161 words on Hurricane
Just watched the recorded documentary about this year’s Hurricane festival. It ran on the wonderful ‘culture’ channel arte. And while they didn’t show complete gigs (as MTV sort-of did in their live-coverage), I quite enjoyed it. In about two hours, they gave snippets from a large number of gigs (Billy Talent, Ben Harper, Seeed, Manu Chao, The Raconteurs, Wolfmother, Apocalyptica, The Cardigans, Hard-Fi, Maxïmo Park, The Strokes, Skin, Arctic Monkeys, Mando Diao, Adam Green, Tomte) along with interviews with the artists on their gigs or other topics.
But what I enjoyed most, was the quietness of the recordings. While MTV couldn’t resist cutting to a different camera every second or so, there were significantly less cuts here, giving you a chance to actually see what’s going (except in the Strokes gig where the strange lighting apparently made it impossible for the cameras which weren’t kicked down to focus properly). The benefit of public rather than purely commercial television, I suppose.