Trailer for a new documentary about composer Raymond Scott by his son, Stan Warnow. Sensoria Festival in Sheffield are premiering the film next Tuesday, with Warnow talking to Martyn Ware (Heaven 17) afterwards.

A little aching and fuzzy-headed today after a lovely few days in the Usk valley for Green Man festival. For the first time in three years we got a consistent view of the mountains around us, and barely a drop of drizzle until Monday morning. Our filmtent stuff went really well on the whole; very lively kids matinees, an attentive crowd for The Moon and the Sledgehammer, nice shambolic Sugarfoot boogying and a queue right across the field for British Sea Power, who did not disappoint. So exciting to be sat in a tent rammed with people watching a beautiful old movie with a great live band. A word also for Paul Shallcross, who accompanied silent comedy on Sunday morning and went down a treat. I had forgotten how brutal and hilarious Laurel and Hardy were in their pre-talkie days, and if hordes of children went on a destructive rampage that day it was probably our fault.

Of course we weren’t the only attraction of the weekend. Some of our highlights included -

> Beyond the Wizards Sleeve dj set, with lots of songs you’d never expect on a dancefloor and film-nerd visuals;
> Joe Boyd and Robyn Hitchcock in the lit tent (especially Boyd’s description of The Move live and Jac Holtzman’s subsequent ill-fated visit to the Mecca Ballroom in Edgbaston);
> seeing all sorts of people we haven’t seen for ages, many now with babies;
> The Dirty Three, with magnificent stage patter from Mr Warren Ellis;
> winning the Ashes;
> Equally good patter from David Thomas (Pere Ubu), looking and drinking a lot like Orson Welles;
> a bunch of very funny lads from Neath;
> swimming under a waterfall on the way home (I didn’t actually do this, but mrs 7inch said it was amazing);
> discovering the Nutrageous chocolate bar on the way home (who needs waterfalls?)

As you can tell from the pretty much universal acclaim on the GM forum, this was the year the festival came into its own. Not just decent weather but a great lineup, improved layout, reasonably priced booze, good stuff for kids and the overall attention to detail was terrific (eg, fresh loo-roll in the toilets on Monday morning). It also felt like a Welsh festival to me and not just a bunch of urbanites with a scenic backdrop like some events. All in all a rare pleasure.

Despite a shedload of work to get through, it’s been a rather euphoric day. As ever, the perfect soundtrack courtesy of Ken’s show on WFMU. Amongst others: I Shall be Released (Nina Simone); I’m Happy (Ivor Cutler); Ding Dong The Witch is Dead! (Klaus Nomi); etc… If you can handle three hours of jollity they’ll have the show archived in a couple of days.

Sounds like there’s plenty of potential for disaster or triumph here. The Bays improvise, the composers throw the score at the orchestra as they go along, and the conductor hopes for the best… The video below gives you a bit more of an idea, and this writeup. Catch it on Friday as part of Integra; not the kind of thing you see at the Custard Factory everyday.

The imminent arrival of Julian Cope at Town Hall next week has resurrected heady teenage days when I wore a homemade ‘Julian Cope is God’ tshirt, played Peggy Suicide to death and pored over his declarations in the NME. Cope’s freewheeling memoirs are still a joy to read, and a reminder that Monday is almost a homecoming gig. He grew up in Tamworth, fled to Liverpool as a student and tasted pop infamy with The Teardrop Explodes, then after the group broke up in the early 80s holed up in his hometown to nurse various paranoid complexes, accumulate a huge collection of toy cars and gradually rebuild his life. In one of his more mental solo songs ‘Reynard the Fox’ the backdrop is provided by childhood memories of the countryside east of Tamworth (see Paul Drummond’s map below), and long before he was writing scholarly tomes about megalithic Britain Cope was making up his own pre-history of the ‘Alvecote mound’, a slag-heap which now overlooks the M42. (Pictured on the cover of Fried with emblematic toy truck, above.)

The internet does boast a ‘Tamworth Bands Heritage Trail’, but there’s no mention of Cope in there (too posh? too weird?) so I decided to rectify this with a little help from Google Maps (in the process discovering that you can now attach video clips to specific locations, which is very exciting). Now that’s quite enough stalking, time to get on with some proper work…

I’m doing a bit of moonlighting this week, writing press releases for Moseley Folk fest at the end of August. One of their guests on the Sunday afternoon is Ian Campbell, father of Ali and Robin from UB40 and a godfather of Birmingham’s folk scene. Back in the 60s his Jug O’ Punch folk club round the back of Digbeth Civic Hall (now the Barfly) gathered all the big names on the revival circuit – including Paul Simon, who went on to cover Campbell’s ‘The Sun is Burning’. The club helped to spawn the Red Lion folk club in Kings Heath, which is still going strong today and pays host to Peggy Seeger and assorted Watersons this Saturday. Big events like last month’s Town Hall sell-out English Originals and Moseley Folk owe a lot to these smaller pub promoters, who kept the folk circuit ticking over through many years of unfashionability.

Anyway, all of this is obviously a very roundabout way of plugging the final event in our spring season. Also jumping on the folk bandwagon, on Sunday 18 May 7inch will be screening a lovely 1965 film about the Watersons; Travelling For a Living. The director Derrick Knight will be up to introduce the film, and you can read a wee interview we did with him here.