T in the Park 'despondent' but upbeat over stabbing

Geoff Ellis, T In The Park organiser, is trying to keep the serious stabbing at T in the Park in some sort of context:

"We're despondent about it," he told NME.COM. "Does it cast a cloud over the festival? Well, as serious as it is, it is an isolated incident, and we've had a really well-behaved festival here so far.

"Unfortunately we're seeing things like this in society today, it seems to be on the rise in general. The security here is really robust – we've got a big fence around the site, for example, but it'd be foolish to say that it's impossible to get illegal things [such as knives] into the site."

It's true enough - you can't really expect a pop festival to stop people getting stabbed on-site if, say, secondary schools have trouble doing the same, but "let's focus on the thousands of people who haven't been stabbed" seems a little too glass-half-full in the circumstances.

But, of course, he'd have to believe that, wouldn't he?

T in the Park is making noises in Scotland this weekend, and the great headline debate which hung over Glastonbury has turned up there, too. To be more precise, the 'Rage Against The Machine? In 2008? Playing a large beer commercial? Seriously?' question, which organiser Geoff Ellis has attempted to answer:

"For me, getting Rage Against The Machine back to T was a great coup," he said. "They are just as relevant now as they were in 1994 at the first T festival, which was when they last played here."

We did wonder if this was a back-handed complement - perhaps Ellis was suggesting that the band had already compromised itself into being a Sony BMG t-shirt marketing scheme painted as political activists; we suspect, though, he meant it.