If you missed the 02 Wireless Festival or Lovebox, there’s always the Ben and Jerry’s thing on Clapham Common this weekend, or Forever Heavenly in September. The festival explosion is obvious, but there’s been less attention given to the big businesses that have sprung up inside the gates. We’ll leave aside the debate over whether the festival circuit has become too commercial and simply say that it’s... very commercial. Take Live Nation, the American......

Mwhahaha. The Book Grocer rubs her hands together greedily as she contemplates the week ahead. Festival season kicks off this week, and its offerings may be summarised with one word: excellent. Tuesday: VS Naipaul fans will want to head to Daunt Books tonight to hear Patrick French and AN Wilson discuss French’s recent biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author, The World Is What It Is, heralded as a “magnificent achievement” (7pm, £5). Also on:......

Stiff Little Fingers' Inflammable Material provided a soundtrack for our teenage years, every single one of its three chords forever fused with our memories of youth. As we grew a bit older, it remained a favourite and was soon joined by Mark Stewart and the Maffia's As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade and the many productions of Adrian Sherwood. Trawlling through used record shops, anything with Sherwood's name on it went home......

"What is house? Technotronic, KLF or something you live in To me house is Phuture, Pierre, Fingers, Adonis The Pioneers of the Hypnotic Groove Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and The Yellow Magic Orchestra" - LFO, "What Is House?" (Warp Records, 1991) Given their famous name check in LFO's classic track "What Is House?" from Warp Records' early days, it seemed appropriate to have a Warp artist open for Yellow Magic Orchestra's......

Diaries out, bibliophiles. Festival season is almost upon us. No, not the festival season that will have you rolling around in mud or throwing your pants at the stage (well, you could throw your pants at the stage, and we’d certainly provide moral support for that endeavour). We’re talking literary festival season – Christmas in July for the book geeks among us. Let’s start with the little guy first. London Lit Plus launched just......

With multi-venue neighbourhood crawls fastly becoming the favoured method of throwing a festival in the city, new ones are springing up all the time. This past weekend the Dot To Dot Festival took the focus away from the capital and into the clubs of Bristol and Nottingham, though thankfully not without giving us a little taste of things to come. Thursday's introductory mini-event, Hox To Dot, featured several of the artists that would go......

If you happened to miss both the Camden Crawl as well as the Stag and Dagger, all hope is not yet lost for you catching an urban festival this season. This weekend the Dot To Dot festival runs through Bristol and Nottingham, but organisers are starting the party early in Hoxton on Thursday with the cutely-named mini-event Hox To Dot. Hopefully you were smart enough to have already requested Friday off work, but if......

When we first learned that Touch was planning a follow-up to last autumn's brilliant Atmospheres festival, the question wasn't whether or not we would attend but what line-up they had in store for us this time around. Once again occupying Lambeth's beautiful Museum of Garden History for a long weekend, Atmospheres 2 returns with a focus on hauntology, particularly with respect to music. If your Derrida is as rusty as ours and you fancy......

After five hours of sleep (thank you Mr. Postman for waking us up) and an Eggs Benedict at the Camden Kitchen, we had mostly recovered from the first day of Camden Crawl 2008 and were once again hungry for more gigs. With several artists playing both days of the festival, there were a few acts we missed on Friday that we wanted to catch on Saturday, as well as many Saturday-only artists that we......

With the Camden Crawl spanning two days and as loaded as ever with amazing acts, it's impossible to do it any justice in only one post. Whilst we easily could write at length about everything we saw, you just want the highlights: who rocked us, who we're dying to see again and how we came to love doing the Rolex Sweep. Without further ado, let's try to remember how we spent Friday 18 April......

The Camden Crawl isn't the only festival in town this weekend. If the thought of braving the Stables Market even on an average Sunday sets your agoraphobia aflame, you don't have to miss out on great live music, as today marks the start of Ether 08, Southbank Centre's annual celebration of art and technology. With Ether running through 28 April, you could even attend both festivals, though Southbank Centre's stunning line-up this weekend means some......

Still a newcomer to the city festival circuit, Field Day returns for a second year to Hackney's Victoria Park on 9 August 2008. The recently announced line-up looks like it should provide a diverse sampling of some of our favourite acts. How could we miss a party that Richie Hawtin, Dan Deacon, The Field and Jeffrey Lewis are rockin'? Unfortunately that question seems to have loads of answers that all involve the word "queue".......

Your mother might well have said ‘that you never should/Play with the gypsies in the wood’, and she would probably advise you to give a wide berth to the begging variety in most urban high streets today as well. But this is just so much social stereotyping, and the Romany culture is a rich and interesting one, certainly worthy of more respect than it usually garners. Londonist has exciting news for those of you who......

Londonist doesn’t need much excuse for a party, and firmly believes that we don’t have nearly enough festivals in the UK. So we are delighted to be able to wish all of our Muslim readers a very Happy Eid. The new moon has been sighted in Saudi Arabia, which is all that is needed for Sunni Muslims to celebrate. For reasons too complicated to explain on a light-hearted blog-site, the Shi’ites nearly always announce the......

Judging from the deluge that hit parts of the capital Monday morning, a rain dance is the last thing soaked Londoners need this week. Lucky, then, that we're actually talking about the Raindance Film Festival, which opens on Tuesday night. Now in its fifteenth year, Raindance has matured from a youthful dalliance as the edgy alternative to the LFF to become one of Europe's most highly respected film festivals, and a proving ground for......

If you have ever longed to exorcise yourself of those dreary afternoons in chilly church halls and torturous tinned food stockpiling that seemed to be the sole remit of Harvest Festivals at primary schools two decades ago, then your chance to experience a very different kind of Harvest Festival is taking place in Camberwell this Sunday. Inspirational art organisations motiroti and home are both jumbles of creative, international, artistic energy and will be combining......

The rather tortured word-play of "thera-pea" is worth it, trust us. We've got an extraordinary event for your diaries and all will become clear... Bobby Baker is an artist who has been bringing the mundane and the ordinary such as housework and healthcare into the world of art and performance for the last three decades, using food as her media and live presentation as the way to communicate. This means dancing with meringue ladies,......

If Londonist were really rich we'd be out every night doing LOADS of fun stuff. We'd be going to see all of the cool things at London Design Festival. We'd be drinking beer out of plastic cups and dancing at the Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly gig. But we're not. Instead all our money goes on rubbish stupid bills and... actually not much else. So here's what we're going to do instead. Here's a......

We talk about festivals all the time here on Londonist: food festivals, theatre festivals, religious festivals, dance festivals... we can't help it. London is a festive place. The latest festival that we bring to you today is the London Design Festival, starting this Saturday and lasting for ten full days of talks, exhibitions, parties, books, magazines, tours, walks and... stuff. This is the fifth year for the festival and it just keeps getting bigger......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

Londonist is very very worried. Standards are slipping. Things ain’t what they used to be (actually they ain’t been that way for quite a long time, but hey). We have learnt this very evening of a new product made in Weybridge which attempts to undermine all of Londonist’s attempts at refinement, and indeed chip away at the very fabric of society. We are talking about the ready-filled, disposable wine glass. With a sticky foil seal......

We're skint again! We've spent all of our money on festivals only to find that we've spent hours standing in the rain listening to the bands we didn't really want to see but our best mate wanted to because they fancy the singer. This means that yet again, we can't go and do any of the things we want (and yes we're sulking). We can't go to any of the gigs we'd planned to,......

As bands jump across the Atlantic to play this weekend's V Festival and next weekend's Reading and Leeds festivals London is treated to a wealth of bands that rarely play these shores. Here's a selection of the best. Monday night sees the amazing Rilo Kiley play the Carling Academy Islington – tickets sold out pretty quickly, but there are a few floating around on eBay etc for what is sure to be one of their......

After numerous appearances on the Continent, as well as performances at such legendary festivals as MUTEK and Detroit's Electronic Music Festival, we were beginning to think perhaps we smelled bad. Why else wouldn't Gui Boratto come to visit our lovely island? Thankfully we no longer need to be concerned about our possibly poor hygiene, for the kind souls at Allez-Allez have once again teamed with the Kompakt label, this time to bring the Brazilian......

Now it’s properly August there’s not much coming up on the tellybox. However, if you really can’t be arsed to get out there and catch some cheap London, Camden Fringe or Shoreditch Festival then you could keep your London head in check by paying attention to the following: On TV, Londonist likes: Monday, 6 August Super Vets (BBC1, 19:30-20:00) Terrible title but a nice opportunity to catch a behind the scenes look at London......

As soon as the sun came out, half of you probably rushed to the nearest beach. Or the nearest pub. Or the nearest airport. Now you're back in the real world and you've spent all your money. It means that we can't go and see the Summer exhibition at Buckingham Palace (we love an excuse to be nosy!) and we can't go and see Orlando Bloom in 'In Celebration' (apparently it's not very good......

Having seen and enjoyed Room 110 in the Camden Fringe Festival yesterday, we continue with our non-Scottish fringe theatre foray with some more new writing. Consisting of three consecutive monologues, Hostage/ Bleach / Burn has only half as many scripts as Room 110 but is equal in power and fringe theatre spirit. Canadian writer Heather Taylor, director Gareth Corke and the three cracking actors Peter Henderson (Hostage), Samantha Wright (Bleach) and Matthew Bulgo (Burn)......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Luardo’s Whitecross St EC1Y Map Expect to Pay: around £5 Rating: 7 out of 10 Strolling along Whitecross Street a few weeks ago, we happened upon a little lime green van with a chalkboard menu listing fajitas, burritos, and quesadillas for sale. Unfortunately, Simon, the bloke inside the van, was done slinging burritos for the day and wouldn’t be......

“Are you lot all sober? In that case you are definitely our best audience ever! Hat’s off to you” Ben Hudson. Mr Hudson & the Library brought their innovative musical fusion to Westminster Reference Library last night. This is not the first time they’ve played in a library, they seem to make a habit of it and Londonist last caught up with them at Swiss Cottage Library in January this year. Completely at home......