The festival season kicked off in earnest last weekend, with two of the biggest events of the summer, the Isle of Wight festival and Download. The Isle of Wight bash was actually the first of 12 UK music festivals that will be broadcast by Sky Arts this year. But although the channel marked the occasion by delivering the first ever 3D TV broadcast of a UK festival, its online coverage at sky.com/festivals was disappointing, with the "exclusive performances" videos limited to just five 30-second clips of the headline acts. Instead, unless you take a certain pleasure from stilted video interviews (the Tom Jones one is a particular corker), the main reason to visit the website is for the enjoyable acoustic sessions by artists including Wild Beasts, the Pierces, Two Door Cinema Club and Imelda May. Absolute Radio also began its festival summer at the Isle of Wight, but made a better fist of covering it online, at absoluteradio.co.uk, with good quality audio highlights of 16 of the biggest acts' sets, including Kings of Leon, Kasabian, Foo Fighters, Beady Eye and Iggy Pop (above).
Despite being attended by 70,000 rock fans, Download wasn't so well covered by the big broadcasters, with Radio 1 limiting its output to a few specialist shows from the site and a couple of acoustic performances, all of which are still up at bbc.in/bbcdwnld. The festival itself did a decent job of providing its own content, filming interviews with more than 30 artists at youtube.com/downloadfestivaluk. It spoiled it all, though, with its depressing "boob-cam" video, a highlights reel of female audience members exposing themselves (albeit with the festival's logo preserving some of their modesty).
It's been a while since a really decent mashup album emerged, which is why a new project that mixes the work of UK dubstep maestro James Blake and Canadian rapper Drake is such a treat. The nine-track mixtape, entitled James Drake, has been put together by producers Bombé & Mr Caribbean. The latter calls it "a soundtrack for sippin Robitussun & Alize in an abandoned cathedral, covered in a velvet blanket with a sexy stranger on a dark night", which is a suitably evocative description of a work that skilfully blends Blake's atmospheric electronics with Drake's soulful croon, and adds a little extra production on top. As with all the best mashups, the biggest compliment you can pay it is that it's so well-matched the original tracks begin to sound like they're missing something. Get it for free from jamesdrakemixtape.com.
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