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.
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