Pussy Riot go to Church at Glastonbury

Pussy Riot by Igor Mukhin
I’m not a big fan of attending music festivals.  I camped overnight at one only once, during the early 2000s. 

My ancient, flimsy tent fell down during a thunderstorm in the small hours and I shivered through an uncomfortable night in a soaking wet sleeping bag, before wandering about Punchestown Racecourse aimlessly until it was time for breakfast.  My friend and tent-mate decided instead to gather up his belongings and sleep in the car, which was parked in an enormous field where he was promptly mugged and relieved of his wallet.

Good times.

At least we weren’t subjected to the singer Charlotte Church conducting a conversation with former members of Pussy Riot, on top of a Russian army truck.

‘Punk feminists’ Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have carved out something of a career courting politically minded, bohemain westerners.  Church, meanwhile, has embarked on her own attempts to become recognised as a left-wing ‘activist’.

The Independent has an account of the three women’s discussion at Glastonbury (above), which seems to have been as incisive as you’d expect.  “Can I join the revolution too”, it encouraged the Welsh singer to ask, “I want to be in Pussy Riot”.

Ironically, its two most famous members have actually been expelled from the punk band which doesn’t record music or stage concerts.  Pussy Riot’s performances were stunts masterminded by the ‘performance art’ collective, ‘Voina’, which traded on shock value and obscenity.  The idea of a politically motivated, female group of punk musicians has proved more easily digestible in the media outside Russia.     

 Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina have become anti-Putin celebrities after serving gaol terms for recording an expletive-ridden video in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow.  Fame enough to secure an appearance at Glastonbury and the admiration of Charlotte Church.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more