The Telegraph has a sweet interview with Guy Garvey of the great British band, Elbow, which ends with Garvey calling for “unbridled positivity” at their shows.  Amen brother!  We can’t wait to pass along all the positivity we can muster when the band plays the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco some time (schedule yet to be finalized) between September 3oth and October 2nd (Friday to Sunday).

Here’s an excellent excerpt from The Telegraph interview (emphasis added):

“This may be Elbow’s area of speciality: the equivocal anthem. The uplifting singalong coda and glass-half-full sentiments of their most celebrated song, One Day Like This, have made it a staple of ads and soundtracks…. In a BBC poll to find the public’s favourite Desert Island Discs, it was the highest-rated song of the past 10 years. “I’m dead proud of that. It feels as if we’ve added to the canon. That’s the goal. It’s like something [Elbow guitarist] Mark Potter said – ‘That’ll last longer than our gravestones.’ ” In a live setting, Elbow’s poetic ambiguity is transformed into something else. “You hear bands saying, ‘We’re gonna blow people away.’ I’ve never really liked that kind of confrontational thing. Its not, ‘We’ll show them what we’ve got.’ It’s, ‘Look what we can do together.’ “That’s the great thing about singalongs. It might not be very cool, but what the f— is cool? I spent years trying to be cool, and I’m not very good at it. So let’s just get stuck in with the unbridled positivity.””

In the meantime, to get you in the mood, check out the videos of Grounds for Divorce and One Day Like This from Festival V in 2009, followed by a BBC broadcast from this year’s Glastonbury Music Festival of the entire Elbow set (after the blather finishes at :46).  You can also go over to Absolute Radio and check out Elbow’s live session at St. Paul’s Cathedral that is streaming only until September 8th.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGqoB6oB4Ic