I went to a festival recently for the first time in a few years. Clearly it’s taken that length of time for me to forget a very important point- I would happily kill 95% of people at any given festival. I’m sure they’re all nice and lovely the rest of the time when their enagaged with normal grinding reality like the rest of us- but stick them in a field with a soundsystem, 48 cans of Stella and access to some industral strength ketamine and everything goes horribly, horribly wrong. They begin communicating at the sort of volume usually associated with a jumbo jet crashing on take-off and decide that 5am is the appropriate time to begin an interpetation of Massive Attack tunes on the bongos to impress a posh girl called something like Iffy.
And these are people I just paid £70 to spend a weekend camping with.
Incredibly, I still had a brilliant time. This is mainly due to the company of friends I don’t see often enough who through a combination of humour, love and understanding managed to smooth the edges off the seething rage that festival people pump into the dense black gloop that’s where my soul should be. Thanks for that guys. Appreciate it.
I was also helped by the fact that festival was everything that Glastonbury always promised to be. Impressive, really, considering that it was a festival called Beatherder I was at and not Glastonbury.
I’ve been down to the big one at Pilton a couple of times and it was great- although as an event it’s so smug and in love with itself that, for one weekend per year, it briefly overtakes Manchester as the cockiest, most-likely-to-harp-on-about-it’s-inherent-greatness place in the UK. If it could fellate itself, it would snap it’s wonderful, oh-so-cool neck doing it.
Glastonbury is brilliant, no doubt, but it likes to present this image as an insane bacchanale of decadence and music where anything can happen. Rumours always ping around the festival like Twitter after it’s received a blow to the head: “Paul McCartney and Neil Young are in the acoustic tent at 4pm!”, “I’ve just seen Kurt Cobain eat a falafel during The White Lies set”, “Glenn Miller’s plane just crashed through a timehole- he’s playing on the Pyramid Stage with Slash”- that sort of thing. The chinese whispers about what’s going on in the awful, rubbish, not-at-Glastonbury outside world are even more insane. Apparently, when news spread about Michael Jackson’s death last year it took about 30 minutes flat for the rumour to mutate into news of every single celebrity called Michael having passed away in the night; Barrymore, Buerk, Jordan, McIntyre, Portillo in a freak yachting tragedy etc, etc. And what really happens that’s a surprise? Bugger all.
Oh, and those festival twats I mentioned earlier? There’s 175,000 of the fuckers.
The truth about Glastonbury, and what actually makes it great, is that it’s lots of bands you’ve heard of playing tightly scheduled sets to ensure they get some coverage on the BBC. That and the fact that Lauren Laverne’s there.
Beatherder, this past weekend, meanwhile turned out to herald all the unexpected insanity that Glasto had to stop having when they let the BBC film it and had to put up a massive fence to stop every baghead in Europe from getting in and ransacking tents. Here’s just three things I saw there this year:
- A stall honest enough to advertise that it sells ‘Shit Cameras’
- A talent competition won by a human-beatboxer and judged by, among others, a drag queen and the woman who plays Janice Battersby on Coronation Street.
- A main stage guest appearance from GMTV’s leotard-toting Mr Motivator which featured backing dancing by a friend of mine dressed as Bertie Bassett
This is what festivals are meant to do; remove us from everyday and let us experience a different reality for the weekend. One where there’s lots of drinking, loads of live music and remarkably few consequences. Unfortunately, this also means experiencing the reality of life in a refugee camp for a few days, albeit a refugee camp where half the residents have gorged themselves on cheap speed and spend their time tripping over guy ropes and walking past tents fruitlessly yelling “DAZ!” at the top of their lungs in the hope of finding their friend who went off to have sex with that posh girl called Iffy because, disgracefully, in this alternate festival reality playing Massive Attack on the bongos in a drug induced stupor at 5am actually does get you laid.
And then instead of bongos you’re listening to sweaty tent-rutting for 3 hours as Daz bangs away at Iffy with admirable tenacity yet few results as his substance-addled brain has forgotten to tell his testicles what to do and Iffy passed out in the early stages anyway. The fucking degenerate scum. Maybe one day he’ll rut right through her pelvis and I’ll be woken by the glorious sound of Daz charging round the campsite as his mind finally caves in with all the horror while Iffy flails around in muted agony looking for her severed legs. The shits. The absolute rotting shits.
Er… Anyway, I had a point, can’t remember what it was now.
Um… yeah… I went to a festival this weekend. It was great. I’m just not sure why.