Festival Frivolities

In Jospeh Conrad’s Heart of Darkness a trader, Kurtz, disappears into the Congolese jungle while working for some Belgian Colonial Exploitation Machine, or something like that , and is eventually found having, in the popular parlance of the time, gone native. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies charts the similar descent of a group of shipwrecked boys as they shed the niceties of civilisation for the more entertaining activities of daubing themselves in warpaint, doing unspeakable acts to wild pigs, and picking on the fat kid.  As with Kurtz, this transformation takes some time. Not as long as it takes David Cameron to come back from his 9k-a-week holiday when the country he’s supposed to be leading erupts into spontaneous aggressive street parties, or ‘looting’ if you prefer. No, not that long, but they are not overnight transformations.

Considering that, I’m convinced that there be some kind of temporal distortion field* around Reading every late August because when I arrived at the festival last Thursday afternoon, and the gates had been open less than twenty four hours, I was greeted with a sight reminiscent of El Greco’s depictions of hell, but with more Day-Glo facepaint and cans of shit lager.

Within the space of a day a mass of what I imagined had been, just two days earlier, mostly functioning members of society had transmogrified into a phantasmagoria of mud-dwelling, hollering, Stigs-of-the-Dump. I suspect some of the younger members had seen the famous images of the mud-crusted in reports of festivals of yesteryear, and had spent the first few hours rolling around on the ground to cultivate the look of a veteran. Some people were clearly just relieved to give into their inner laziness and not have to wash or change any clothes. Because it is such an effort, as we all know. However, I suspect the majority of people were more concerned with conducting a contained experiment to see how twatted a human can get without a total cheese-brained meltdown.  They could have saved themselves a lot of time and money and asked me. I’ve already conducted this experiment. The answer is Very.

I went to my first festival when I was eighteen, travelling all the way from Manchester, on a baking hot day, on a National Express coach. It was like a pilgrimage, a rite-of-passage. There was a sense that, like the Native American Sun Dance Ritual** without the experience of Music Festival no amount of Sisters of Mercy T-shirts, or Stone Roses Twelve-inches could allow you to be considered a true disciple of an Alternative Music Scene**.

The first Reading Festival Proper was in 1971, and it must have been absolutely fucking awesome as I’ve met a shedload of people who’ve complained about how it used to be much better, and how it’s gone more downhill than a fat cheese on Cooper’s Hill.  This must mean that every year is worse than the previous, and that eventually it’s downward trajectory will mean it is so shite that it will cause a black hole of musical evil to rip open the planet, and we’ll be left in a perpetual hell of Jedward and Milli Vanilli miming to the Bay City Rollers. With bongos.  

Alternatively, these people are talking through their greying rectums (recta?) and the past is really like a foreign country.  While you’re there it’s a bit Meh, but when you got home and look at your photos after a few beers you only remember the sun and architecture, and forget the dysentery and ouzo.

I’ve already forgotten the horror of the toilets, and have fond memories of sipping cider in the sunshine. The water torture of a slightly leaky tent has been fuzzed out by the reassuring image of a soft pitter-patter on the protective canvas. And where once there were some excruciatingly irritating public school tossers promoting psychopathic thoughts of class war and petrol-bombed tents, there are now vague reflections of carefree youth, riding the wave of the contemporary Sun Dance.

 Now they are no longer the innocent, the untried.  Having experienced their first festival, they are warriors of the scene. Yes, they too can now join their elders in reflecting on how great everything used to be when we were kids, and how shit everything is now. In the words of the Great Colonial Overlord Rudyard Kipling, if you too, my son, can keep your head for a weekend while drinking watery lager , while all around are losing theirs in K-holes and the like, then you are a man. Or at least, you’re no longer a festival virgin, and that’s gotta be worth something.

*Or whatever those things from Star Trek are called

** Which sounds very fucking painful : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Dance

***Or maybe it was just me and my insecurity.

Dribble

Yesterday evening, as I sipped a refreshing summer cooler*, the Cornish sky was kissed with searing pinks and reds, flamed with a glowing orange, shitfaced with colour.  It was the kind of summer sky which grabs the heart and atomises it.  This morning I looked out of my bedroom window and half expected to see Noah and all his wee beasties looking smug and dry in their Godboat, so plentiful was the rain. It was truly shitting down. Luckily I'd cashed in my year's worth of Nectar points for a rather fetching floral umbrella so at least I can pretend it's sunny when it's actually raining sideways.

Now the sky is grey and there is an all-encompassing drizzling mist across the ground. It is clearly summer in England. I differentiate England from the rest of Britain, because I’ve never seen anything but rain in a Welsh summer, Scottish summers are made of midges, and I was mostly in the pub when I went to Ireland, and so don’t feel qualified to speak about the Emerald outdoors. I’m sure it’s there, in the same way that the centre of the earth is there. I’m vaguely aware of it,  but it never really concerns me.

It is telling that the words British Summer Time do not stereotypically invoke visions of turquoise sunsets, sticky thick heat and bronzed bodies lazily going about their daily lives but rather a reminder to change your clocks and feel jetlagged at work for half a week. I suspect this deed is less to do with the changing light of days and more to do with the fact that we need a marker so we can say for definite that it is summer because, although the weather might bear witness to the contrary, we’ve changed our clocks, so it has to be summer.

I didn’t really believe people who claimed that a pre-occupation with weather was peculiarly British trait when I was younger, because I thought stereotypes were lazy, and that we didn’t really talk about the weather ad nauseam. As I’ve grown older and wiser and rounder, I found that the reason for many stereotypes is a tenuous grounding in reality. Northeners are friendlier (or more intrusive, if you’d prefer), goalkeepers and drummers are all slightly nuts, and Tories are callous heartless tautological arseholes.

And the British, generally, talk about the weather. Frequently. I suspect there are two reasons for this. One is as a conversational ‘in’, especially with strangers/potential romances. Lots of Rain We’re Having opens the gates for Nice Eyes leading to Here’s My Number which swiftly steps into I Do and it all ends happily with You’ll Hear from my Lawyer.

The second reason is that we have lots of it, over forty-nine different flavours, and it can’t be taken for granted.  We spend our lives subconsciously noting how minute atmospheric pressure changes mean that although, yes, the sky is blue, and yes, although the sun is battering down, it is clearly going to start raining like a motherfucker in twenty minutes. More so if you leave house without a coat.  This ingrained, hypersensitive barometer allows us to negotiate our way through the fickle meteorological smorgasbord in which we are immersed.

But it comes at a price. Like the model train collector, or antique lawnmower collector you surprisingly find yourself talking to a party at which you know no-one else, expertise borders on obsession. I think it’s time we decided to shed this weather-obsessed image, and to promote ourselves globally with a more hip, glamorous image.  There must be other interests we share as a group of nations, something with more jazz and dazzle around which we can start all conversation.

It is with a sense of national obligation, therefore, that any conversation I have with anyone who is not a native Briton, and probably even if they are, will not be about the weather. It’s time to forge a new National Stereotype, to change our global image. Something sexy and dynamic, worthy of the Twenty First Century. A topic we can all unite about, about which we can all have an opinion or an anecdote. I’m going talk about Nectar Points. Join me in this brave new world. Do it for your country.


*Sainsbury's Vodka. Double Nectar Points

Damn Youth Gone Wild

The best thing about the past is that it is an ever changing Protean dreamscape. Or something like that anyway.  What I mean is that how we think about the past can change from day to day, and sometimes even minute-to-minute. When I’m feeling sorry for myself, grisly depressing episodes from my past congregate together in my mind, like an ominous blob of whinging despair,  and I slump around  viewing my life through grey-tinted, and probably slightly-cracked, spectacles. Cheap NHS ones, from the eighties, usually.

 Conversely, when I ‘m feeling chipper, and things are ticking along nicely, the past is a paradise of taken opportunities and lessons learnt.  Everything that happened made me stronger, and there was always love, and pockets full of joy, and other sugary shit like that

Just because it’s gone, it doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. 

One of the more irritating effects of the phenomenon is a twatty tendency to think that when were younger, we were less offensive/rude/hard/soft/feral/molly-coddled than the current younger generation.  This doesn’t apply to just teens.  I’m sure most of the twenty-somethings I know are considerably less cool than I was when I was in my twenties.  Although this bit is probably true. But I’m in a good mood, so I would think that. Tomorrow, you may find me a grave man entertaining visions of a semi-overweight sociopath floundering from one bar to another when contemplating the very same period of my worthless failed existence.

 I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.  I was probably a drunken twat, but a bit hip with it.  Anyone who knows me from that period, please refrain from sharing your memories with me. I like the fug.

This phenomenon goes beyond misremembering our own pasts, to misremembering  general society, and, in the case of Creationists, misremembering the Universe. Dinosaurs are not dragons from three thousand years ago, dickheads.

Following the recent riot-lootings, this rewriting of days of yore, to the detriment of the present, is taking a worrying turn.  CallMeDave Cameron is spouting sinister platitudes about the slow decay of society. As if he has anything with which to compare it.  I’m sure the worst disruption of his school years was a squabble over who’d lost the biscuit game, or the crushing despair of realising one’s brogues were from a less reputable Saville Row establishment than one’s fag.

Personally, I don’t notice massive differences. When I was a child we had riots, we had single parent families, people got murdered, Marathon was a better name than Snickers, and old people banged on, relentlessly, about how out-of-control we pesky kids were.

But CMD has decided that we’re going to hell-in-a-looted-handcart, and that society is going to descend into a Lord of the Flies kiilfest unless he steps up to the plate and whacks some respect into the oiks who dare to taint his idea of the perfect world. A world in which the oiks doff their caps to their richers and betters, and he sits on a throne of slave-gold, laughing as chavs and hoodies are forced to work in his dungeons for a token monthly stipend.

 And he seems to have mustered some support in this view.  Until recently there was common Facebook meme about ‘You Know You Grew Up in the Eighties if…’ which basically suggests all children are weak-arsed shits who are scared of daylight,  and couldn’t organise a piss-up in brewery, and even if they could, they’d be shitfaced after two Bacardi Breezers. 

Now the more common feeling crawling the same pages is that the modern youth are all baby Mafiosa, with the criminal organisational skills of a John Gotti , the physique of The Thing erratically coupled with the temperament of Captain Cavemen, and Weren’t We All Much Nicer When We Were Kids.  I’ve even heard people complaining that in their youth, people only slashed with knives, but the modern young hoodlum stabs, which is much less respectful because a slash, y’know, can be stitched but a stab can kill. An unusual perspective, at least from where I’m standing. Over here, far away from the person who told me that.

It would be churlish  to bring up CMD’s Bullingdon Club riots here, and to point out that even the most over-privileged of Tory pigfucks have episodes of anti-social behaviour, but I’m a churlish kinda guy.  If anyone can honestly say they weren’t a twat at some time in their youth, and didn’t do something their older selves would thoroughly disapprove of, then either they’re lying, or very, very dull. The riots were a step too far, but they were the result of very complex social issues and agendas. Not everyone involved was one of Satan’s hooded minions, nor were they all fallen angels.  Banging out Draconian sentences and reactionary policies, on the grounds that the safety of the world depends on it, is at best misguided, and at worst disingenuous.

They may dress differently, listen to different music, and have technology we only saw on Buck Rogers, but essentially they’re the same as we were. The kids are alright. 

London's Burning

Boris is on TV talking about people destroying communities and wrecking livelihoods. I assume he’s talking about Bankers, as he’s stood outside an HSBC, webbed with broken windows. I also assume that’s his handywork, and he’s about to lead the country into revolution. Looks like he’s got quite nice a tan.  It must be sunnier in Hackney than I thought.

Elsewhere, London has turned into Escape from New York.  I lived through the Moss Side Riots of 1981, which is to say, they happened about a mile from where I lived, I was alive when they started and, as you can tell, was still alive when they finished.  That was a proper riot.  Princess Road looked like a Picasso sculpture by the time it was over.  I went to Clapham Junction last night, (once I’d been told it was safe to do so. I like thrills, but I don't confuse stupidity with bravery) and it seemed to be more of an overly-aggressive shopping trip cross-bred with the end of Glastonbury.

 I’m sure there’s a passionate political message somewhere, but the first reading is mostly I Want Stuff So I Will take Stuff. If anything, it’s a vindication of the power of the consumerist capitalist world which one might reasonably assume the riots were a reaction to. So, through the looting, the kids are validating the desirability of materialistic culture, and are condemning themselves by perpetuating its grip on society.I suspect they haven't thought this through.

 It’s also massive free advertising to Curry’s, JD Sports and, amongst certain Facebook Friends, Gregg’s pasties.  I’m particularly fond of the Vegetable Pasty. Most others seem to go for something called a ‘Steak Bake’. It takes all sorts to make a world.

CallMeDave has finally come home from his 9K-a-week holiday villa to lecture us all about poverty and how it’s no excuse for the uproar. The Tories seem to be trying to out-Tory each other on this issue, which is as depressingly predictable as a dropped pint when trying to carry three beers and a packet of Cheese and Onion though a crowded bar.

Theresea ‘Mrs Dracula’ May refused to acknowledge that the riots were provoked by anything other than evil, and may have even suggested that Satan himself had taken corporeal form, donned a  hoody, and tried to bring about the End of Days. This is something I believe St John predicted in the little-know book from the Apophryca, The Adidas Testament, although I may have misheard during that particular RE lesson..  The Daily Mail is shouting about the Army, and the Mail message boards are shouting about immigration, and the BNP is shouting, but is so excited can’t actually form any full sentences.  Instead they are reduced to pointing and screaming ’Them! Them!Them!’ with pulsating red veins bursting violently along newly shined skinheads.

For me, it’s a genuine melange of fear, excitement, pity, anger and worry. Probably a few other emotions too.  And I think this is a reasonable state to be in. Because I don’t think there is simple split of Poor Disenfranchised Youth/Evil Thugs.  The kids have got genuine grievances – the EMA has been cut, there are very few jobs, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting fucked. We’re not all in this together, not by a long shot. And if you know you face years on the dole with limited options, you’re going to want to do that with a big TV and some comfy shoes, surely? 

In his Autumn before the Winter

I think I had my first midlife crisis when I was about nineteen and regretted not having put in the time and effort to learn guitar, not having been more studious during my A-Levels,  and not being on the way to doing something sensible and secure, like Dentistry, rather than something utterly impractical, like English and Latin.  Even now, I sometimes pine for the simplicity of looking at people’s mouths all day while fiddling about with bits of pointy metal, in much the same way a Norwegian Blue pines for the fjords.

Being a man of logic and quiet reflection I exorcised some those demons of regret by getting angrily drunk one winter’s morning,  and smashing my guitar into contemporary art , cutting my hair and attempting to channel the spirit of early sixties Beatles by wearing a polo neck jersey and black leather jacket. 

Unfortunately I ended up looking like, in the words of one very kind friend, ‘someone who knew a lot about curtains’.  I’ve never worn a polo-neck since. Mostly because I don’t wish to project the vibe of a curtain connoisseur. But also because there is a degree to which I like to separate fashion and the sensation of sharing an intimate moment with The Boston Strangler. It’s a win-win decision.

The stereotypical Mid-Life Crisis has many essential elements. Take one slightly greying/balding/chubby man in his forties, pencil in an ex/long-suffering/bored wife, and insert either a Harley or a Hornby Train Set, depending on the demographic. Working-class balders tend to go for the Hornby route, presumably because they’re ashamed of their headshine.  Middle class greyers fall more towards the Harley side, just because they’re, y’know, still cool, and an outlaw. And the price difference between a Harley and a Hornby is fucking massive.

I think I’m on my third MLC now.  Which, apart from anything else, means I’m going to live to a variety of ages, bending the rules of human existence as we know it.

However, I eschew such phallocentric crisis aids as fat throbbing motorbikes, or chirpy little trains chugging in and out of tunnels. Not for me such symbolism of the flickering pulse of a dying sex drive.  No, sireee.  I’ve chosen the third, less subtle route. I’ve finally started playing guitar. More accurately, I’ve bought several guitars which all look CAF*, and am equally inept at all of them.  I play usually like I have plump sausages nailed to my fingers, or, on bad day, in exactly the same way I imagine C3P0 would play if Jabba had ordered he be the P-Bass Funk-Droid, rather than an interpreter**.

The  guitar habit is getting a bit out of control now, and has spread into the world of bass, which, quite frankly, is trying to run before learning to crawl.  A loud guitar through several pedals is quite forgiving.  If you’re shit at bass, you cannot hide. A bit like Where’s Wally at the Million Man March: your number is up. 

I suppose the MLC is that final last mad surge of youth before the Autumn of life has fully kicked in. Sid Vicious once sang ‘Regrets- I’ve had a few’***.  And it is surely better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t.  I can go to my grave now, miserably safe in the knowledge that I didn’t become a great rockstar not because of missed opportunities in my youth, but because people have ears to hear, and that is the biggest hurdle I could ever have faced.  The MLC serves to remind us all of our limitations, and set in a thick vein of cantankerousness to see us though the second half of our lives.

When I am old I shall wear grey.

I’m off to shout vague complaints in the direction of some children. Better start practising now.

*Cool As Fuck

** If you don’t get this reference, then I pity you, Family Guy must make absolutely no sense to you, ever.    

***Fuck Frank Sinatra. This is the one I heard first.