—

Firstly, following the announcement of their booking in Dispatches earlier this week, a jubilant video for "Getting Better" by York's finest, Shed Seven…

—

Next up, The King Blues, with their agit-prop pop-punk anthem "Let's Hang The Landlord"…

—

And finally, a beautiful stop-motion video for "Ain't Got Far To Go" by Harry Bird and the Rubber Wellies… This is really lovely.

If there's something on the Greenbelt 2010 programme that you're particularly looking forward to, do email us a paragraph or two saying why, and we'll put it up here on the blog…

Here's Malcolm Doney, writer, editor and Anglican priest at Greenbelt's HQ, All Hallows On The Wall on the singular talents of Bobby Baker…

—

Performance artist Bobby Baker shares a particular characteristic with Greenbelt. There’s simply no-one else like her in the world. Her performances which – at one level – deal with very ordinary experiences like shopping, motherhood and home cooking, also explore the darkest recesses of the mind, the existence of God and the fierce reality of 21st century life. Witness one of her performances and you don’t know whether to laugh, cry or flinch. That’s because Bobby Baker’s art is always absolutely honest.

This quality of heart-baring, heart-breaking honesty is vividly present her Diary Drawings, which will be on show at Greenbelt this year. In 1996 Bobby was diagnosed as having a ‘borderline personality disorder’. And these watercolours, which she produced daily, chart the terrors, self-destructiveness and wonderful, wild humour of her experience of juggling art, faith and ‘madness’.

I’ve been tracking Bobby’s work for some years now – she’s a premier league contemporary artist – up there with Anthony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the like. It’s a real coup to have her at Greenbelt. This is a must see.

—

To hear Bobby talking about the exhibition, listen to the audio slideshow at the Guardian, or read an interview with her here. There's also a slideshow of images here, which document Bobby's venture into printmaking, one print of which will be given out at Greenbelt 2010.

The event takes place on Thursday 29th July at 7.30pm, and features live music from Greenbelt favourite Iain, supported by Lovers Electric and The Social Services. It's all taking place at Moot's regular London venue the Church of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London.

Tickets can be purchased here for £7, and a map can be found here. For more information, sign up to the Facebook event here, or see below for a flyer.

The Church Urban Fund will be in the Kitchen at Greenbelt this year. Come and visit us to hear stories, meet people, be inspired and learn about the practical every day ways to make a difference on the doorstep, wherever you live…

Church Urban Fund is no longer just a funder. We are now a development organisation that provides advice, money and guidance to local churches and activists who share our passion to see lives changed.

Everyone can be an activist! Join the movement to transform the lives of people affected by poverty in England and enter our free prize draw at the same time by visiting www.cuf.org.uk/events/greenbelt-festival-27-30-august.

I'm New Here, Gil's latest album is available on CD via Amazon or for download via iTunes. Newbies might also want to check out Gil's back catalogue (Amazon | iTunes).

** If you want to see Gil at this year's festival, you'll need to buy a ticket. If you haven't done so yet, be sure to invest before the end of the month, to save 10% on onsite prices**

Credits

• Interviewee – Gil Scott Heron
• Interviewer – Gawain Hewitt
• Mixed and Edited – bigJohn Noble
• Editing and introduction – Paul Northup

Christian Aid's Trace the Tax campaign will play a central role in the charity's presence at this year's festival. The campaign calls for greater financial transparency and for an end to tax dodging by unscrupulous businesses operating internationally. Each year developing nations loose out on billions of pounds of revenue which could be better used to improve sanitation, build schools and develop other essential services.

In March we asked all members of the FTSE 100 to complete a brief survey to gauge their opinions on greater financial transparency which would help lead to a reduction in tax dodging. The response was initially slow; however thanks to Christian Aid supporters sending over 100,000 emails to companies which had not responded, more and more have since got in touch.

At this year's festival Christian Aid wants you to help unravel the maze of tax dodging. We hope to inspire and challenge you, but we also need you to help engage with four high profile high street companies. These companies have massive potential in helping end tax dodging but we need your help to unlock it.

Visit Trace the Tax on the Christian Aid's website for more information.

Rebecca is a library assistant for King's College London, and has had some of her favourite Greenbelt experiences in the Literature programme ("Andrew Tate's lectures, the Books To Read Before You Die panel in 2007, a literary pub quiz in 2008) since she started coming in 2007. This year will be her fourth Greenbelt.

Here, she reports back on Winterson's retrospective look at the 25 years since the publication of her first novel "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit":-

—

Author Jeanette Winterson’s 2010 Southbank Centre lecture was a passionate appeal for the importance of the arts, both to individual development and to society. “My parents always wanted me to be a missionary,” she joked, “and here I am!” – a fervent advocate for the arts in private and public life.

Reflecting on the 25 years since the publication of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson characterised time as both liberating and mystifying, such that it seems both a lifetime ago and just yesterday that her first and most celebrated novel appeared in print. The novel echoes Winterson’s experience as an adopted child in an uneducated and strictly religious household in Lancashire. Crisis comes when the main character falls in love with another girl and is kicked out of the family home after the church body’s unsuccessful attempts to exorcise her sexual urges.

The author’s adoptive mother, always coyly referred to as ‘Mrs Winterson’, comes across as a formidable tyrant: a woman of fiery Old Testament religiosity, rejecting the ethos of forgiveness in favour of wrath and suspicion. One of Mrs W’s constant refrains was “you never know what’s in a book until it’s too late” (with “book” always pronounced so as to rhyme with “spook”).

Nonetheless, Winterson came to see art (literature in particular) as her salvation. At age 16 she encountered T.S. Eliot through Murder in the Cathedral, which Mrs Winterson had mistakenly put on a list of murder mysteries for Jeanette to collect for her at the public library. Winterson recalls weeping over the play; she had discovered that poetry was “tough language for a tough life.” From that point her literary education was self-determined and thorough, if arbitrary: she went to the Accrington public library shelves and began with ‘A’, proceeding through Austen and Beckett to the Brontës, and so on. When Mrs W burned all Jeanette’s carefully hoarded books in a great backyard conflagration, she learned the lesson that anything external can be taken away, but anything internal can never be stolen. She began what has become a lifelong habit of memorising text to create a kind of inner library.

Winterson described the bitterness of her unhappy childhood as “rocket fuel” that helped her escape from her family home and inspired Oranges. Although Mrs W’s horrified objection to Oranges was “it’s not true!”, the plotline undeniably resembles Winterson’s own life story; the protagonist is even named Jeanette. Acknowledging the novel’s autobiographical elements, Winterson explained that seeing one’s own life as a fiction allows one to think of it as something changeable rather than fixed. Recognising that everything is a version of the truth rather than the final word has freed her to play around with time and circumstance. Winterson was adamant that she has never accepted the stereotype that women write about experience whereas men concentrate on the experiment with form and language. Why not do both?

Indeed, by combining experience and experiment art has become for her, not escapism, but rather a means of defeating the myth that “there is nothing we can do.” Instead, paraphrasing a quote from poet Emily Dickinson, she asserted that we “dwell in possibility”. Art is “a place to roam”, freed from the enclosures of the expected and the cliché.

Concluding with a plea for the importance of the humanities in society, Winterson argued, “in a world of separations, art connects”. It forms both a “continuous present” in which the dead and the living communicate and a “web of relationships” between people and events halfway across the globe from each other. Winterson pinpointed today’s ideological battle as being between the seductively dark narratives of global meltdown and apocalypse on the one hand, and hope on the other. Dark thoughts may have been useful to her as a catalyst for Oranges, but she says she had to let the anger go to make room for new sources of creative energy.

Although she no longer associates herself with religion, Winterson seems to have made her peace with Christianity; in fact, she still includes the Bible (along with Shakespeare’s Complete Works and the Oxford Book of English Verse) on her list of three ‘desert-island’ books. “It’s a good read!” she insisted. Her inspiring lecture made it clear that she has discarded the worst of her religious upbringing and taken from it the best sort of advice on celebrating creativity and living life to the fullest: “life must be a conscious choice every day; it can never be passive.”

—

Image of Jeanette Winterson by Alex Lake.

The Herbaliser started out as an jazz rap band formed around the core of Jake Wherry and Ollie Teeba. They were one of the most well-known acts from the Ninja Tune label,until they moved to !K7 Records to release their 2008 album "Same As It Never Was". Although initially instrumental, they later incorporated guest vocals from Jean Grae, Roots Manuva, MF Doom, among many others.

They arrive at Greenbelt in full effect as a live band, touring their new album "Session Two", their second release as The Herbaliser Band. They've added Ralph Lamb, Andy Ross and Jessica Darling to the core of the band, and describe their current sound as "glossy and gritty, organic and eclectic [...] building on the band's hip-hop origins with a rich mix of jazz, funk, R&B, pop and instrumental soundtrack influences".

The Herbaliser at Greenbelt are sure to bring a smile to your face, and a spring to your step!

Gil is a pioneer of socially-conscious soul music; a legend of spoken word, who – in recognition of his poetry as showcased in "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" – has sometimes been dubbed "The Godfather of Rap"; an intelligent activist and flat-out the coolest man you will ever see – we're so excited about Gil coming to Mainstage and are breathless in anticipation of what his show may bring.

Gil arrives at Greenbelt on the back of "I'm New Here", his first album for fifteen years. Rather than treading ground he's trodden before, "I'm New Here" marries Gil's brilliant vocals with atmospheric accompaniment reminiscent of the sounds of Burial and Massive Attack, filtered through the blues. It has been rapturously received, with the review on Pitchfork breaking it down:-

Three songs reveal him as an adept interpreter of three generations' worth of roots music: Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" rendered as vintage Massive Attack, a minimalist, piano-driven orchestral reworking of the Brook Benton-written Bobby "Blue" Bland classic "I'll Take Care of You", and the unexpected but deftly claimed title track, sourced from Smog. [...] Comparisons have been made to what Rick Rubin did for Johnny Cash in the 90s, and the parallels are there: I'm New Here and American Recordings are both cover-heavy, starkly-produced releases where rebellious icons become reflective as they hit their sixties.

Upon Gil's return to public life, Newsnight did an interview with him which is a great introduction to the importance of his body of work, and . It's on Youtube, and part one and part two are embedded below, alongside some other videos to act as a primer for Gil's Mainstage performance.

—

Well, the 2010 festival is no exception and so we're excited to announce a show combining music and performance, clowning and comedy, in the idiosyncratic package of Zic Zazou.

Winners of a Herald Angel award at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Zic Zazou's show "Brocante Sonore" has taken audiences on both sides of the Channel to a miraculous and melodious world, presided over by artistic director (and balloon maestro) Jean-François Hoël.

Yes, I said "balloon maestro".

For in their show, Zic Zazou – in trademark blue factory overalls – take a range of ordinary objects and make extraordinary music with them – thwacking pipes with ping-pong bats, teasing notes from garden hoses – it's funky, fun, and shamelessly French.

Sometimes comedic, sometimes wistful, their sound embraces Brazilian drumming, jazz, blues and folk, with a tinge of socialist leanings. (One Edinburgh Fringe reviewer referred to them as "blue-collar socialist folk songwriters of the industrial age"!)

Their performance at Greenbelt should not be missed – and who knows, perhaps you might be inspired to raid your shed and start your own band!

"Extraordinary, exhilarating, exhaustive: a frenzy of free- wheeling invention… Five Stars" – Three Weeks

"Good for the heart and soul and the whole family… Five Stars" – The British Theatre Guide

"Zic Zazou create something that’s magic, fun and genuinely surprising… Five Stars" – The Herald