Saturday 28th September

This is the weekend of The Great Notts Show, a weekend of music and various entertainments and food. When the Market Square was redeveloped and reopened in 2007, a lot of people complained about it. They were wrong; the ‘new look’ Market Square was an ideal space for live music, markets, the big wheel, an open air ice-rink at Christmas, and much more besides. Unfortunately, Nottingham Council are a short-sighted bunch of idiots who immediately stopped City Pulse, stopped having the big wheel, reduced the farmer’s market to a handful of stalls, and turned the Christmas attraction into a small scale funfair with no ice-rink. One of the better uses of the space was the ‘Nottingham Riviera’, a makeshift beach in the middle of a landlocked city. This was provided by James Mellors, one of the main fairground owners whose name you won’t escape at Goose Fair next week, totally free of charge. What the public didn’t realise was that this was part of a very clever long game; the first beach was a lot of sand and water, with a bar and a smattering of stalls and rides. As he was providing the whole thing at no expense to the council, nobody could complain about the use of council tax money. In my opinion, more council tax money should be spent on entertainment; music festivals being the biggest area seeing as we are in the “UK capital of music”. Over the years, Mellors has manipulated the beach to his own commercial means, which is understandable. However, I do feel that the council should perhaps have stepped in and asked him to rein it in a bit, as over the last four years the free beach has reduced and the space devoted to stalls and rides has increased. The time scale has also been scaled down, and what we had this summer was basically Goose Fair with a bucket of sand in the middle. This was an unnecessary move as Goose Fair is one of the biggest and most exciting events in the Nottingham calendar, attended by the entire population of the city.

The Great Notts Show is perhaps the first proper use of the Market Square for about two years, although it appeared cluttered. Live music was split between a small stage and a tent. I’m pretty sure that a big stage could have been erected by the Council House in the same way that it was for City Pulse. It’s good that the council - who are well known for making bloody stupid decisions that go against public opinion – are finally getting the right idea, although time will tell, but they need to hand over control to the organisers and not get involved as they apparently make a mess of things. We didn’t stay long as Mandi wasn’t feeling well and the heat and crowds didn’t help, but we did manage to catch our very talented friend Josh Kemp performing. I have written about Josh’s immense talent before so don’t need to go over it again, but he did something today that I haven’t seen him do before. Perhaps wary of the audience being ‘the public’ and not his usual crowd, he played more cover versions in one set than I can remember them doing. What stood out for me was a cover of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, which I had never heard him do before, and made a point of asking him to record for radio play. I am the reason that there exists a cover by Josh of ‘I Wanna Be Like You’, so it would be cool to have another cover of his to play on NottinghamLIVE’s (one word) occasional cover version of the week feature.

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