 

food offering: prepare for a walk through a 

taste sensation of carefully curated cuisine, 

with top-quality, cosmos-inspired food and 

drink. With a bounty of meat-free and dairyfree 

offerings, veggie and vegan discoverers 

are set to be just as stuffed as anyone else. 

Sensory eating experiences will abound. 

RESTAURANT AT THE 

END OF THE UNIVERSE 

One of Britain’s most respected and acclaimed Michelin-star chefs, 

AIDEN BYRNE, has devised a galactic banquet especially for bluedot 

to take you on a space odyssey of experimental tastes. Along with his 

crew of culinary rocketeers, the man behind Manchester House and 

The Church Green in Lymm has taken his cues from astronomy, futurism 

and intergalactic travel in preparing this seven-course menu, for which 

gastronauts will dine in a pop-up restaurant in the shadow of the Lovell 

telescope. 

STARGAZER’S FEAST 

SUNDAY ROAST 

Stay up late and tuck into a scrumptious stargazer’s midnight feast 

beneath the canopy of stars. Give in to the temptation to indulge in 

succulent sharing boards, a selection of handmade picnic pies, nibbles 

and arancini smoked onion and truffle once the main-stage excitement 

draws to a close. Prepare to fill your stomachs and dig into a taste 

sensation, and afford yourself some time to wind down and reflect on 

the day’s performances. 

Join us for a Sunday roast banquet fit for kings and queens of all 

ages. The menu boasts traditional classics accompanied by beautiful 

local produce to create one of the best Sunday roasts on this planet. 

Delectable taste combinations are sure to send your stomach rocketing 

off into space: local beetroots and greens, Lancashire cheese, 28-dayaged 

beef sirloin, lentil shepherd’s pie. Where else are you going to find 

the most fabulous, futuristic Sunday roast but in the fields at bluedot? 

Additional booking is required for all dining options. Head to 

discoverthebluedot.com for full menus and further information 

38 | EXPLORE

Explorers of all ages will be well catered 

for at bluedot, with a fun-filled line-up of 

contemporary and classic entertainment 

that all the family can enjoy. There will be 

loads of chances to join in with a variety of 

tricks, brain illusions, carnivorous plants, 

giant bubbles and science superheroes. 

CLANGERS 

URBAN 

ASTRONAUT 

The whistling trill of the CLANGERS will be floating on the air at Jodrell 

Bank this summer, reminding many of us of a youth spent in fear of 

the Soup Dragon and wondering what blue string pudding tasted like. 

The BAFTA-award-winning TV show returned to the BBC last year, 47 

years after its first appearance, immediately becoming the UK’s no. 1 

children’s programme. Kids and big kids alike will be treated to swanee 

whistles, storytelling, guest appearances and a few surprises… 

Combining stunning design with simple storytelling, URBAN ASTRONAUT 

searches for a solution to the environmental disaster that is present 

in our near future through an enchanting piece of physical theatre. 

Performance company Highly Sprung bring a bold new approach to 

a global issue with this thought-provoking production choreographed 

around a unique flying machine. Each show offers a glimpse of a future 

where problems surrounding air pollution have grown to a crisis point, 

and asks: is there any way back? 

SCIENCE MADE SIMPLE 

POKING THE BRAIN 

The inspirational Science Made Simple team bring the brilliance 

of science to life with some high-energy interactive shows. IZZY’S 

INCREDIBLE ADVENTURE uses an explosive rocket and a reallife 

hovercraft to investigate the way we travel, while the massively 

popular BUBBLES AND BALLOONS stretches your beliefs about square 

bubbles and balloon helicopters. In addition, award-winning local 

maths communicator KATIE STECKLES introduces you to the beautifully 

intricate mathematical world of fractals. 

Always thought illusions were just for your eyes? Join Blue Peter scientist 

Steve Mould as he takes you on a remarkable tour of the world of 

illusions, using spectacular demos to demonstrate how they can affect 

your senses and make your mind boggle. Find out what makes purple 

peculiar, how you can see sound and what happens in the depths of 

the cone zone. Steve will also be doing a stand-up show with his fellow 

Festival Of The Spoken Nerd comic geek Helen Arney. 


STARGAZING 

“Look you, this brave o’erhanging 

firmament, this majestical roof 

fretted with golden fire.” 

Hamlet, William Shakespeare 

Our obsession with the stars is as old as humanity itself. 

Drawing upon this timeless impulse, bluedot’s Stargazing 

series is set to propel you into the cosmos. Stargaze as never 

before as our panel of experts guide you through late-night talks 

and tours of the night sky in the darker corners of Jodrell Bank. 

These will be headed up by bluedot’s resident cosmic expert 

TIM O’BRIEN, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of 

Manchester, and PETE LAWRENCE from the BBC’s Sky At Night. 

TIM O’BRIEN 

PETE LAWRENCE 

As well as chairing talks and introducing acts on the Lovell Stage, 

Jodrell Bank’s Associate Director will be hosting two extraordinary live 

links with two of the world’s leading observatories. One will be to 

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) sin the 

USA where the detection of gravitational waves was made earlier this 

year. The second will be to eminent scientist Christine Corbett Moran, 

who’s currently working in the extremes of the Antarctic darkness using 

the South Pole Telescope at the Amundsen-Scott research station. 

As well as being a presenter on the Sky At Night and an astronomical 

consultant for Stargazing Live, Pete Lawrence is a leading expert in 

astrophotography, capturing beautiful views of the sky. Pete will bring 

his great expertise and knowledge of the night sky to bluedot, showing 

off some of his most spectacular photographs of the universe – including 

the Northern Lights, Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun. 

40 | EXPERIMENT

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS 

Dissecting the science of ideas behind art and technology is on the 

menu at CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, with a series of talks from leading 

thinkers and authors giving us a glimpse of tomorrow’s world. 

Curated by Observer Science & Tech in association with ESOF 

(the EuroScience Open Forum, hosted this year by Manchester as 

the 2016 European City of Science) and FutureFest (a weekend 

festival of talks and immersive experiences designed to challenge 

perceptions of the future, run by UK innovation foundation Nesta), 

the programme will host debates on a range of topics, from why 

our brains love house music to why Buzz Aldrin hallucinated in 

space. Comma Press and Manchester University’s acclaimed 

Centre for New Writing will also host sci-fi short story readings 

and prose workshops, for those of a literary disposition. 

CERN PRESENTS 

THE COSMIC PIANO 

The endlessly tireless CERN scientists Dr Arturo Fernandez Tellez and 

Dr Guillermo Tejeda Muñoz have devised an electronic instrument that 

responds to messages from space. The COSMIC PIANO creates its 

symphony when a cosmic ray passes through one of its four detector 

pads, triggering a musical note and a colourful flash of light. The 

rays arrive from space in random intervals, providing Chicago jazz 

pianist Al Blatter with a unique canvas for improvising a cosmic duet of 

polyrhythmic jazz. 

MARC ABRAHAMS 

The founder of the Ig Nobel Prize, MARC ABRAHAMS, is a champion 

of the improbable. Through the annually awarded Ig Nobel Prizes, his 

weekly Improbable Research podcasts and his Annals of Improbable 

Research magazine, Marc aims to celebrate unusual and imaginative 

achievements in science, medicine, and technology that make people 

laugh, and then think. Marc Abrahams will be joined at bluedot by 

some famous faces (possibly even QI Elves) in reading some weird and 

wonderful prose from research papers from around the world, in a race 

against the clock. 

THE FUTURE OF 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 

It is readily accepted that we’re on the cusp of a great breakthrough 

in artificial intelligence, so how do we factor the inevitable rise of the 

machines into our plans for the future? One of the best people to explain 

how this will pan out is JESSICA BLAND, head of futures research at 

Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation. Covering technology trend 

insights and the ethics of machine learning, Jessica leads Nesta’s work 

on foresight methods, and her talk will give us an insight into a rapidly 

expanding field of technology. 

MUSIC, DANCING 

AND OXYTOCIN 

As a Principal Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of 

Westminster, Dr CATHERINE LOVEDAY has a long-term fascination with 

music in the brain. Having carried out a number of studies looking 

at the cognitive aspects of music processing, Catherine has recently 

begun investigating how memories of music are central to our sense 

of self, imagination, emotional state and social functioning, including 

the biggest-ever study of the selections made on BBC Radio 4’s Desert 

Island Discs. 


TICKETS 

WEEKEND AND CAMPING 

ADULT 

£129.00 

(plus booking fee) 

11-15 YRS 

£69.00 


CHILD 6-10 YRS 

£19.00 


FRIDAY 

CHILD 5 AND UNDER 

£10.00 


SATURDAY 

ADULT 

£35.00 



£25.00 


ADULT 

£59.00 



£25.00 


SUNDAY 

ADULT 

£49.00 


TICKET OUTLETS 

TICKETLINE.CO.UK 

TICKETMASTER.CO.UK 

SEETICKETS.COM 

KIDS GO FREE 

SKIDDLE.COM 

TICKETARENA.CO.UK 

DICE.FM 

Adult Ticket: For anyone aged 16 and older 

Child 6-15 yrs: Children up to and including the age of 

15 can attend but their parent or guardian must obtain 

a ticket for them and accompany them at all times. 

Must be accompanied by an adult aged 25 or over. 

Child 5 and Under: FREE 

Further ticket options for campervan access, furnished 

dome tents, yoga classes and Club Class areas (featuring 

‘posh’ showers and toilets and a pamper lounge) 

can be found at 

www.discoverthebluedot.com

LOCATION 

BLUEDOT IS HELD AT: 

Jodrell Bank Observatory, 

Bomish Lane, 

Cheshire, 

SK11 9DW 

TRAVELLING BY COACH 

The best way to get to the festival is by coach. 

BIG GREEN COACH, the Events Travel Company, is 

operating a variety of dedicated weekend and day return 

coach services to bluedot, operating from 19 locations: 

Birkenhead, Blackpool, Bradford, Bury, Chester, Crewe, 

Knutsford, Leeds, Liverpool, Macclesfield, Manchester, 

Nantwich, Northwich, Preston, Stafford, Stockport, 

Stoke-on-Trent, Warrington and Wigan. 

www.biggreencoach.co.uk 

DRIVE TIME 

Manchester - 35 minutes 

Manchester Airport - 20 minutes 

Liverpool - 1 hour 

Leeds - 1 hour 20 minutes 

Sheffield - 1 hour 30 minutes 

The Moon - 195 days 

Mars - 143 years 

Andromeda Galaxy - 2.5 million light-years 

Bluedot Festival 

22.23.24 July 2016 

Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, UK, Earth 

53.2363°N 2.3071°W 

For festival enquiries please email 

hello@discoverthebluedot.com 

www.discoverthebluedot.com 

Bluedot Volume 1 is a Bido Lito! publication 

www.bidolito.co.uk 

Publisher: Craig G Pennington 

Editor: Christopher Torpey 

Commissioning Editor: Nathaniel Cramp 

Designer: Thom Isom | thomisom.com 

Proofreader: Debra Williams | wordsanddeeds.co.uk 

Editorial team: Mark Beaumont, Jamie Bowman, 

Rhian Daly, Damon Fairclough, Becca Frankland, 

Joe Hatt, Ben Homewood, Edgar Smith, Sam Turner 

Additional photography: Keith Ainsworth | arkimages.co.uk 

Tom Martin | tmoose.co.uk 

For any enquiries about this publication please email 

info@bidolito.co.uk 

bluedot is proudly supported by:

Now Wave & Hey! Manchester 

Present: 

Julianna 

Barwick 

Creator of such minor masterpieces as — 

‘The Magic Place’, ‘Nepenthe’ and this year’s ‘Will’. 

+ 

Special Guests 

Tuesday 23rd August 2016 

The Deaf Institute 

Doors 7pm : £12.50 

Tickets — 

Songkick | See Tickets | Dice | Ticketline | Skiddle 

nowwave.co.uk | twitter.com/nowwave 

NOW WAVE PRESENTS 

WHITNEY 


A VERY SPECIAL NIGHT WITH 

+ 

SPECIAL GUESTS 

TUESDAY 8 NOVEMBER . GORILLA 

DOORS 7PM : £10 (14+) 

TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM : SONGKICK | SEE TICKETS | DICE | TICKETLINE | SKIDDLE 

NOWWAVE.CO.UK | TWITTER.COM/NOWWAVE 

O 2 

APOLLO MANCHESTER 

SATURDAY 

5th NOVEMBER 

£29.50 

TICKETS — TICKETMASTER | SEE TICKETS | SONGKICK 

NOWWAVE.CO.UK | TWITTER.COM/NOWWAVE


PAR 

QUET 

COUR 

TS 

+ EAGULLS 

MANCHESTER 

ACADEMY 2 

MONDAY 

£15 | 7PM (14+) 

TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM — 

SONGKICK | SEE TICKETS | DICE | TICKETLINE | SKIDDLE 

NOWWAVE.CO.UK 

10 OCTOBER 

TWITTER.COM/NOWWAVE 

Kevin 

Morby 

+ Special Guests 

The Deaf Institute 

Monday 22 August 

Doors 7.30pm : £10 

Tickets — 

Songkick | See Tickets | Dice | Ticketline | Skiddle 

nowwave.co.uk | twitter.com/nowwave 

Presented by 

Now Wave , Comfortable on a Tightrope 

& Hey! Manchester

Bluedot Volume1

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