Free Republic

TO JUDGE by the crowds making their way to Glastonbury Festival on June 24th, it is a good time to be in the music industry. This week nearly 200,000 revellers set up camp across several fields in Somerset, where the festival has been held nearly every year since it first started as a small, hippyish event in 1970. Now hundreds of live bands and DJs will perform on 90 stages over five days. Each punter pays £225 ($353) for the experience, which, thanks to the damp British weather, tends to be a muddy one. Glastonbury is perhaps the most striking...

Bill Murray is a man of great taste, that's well known by now. He's appeared in a film with Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and GZA, shared a stage with Eric Clapton and even hung out with Leeds punks Eagulls (who got a tattoo especially to mark the occasion). The celebrated actor also likes to mix it with the general public - and these moments, as well as urban legends regarding his prank antics, are becoming even more well known in this increasingly digitalised age. Now, just like Danny DeVito before him at last year's Coachella, Murray has has been checking out...

At age 75, the legendary songwriter and beloved recording artist Gordon Lightfoot is still working hard and enjoying it more than ever. The creator of such standards as If You Could Read My Mind, Early Morning Rain, Carefree Highway and Sundown still performs upwards of eighty concerts a year in North America. "We love the work" is the joyful mantra his associates hear him say all the time. Even after waking up from a six-week coma following a burst abdominal artery in 2002, Gordon worked from his hospital bed and polished the final tracks for his twentieth album. It would...

From their 2011 album Gravity the Seducer. Interesting stuff and every track worth a listen IMO.

This is the first post of the Modern Music Jarre weekend. This piece, Bells, is the opening number at The 12 Dreams of the Sun, a concert staged at Giza, Egypt, on the night of December 31, 1999. The show featured stunning visuals against a backdrop of desert and pyramids.

Violinist Vanessa-Mae performing at Royal Albert Hall.

French guitarist Patrick Rondat performs Vivaldi's Summer with Jean Michel Jarre. Recorded live at the Solidarnosc concert, Gdansk shipyard, 2005.

As part of FR's new Modern Music pinglist, I am asking FReepers to help me compile a list of links to sources of new music. The Modern Music pinglist focus is music from the 20th and 21st century, from Ravel and Shostokovich, through the Synth Pioneers such as Carlos, Jarre and Kraftwerk, and beyond. Here's my start. Live streams: CIND-FM Toronto- http://indie.streamon.fm/ Web: Kling Klang Studios (KraftWerk)- http://klingklangstudio.com/ Jean Michel Jarre- http://jeanmicheljarre.com/ CIND-FM Indie88- http://indie88.com/ Twitter: Alan Cross, Music Historian- https://twitter.com/alancross Kraftwerk- https://twitter.com/kraftwerk Mark Steyn- https://twitter.com/MarkSteynOnline Ladytron- https://twitter.com/LadytronMusic Jean Michel Jarre- https://twitter.com/JMJarre

As a MuchMusic VJ in the channel’s 1980s heyday, Terry David Mulligan remembers sneaking a film crew into the very temple of the American music industry — the Grammy Awards. His boldness paid off with a shot of a moment that went down in music history — Metallica storming out in a hail of curses after losing to Jethro Tull for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance. And Mr. Mulligan did it with what could charitably be called a small fib: telling the security guard he was part of the film crew there to accompany Olivia Newton John. “He said, ‘That’s the...