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Luke
It's crazy what people will say during an awkward silence. Now transactions are done before the silence takes hold. That means I can focus on the task at hand and make an extra sale or two. Sometimes I do miss the bonding time. Sometimes AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything. A password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team. Why? Because compromised passwords are the number one way bad actors attack companies, and small businesses are their favorite targets. But unlike a lot of security challenges, passwords actually have a pretty simple solution. 1Password lets you manage all your business's credentials so you can feel confident that your data stays secure as your company grows. Find out more@1Password.com specialoffer and start securing every login. You're listening to Luke's English podcast. For more information, visit teacherluke.podomatic.com hi, folks, it's Luke here and it's a Tuesday evening. I'm just sitting here in my flat, relaxing, having a very nice time. The weather's pretty good. I'm looking at the view outside my window and there's blue skies, a few little fluffy clouds dotted around in the sky, but mainly it's a blue sky and there's a nice cool breeze coming through the window. So it's. It's very pleasant all round, as a matter of fact. Let's see, I'm a bit sunburnt, actually, because I spent the weekend at a music festival that was in Wales, in South Wales. It was called the Green Man Festival, and it's actually the second music festival I've been to in the last month. So this podcast is going to be about music festivals and music festivals in the uk because it's the summertime and this is the season for all the big music festivals to happen this country. So basically in this podcast, I'm going to tell you about the kind of culture of British music festivals, because they're very. They're very important, actually, to a lot of people, and it's something that happens on quite a large scale across the country during the summer. So it's an interesting part of British culture. So before I talk about that I'd just like to say thank you to everyone who sent me messages. I'm getting more and more messages all the time, which is very promising because it means that the podcast is becoming more popular and I'm still getting more and more downloads. I'm getting over a thousand downloads a week now, which is what I was aiming for. That was my goal a few weeks ago, actually. I was. I remember making a comment saying, I hope to get a thousand a week. And I'm getting a thousand a week now. So that's quite good. That's large numbers. That's over 100 a day. So it's fantastic. So again, I know that there are thousands of people listening to this podcast every week, but I don't really know very much about you. I get messages from some of you, but I don't know that much about all of you, really. So the more information I have about you, the better. So you can send me information like who you are, where you are, how old you are, what you do in your job. Right. So are you working or are you a student? What's your job? What are you studying? And why are you studying English? Why is English important to you? And what kind of English are you going to need in the future? Because for many people, actually, they're going to need English to work. They need it for their jobs. And so English for work is a different kind of English, really. There's a different set of skills and a different set of situations in which you'll need to speak English. So, yeah, so it's interesting for me to find out why you need English and other things like that helps me. Helps me to make a more interesting and effective podcast. Now, so on the subject of music festivals, I ought to give you some facts on the subject. Okay, so I'm now on the Internet and I'm looking at the website for the Times. That's one of the top newspapers in this country, the Times. So I'm on TimesOnline. That's www.sorry, that's. Co.uk.com. right. Just a funny thing about websites. Yeah? They're very difficult to say, aren't they? That's quite difficult to say. And actually the WWW is ridiculous because WWW is short for World Wide Web. Yeah, World Wide www. But there are more syllables in WWW than there are in World Wide Web. So I don't know why we don't just say World Wide Web. That would make more sense. In fact, it would be quicker just to say wu, wu, wu. Right. So we should say. We should say that. And HTTP is a bit tricky, so it may be quicker and easier to say. Right. So instead of. It would be. Which in my mind is a lot quicker and a lot easier, but I think it would be a little difficult to persuade the whole world to start changing the way they call those things. Yeah. As a matter of fact, those ideas there that I just had aren't really my own. Those ideas of ones that have been suggested by several comedians in this country. One of them is called Stephen Fry and he has a podcast and in that podcast he talks about how we talk about www and www and so on. And another is a comedian called Richard Herring and he's got his own podcast too. And he suggests that we change HTTP:// forward slash to hatuta. Puh, flash, flash. Which I think sounds pretty cool. Anyway, I'm on the Times online website. They have an article here, an article which is called the top 20 British festivals for 2009. And here there are actually, they've written about 20 of the festivals that have happened. And there are so many festivals going on this year, this summer in the uk. So just to run through some of them, we've got End of the Road in Wiltshire in September. Then there's Jersey Live, which is on the Isle of Jersey in September. There's Field Day in Victoria park in London. There's the Isle of Wight Festival on the Isle of Wight in June. There's Beach Down Festival in Sussex in August. The Secret Garden Party in July. I don't know where that is. It's a secret. There's Love Box in Victoria park in London. Womad in Wiltshire in July. The Download Festival in the Midlands in June. There's Reading and Leeds festivals in August. Global Gathering, which is a dance festival that's in Stratford Upon Avon in July. There's more which are coming right up once my Internet page loads. There's the Green Man Festival in the Brecon Beacons, that's the one that I went to last weekend. There's Latitude Festival in Suffolk in July. Tea in the park in Scotland in July. There's the Glade Festival in Hampshire in July. The Big Chill Festival in Hertfordshire in Herefordshire. That's the other one that I went to earlier this month. So that's the fourth best according to the Times. And then the top three, we've got Rockness in Loch Ness in Scotland in June. Glastonbury Festival, which is the most famous and the longest running British music festival that happened in June. And then at number one, the Times thinks this is the best festival. It's called Bestival, which is kind of funny. It's the best festival and the name of the festival is Bestival. Right, Very funny. But they think it's the. The top festival and that happens in September at the Isle of Wight. So that. That's still coming. And I might go to that. So those are the basic top festivals, really. Glastonbury is the. The most famous one. It's been. People have been going to a music festival in Glastonbury for a long time. I'm not sure how long, but maybe something like 40 years. So it's very long. And. And even before then, Glastonbury has been a very important sort of cultural site in. In the uk, because around that area there are lots of sort of ancient remains, kind of stone circles and other important archaeological remains that tell us a lot about the culture, the ancient culture of this country. And so there's a music festival that happens there every year and it's very popular and very, very famous. And it's. Every year we can watch the festival on television, on the BBC, and lots of people go. Thousands of people go there and lots of famous musicians have performed there recently. This year the headliners were Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Blur. But they also have other bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, Fleet Foxes, Franz Ferdinand and other big bands like that. So really, really big. The one I've been to a few festivals this year. I went to Hyde Park Calling, which is a kind of hard rock festival, and I saw the Fleet Foxes, who were amazing. Their harmonies are brilliant, the way they sing. All four members of the band sing together in harmony and it sounds beautiful. And I saw Neil Young in Hyde park as well. And if you don't know Neil Young, he's been making music for. Well, he's been making music since the 60s and he's from America, or he's actually from Canada, but he performed most of his music in America. And he's very influential and a great musician and he's still going. And he plays his electric guitar very, very loud and he uses lots of feedback and distortion. So he's an incredible performer. And I also went to the Ealing Jazz Festival, which is a small festival in Ealing in Walpole park, and they have local jazz bands and blues bands playing there, and that's nice. And I went to the Big Chill Festival in Herefordshire, and that was great. I went with my cousin and my brother and some friends, and the sun was really, really bright and it shone all weekend. And I actually performed. I played the drums at that festival with my cousin's band, and that was fantastic. And then recently I went to the Green Man Festival. That was this weekend. So basically, a festival, a music festival is a very big event. It usually happens in the countryside somewhere. It often happens like, for example, on a farm. Glastonbury Festival takes place on a farm, a big farm in Glastonbury. And so they're very large events. They cover a lot of ground and thousands and thousands of people go and they camp, they sleep in tents in large campsites. And there are literally thousands of tents in these huge fields all around the festival. And then in the middle of the festival, we have the arena, the festival arena, which usually has a number of different large stages where bands can perform. And then surrounding the whole area, there will be different places to buy food and clothes, and you can. You can buy beer and cider and other drinks. And so really, it's like a little temporary town. It's a town for like five days in this large farm or something. It's very interesting. It's a bit like going back to the medieval times when everyone lived in towns like that. And just being part of this massive crowd of people who are all sleeping in tents is very intense, actually. Yeah, there's a little joke there, you know, thousands of people sleeping in tents is quite intense. Yeah, hilarious. Okay, so what I'm going to do is to give you an overview of the whole British music festival experience. I've come up with two lists, and I've got a list of good things and a list of bad things about festivals. Which one shall I go through first? I think I might flip a coin to decide which one I'm going to go through first. So. Okay, if it's heads, it's bad things and tails, it's good things. Here we go. Well, it's good things first because it came up tails. Okay, so I'm just going to go through a list of various good things about music festivals. Okay? So the first thing you can enjoy the atmosphere of loads of people together, all camping, all having a really good time in the fresh air. It's a great event to be part of, so it's just a great experience to have next. There's loads of good music and bands, so you know, each festival will have loads of different bands playing and you can go and see, like, some of your favorite bands all across the same weekend, or you can find out about lots of new bands. So, you know, you just learn, you hear bands that you like, and then you find them on the Internet and buy their cd and it's a great way to find out about new music, if you like. It's like, if you go to a concert, usually you just see one person, one band, but a festival is like, you can see about six or seven concerts or more in just one weekend. It's brilliant. There's lots of sunshine. If the weather's good, the sun comes out and you can lie in the sunshine and get lots of fresh air. It's very nice. There's lots of local beers and ciders that you can drink. The local beers will be kind of traditional, traditional English ales or bitters, and they've got distinctive tastes. And cider in England is a kind of alcoholic drink, a bit like beer, which is made from apples. So I know that cider in many countries, I know that in Japan, cider actually means like lemonade, it's a soft drink. But in England, cider is like beer. It's like an alcoholic drink made from apples. And it's very nice and traditional as well. So you also, when you go to a festival, you can get out of London. You can escape from London and go into the countryside because sometimes London is a bit too intense. There are too many people and it's very noisy and crowded. So if you can get out of London into the country countryside, it's quite nice, it's quite pleasant. You camp at the festival and it's just fun to live in a tent for a while. You know, it's like a little mini home and it can be quite nice and comfortable if you've got a large tent. Plus, it's. It's a huge campsite with thousands of people all camping together, so you get a kind of community feel. There's loads and loads of delicious food at festivals. Lots and lots of different little stalls you can go to to buy food, you know, different types of food. My favourites are the Caribbean food stalls and they do what's called jerk chicken. And jerk chicken is a kind of barbecue chicken which has been marinated or marinated, soaked in sort of a sauce which is very spicy. And it's served with rice and beans and salad and it's just really, really tasty. And also I like the curries. There are sort of Indian places where you can go to get vegetarian curries and chai tea. It's really, really nice. So lots of good food. You. You get to meet lots of interesting people there. Often you can make new friends when you go there. You meet, like, friends of Friends, and then they become your friends and then you add them as a friend on Facebook, for example. It's a good way to make friends. How many times did I say the word friends in that sentence? A lot. Also, as well as music at first festivals, there's lots of comedy. Comedy is a really big industry in this country. It's not as big as the music industry, but it's still very, very big. There are lots of famous comedians. So really, comedy is like the second biggest sort of entertainment industry after the music industry probably in this country. So you can see lots of comedians in the comedy tent, and that's really great. You can just sit there and see these new comedians who you've never heard of before. You can basically do whatever you like at a festival. You can just sort of have fun, you know, it's great. It's like being on holiday. Also, if you're a musician, you can perform at festivals like I did with my cousin's band. It's a great opportunity to show people your. Your music. So especially if you're a big band, playing a festival is a great way to expand your audience because you get people watching your show who normally wouldn't listen to you. So it's really great. And it's very important for the music industry, the festival scene, it really gives the music industry a big boost every year, and it's a great way for record labels to promote their acts and lots of people buy the music of the artists that they've listened to at the festivals. So it's a big boost to the music industry in this country and a very important event every year, particularly Glastonbury. Okay, so those are the good things, but it's not all good. It's pretty bad sometimes. In fact, sometimes it can be a nightmare. And I'm going to give you the reasons why. Okay? Number one on the list, of course, is the weather. Now, if you can imagine thousands of people gathered together in a field, all camping together and it rains a lot, Basically what you're going to get is loads and loads and loads of mud everywhere. So mud, of course, is the brown earth on the ground under the grass. That's mud. And when it rains, everything turns to mud. It's absolutely disgusting. It's a bit like a disaster zone. You know, I think sometimes when festivals rain enough, it could be classed by the United nations as a disaster zone. Because seriously, you get, you know, lakes of mud. It's disgusting. So, first of all, if it rains, it's horrible and you get wet and covered in mud and it's a disaster. Also other things like for example, if you go to a festival on the Friday night, on the first evening you might have too many beers, you might get a bit over excited and drink too much. And then you wake up on Saturday morning with a bad hangover. And there's nothing worse than waking up with a hangover when you're in a tent that is exposed to bright sunlight in the morning. Because what happens is you kind of cook inside the tent. The tent kind of magnifies the heat of the sun and you just cook in there. It's horrible, especially with a hangover.
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Luke
If you don't have a big tent you might be sharing your tent with and that might mean that you don't have a very good night's sleep. Now tents in this country will tell you how many people can fit inside. So for example, you might get a two man tent or a three man tent. A two man tent is supposed to hold two men, two people right now. It's just not true. They're lying because a two man tent just the right Size for one person. And I learned this the hard way because I went to the Big Chill Festival with my brother and we had a two man tent which we thought would be fine for two men. But no, it wasn't fine. There wasn't enough room for two people and bags. So basically we were sleeping really close to each other, you know, and he was snoring in my ear. If you don't know what snoring means, it's kind of go. It's when you go. Right when you're sleeping. So he was snoring in my ear. It was horrible. So if you share a tiny tent, it's very uncomfortable. Festivals are expensive. The tickets are expensive, like over a hundred pounds for the weekend. You've got to pay for the train chip journey there. And then you spend a lot of money on food and drinks at the festival. I mean, they really rip you off. The prices are ridiculous. It's a rip off. You might spend over ten pounds on lunch. It's a rip off. So you spend a lot of money there. Sometimes the crowds can be a bit difficult. If there's large crowds of people, it's difficult to walk through the crowd. If you need to get to the other side of the arena to go to the toilet, you have to walk through lots of people and it's a bit difficult. The toilets are very smelly and disgusting, right? They use chemical toilets and they stink and you don't want to touch anything because you might get like swine flu or something like that. So the toilets are horrible. If you have to go to the toilet, it's a bit of a difficult experience. Doing a number one isn't so bad, especially if you're a bloke, right? Doing a number one is quite easy. Doing a number one if you're a girl is a bit difficult because you have to sit down. Doing a number two for anyone is difficult because you have to sit down to do it and it's disgusting and you need toilet paper. Oh, horrible. So the toilets are disgusting and you have to wait for the toilets. You have to queue up and wait for a free toilet and you go in and it smells. Oh, not nice. Especially in the morning. Anyway, it's difficult to get to the festival and get back. Like you need to get on a train and travel across the country and get a bus and do things like that. If you're carrying a large bag it can be very difficult. So it's difficult to just get there, get back. It's a real mission just to get out of the festival on Sunday or Monday or whenever. Also, sometimes when you come back from a festival, you need a few days to recover. I mean, depending on what you did at the festival, you know, depending on how crazy you were or how much you drank, you know, you might be exhausted at the end, especially if you didn't sleep very well. So you might need three days to just recover afterwards. So sometimes you have to just go back to work and just be normal, even though you're, you know, you're exhausted because you. Your tent was very uncomfortable. Let's see. Basically, as the weekend continues, it's quite funny because the people at the festival become more and more dirty and more and more exhausted and more and more crazy as the festival continues, until eventually, by Sunday lunchtime, it's like a massive crowd of zombies all sort of shabbling about, you know, shuffling around, you know, Just zombies, you know, walking around in a field, just except exhausted. So it's pretty ridiculous when on Sunday everyone's just asleep in the field. It's quite funny. It's quite easy to lose your tent because there are so many tents, and if you lose your tent in the dark, it's really hard to find it again, and you might have to sleep on the grass and you get wet and it's horrible. Mobile phone reception is quite bad at festivals because there are so many people using the mobile phone receptors that the signal gets very weak. So sometimes you can lose your friends and you don't know where they are and you can't call them because there's no reception. It can be hard to sleep in the tent because there's a lot of noise. Often you'll get these large tents full of people having a little party, and if they're having a party right next to your tent, then you're not going to be able to sleep, you know, especially if they're sort of laughing and, you know, playing music all night. So it can be difficult to sleep. Also, if the tent is on a slope, if it's on an angle, then it might be difficult to sleep. And eventually, at the end of the festival, you're in quite a lot of physical pain. You know, your back aches a lot because you've been standing up watching music, your feet ache because you've been walking around the whole time and you haven't really got a comfortable bed to sleep in. And so by the end, you're kind of broken, basically by the festival, but at the same time, you've had lots of sunshine and fresh air and you've seen Lots of really good bands and you've had a lot of fun, so you feel really good at the end, even though you're quite tired. So, all in all, going to music festivals is a great thing to do, and it's a very important part of our culture. So that's it, basically. That's my little bit on music festivals. I wonder if I could play something to you now. Well, actually, I did have an email from Paula again in Argentina, and she asked me about my music and she said that she'd like to hear some music that I've been doing. Now. There's actually. There's a couple of things I could play to you if you want to hear some of the music that I've done. I've been in a few bands. At the moment I'm in the school band and we play a kind of rock and roll kind of music. And so I do have a live recording of the school band. So I can probably play one of those for you. But before that, I'll play you a song that I did myself on my own. I've got a computer and I've got various musical instruments. And sometimes I write songs and record them. So the one I'm going to play to you is. It's my kind of funk song. Right. It's a little bit embarrassing playing it to you because I sing on the song and my singing that's not that good and it's okay, but it's kind of strange hearing myself sing. But I'll play that too. It's a kind of funk song. So it's meant to be a kind of upbeat tune that you can dance to. And I actually. I sampled a drum loop from a record by Sly and the Family Stone. And the bit that I sampled sounds like this. Wow.
Luke's Bandmate
Hey. Hey.
Luke
Actually, it was just the first part of that that I. That I sampled. Just the very first bit that sounds like this. That's the only bit I sampled. I had to just keep playing the last bit because I just love that song so much. I could happily just sit and listen to the whole song. I think Sly and the Family Stone are just brilliant. But anyway, I sampled that and just looped it. So the drum loop was just going round and round. And then I just layered all the other instruments on top. So I had a song that I'd written on the guitar and I just played the song and recorded just the guitar playing over the loop. And then I played the bass guitar that as well. And then I played some electric guitar, too. And I added Keyboards and I added percussion and some string sounds and then my vocals. And also I used other things like I clap my hands and slap my legs and I make noises with my mouth, like that kind of thing. And then put it all together in the same track. And you've got the finished song, so I'm going to play it to you now. It's called Running Away. Yeah, that's it. Running away. So I hope you like it.
Luke's Bandmate
Who do you want it? There's music in your body. You can have it if you got it. And we can start to party. Stop running away, Running away. Moments in the morning. All the puzzles in your mind in the evening sky is falling but the sunshine never dies. Just running away, Running away, Running away.
Luke
You're running away.
Luke's Bandmate
Sa. What makes you so. Everybody got a name? Don't you know that we're a crazy? But we are all the same. Just running away. We're running away. If you leave me and lose it, you live in your MO. And you can make choosing. You're running, You're running away.
Luke
Just running away.
Luke's Bandmate
You're running away. Stop running away. Just Sam.
Luke
So that was my tune. I hope you liked it. Now, the. The one that I'm going to play next is the. The school band. The name of the band is Band Practice. There's a kind of double meaning to that. Band Practice, on one hand means like a practice session for a band. But also band practice means something that has been prohibited. Right, A band practice. See, it's like a joke. Yeah, it's a pun. It's a little word. Joke. Clever. You see, it's because we're English teachers. We're kind of clever with the language. Maybe a bit too clever. Who knows? So I'm going to play this song to you, which we did at our last concert, which was a couple of weeks ago in Shepherd's Bush. And this song is kind of like my. My greatest moment, basically. Like the greatest moment in my life whenever I play this. It's kind of my. My moment to rock, basically, because I'm the drummer in the band. And in this song we do, there's lots of drum solos. So I'm really just showing off now, just sort of like getting an audience and then just shoving music that I've done into their faces. So obviously, you know, if you're not interested, you could just stop listening. You've had all the English. Here's a bit of the culture, right? The music. Anyway, this is Wipeout, and I hope you like it. It's a little quiet and also bear in mind the fact that we'd been playing for about two and a half hours and it was very, very hot in the room. You can almost feel the heat on the recording. Right. Just imagine how hot it was in the basement of that pub. If you listen to the recording carefully, you can actually feel the heat coming through the space speakers. It was very sweaty, very funky atmosphere. And so we've been playing for a long time, so we were all very exhausted, but we managed to battle on and come out with this performance at the end of our concert. Here it is, Wipe Out.
Luke's Bandmate
It. It's.
Luke
So there it is, the almighty band practice performing Wipeout at the Brook Green Hotel in Shepherd's Bush just a couple of weeks ago. I think you'll agree that that was a hard rocking performance because, you know, we don't muck about here in Shepherd's Bush. Yeah, we don't. We don't mess around. We just rock all night long, basically. Okay, that's. It's the London. It's the London way of doing things, basically. You just, you gotta rock, essentially. Okay. So, you know, I expect you've got to rock in other countries too. In fact, I know that you rock. Yeah, you. You rock, basically. So well done. Yeah. That's the end of the podcast. Keep listening out there, folks. Hope you're having a great time enjoying the podcast. Keep in touch, send me an email and I'll get back to you at some point. You might have to wait for my reply, but I will get back to you eventually in some way or another. So that's the end of this. Luke's English Podcast. Good night. Luke's English Podcast was brought to you by www.teacherluke.podomatic.com. for more information, visit the site or you can email luke luketeacherotmail.com.
Karim
Hi everyone, this is Karim, the voice of Simon Fairchild from the Magnus archives. And today I want to talk to you about Boost Mobile. Some things quietly drain you like an expensive phone bill, trapping your money month after month. Here's a quick money tip. Stop paying a carrier tax when you bring your own phone and switch to boost Mobile's $25 Unlimited Forever plan. You can unlock up to $600 in savings. That's money that belongs in your life, not trapped in a phone bill. Reclaim those savings for something you're actually into. An EMF meter, a thermal camera, or whatever strange corner of the universe you're currently exploring. Visit boostmobile.com to unlock your savings and take back control after 30 gigabytes customers may experience slower speeds. Customers pay $25 per month as long as they remain active on the Boost Mobile Unlimited Plan Boost Mobile January 2020 Comparing average annual payments of AT&T, Verizon and T Mobile customers to 12 months on the Boost Mobile Unlimited Plan. For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com par
Luke
le tu francais hablas Espanol Parliament if
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Luke
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Host: Luke Thompson
Date: August 25, 2009
In this engaging episode, Luke Thompson explores the vibrant culture of summer music festivals in the UK. Drawing from his own recent experiences at two different festivals, he provides listeners with firsthand insights into what makes British festivals unique. The episode includes a breakdown of the best and worst aspects of the festival experience, a rundown of the UK’s most popular events, and even a taste of Luke’s musical creations. Along the way, Luke’s characteristic British humor and informal tone offer an enjoyable, authentic listening experience for English learners.
[00:32 – 02:30]
[02:30 – 06:30]
[06:30 – 13:45]
Luke lists the top 20 festivals for 2009, according to The Times, and riffs on the British challenge of pronouncing URLs.
[13:45 – 15:50]
[15:50 – 18:03]
[18:03 – 23:01]
(Decision made by flipping a coin!)
[24:35 – 32:28]
[32:28 – 44:13]
Luke paints a vivid, authentic picture of British summer music festivals: from the thrill of live music in the sunshine, new friendships, and camping camaraderie, to the muddy boots, expensive snacks, and zombified crowds by Sunday afternoon. With stories, jokes, and personal experience, the episode serves both as a cultural primer for learners of English and as a window into one of the UK's most beloved seasonal traditions. The inclusion of original music adds a personal, creative touch to the festival discussion.
For more information about Luke’s English Podcast, or to send Luke your own stories about your culture or English-learning journey, visit teacherluke.co.uk.