Manchester International Festival 2009: GO

It'sManchester International Festival time again - yay! I should have been at the media launch this afternoon but the invite didn't say "please bring your squirming, restless baby" so I decided to stay home. It was like I was there, though. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology I got an up-to-the-minute MLF launch feed from the twitterrific cahoona brothers. (Sample tweet: "Good lord! They've put a donk on it! Blackout Crew are coming to town!")

Tickets are now on sale! Oh My God! And the festival programme is seriously, no shit, amazing this year, in my humble opinion. Go buy, but be prepared to be patient with Quay Tickets as the site is experiencing some wee overload problems. I've been trying to load it for about 20 minutes now.

So what to buy? If my friends are anything to go by Kraftwerk seems to be the hot ticket so far, but maybe that's just the kind of weirdos I hang out with. They're performing with Steve Reich at The Manchester Velodrome - need I say more?

It felt like a kiss, a crazy multilevel multimedia promenade about American pop music in the sixties with Damon Albarn/Adam Curtis/Punchdrunk/Kronos Quartet. The Monkey of 2009?

Sure to be popular is a double dose of hometown heroes: Elbow vs. The Halle.# Antony and The Johnsons with Manchester Camerata should be saw-weet as well. And Rufus Wainright's Prima Donna opera will probably sell a few tickets. The Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed performance (yes, The Clintons of the East Village are coming to Manchester) has got to be my pick for hipster-date-of-choice.

There's a whole host of cool art stuff incl Jeremy Deller's parade, a play about Bingo and the installation of Zaha Hadid's whole new chamber music hall in Manchester Art Gallery. Oh its all too much. It all sounds so great. But what am I, personally, most excited about? De la soul are taking us all back to the Daisy age. Apparently it was twenty years ago. Which means I'm officially old.

Anyway, more on this later, I'm sure...