I enjoyed this funny and truthful piece on Glastonbury in the Quietus recently https://thequietus.com/articles/31725-glastonbury-festival-review-people-eh about the self-including misanthropy the recent festival brought out in the writer.
I never went to Glastonbury, but between 2005 and 2012, I
did go to, on average, a couple of music festivals a year, and I found his
words and his irritations rang true, which is not to say I didn’t mainly love being
at festivals. But if you haven’t regularly experienced minor rage at gigs and
festivals at people making too much noise, jumping queues, going on shoulders
etc. then I suspect you may be one of those people and you need to stop.
Mostly I went to smaller, but not tiny festivals. Not sure I
could have coped with Glastonbury, though who knows.
A particularly memorable performance was that of ‘The
Trapeze Swinger’ by Iron Man at Green Man Festival in August 2008. I probably
remember it so well because it was extremely well captured on amateur footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnGXduu293c&ab_channel=missyhate,
perhaps by an early iPhone.
I don’t throw in the conjecture on technology for no reason.
I’ve written about this song before, so it’s (mainly) not the song that I’m
going to write about now, but the moment.
It’s about 8 pm on Sunday 17th August 2008, near
Crickhowell the middle of the Brecon Beacons. It’s been one of those
rain-all-weekend festivals. The whole site is a mudslide. Some people are
literally covered in mud, the marquees are packed with people seeking shelter,
warm and cold drinks, but the mood in the open air has been good all weekend,
and there have been no major disasters.
I don’t revel in the weather, but I’m still of an age where
I can cope fine with it. The rain and mud don’t ruin my enjoyment. I’ve got
wellies, I’ve got waterproofs, I’ve got an ok tent. I’m with a couple of
friends, I think a couple of members of my family are there too.
Spiritualized headlined the Friday, Super Furry Animals the
Saturday, Iron and Wine are the second last act on the main stage on the
Sunday. The headliner, bizarrely perhaps, but showing the festival’s original
folk credentials, will be the original line-up of reformed 60s folk
“supergroup” Pentangle – Jacqui McShee, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny
Thompson, Terry Cox.
As I look now through the line-up, I remember the weekend.
Plenty of music that was up my street. I remember King Creosote and James
Yorkston being great on the Friday.
A few nice little oddities in terms of place on the bill.
Some acts will get a lot bigger. Cate Le Bon, The War on Drugs, The National;
Mumford and Sons are literally as low on the bill as they could possibly be,
maybe a few months from accelerating their path to domination.
Richard Thompson was fantastic on Saturday evening, I
remember, just filled the natural amphitheatre with the sound of his one
guitar, also Laura Marling, still a teenager, was great. I’d been watching the
main stage all day on Sunday.
There’ve been a few pieces in the last year or so making the
case that culture has stopped moving, that everything is the same as it was
10/15 years ago. I think this hypothesis is wildly, wildly, impossibly wrong in
the wider sense, but, if you take, a very specific, small view of what
“culture” means, you can look at the footage shot of Iron and Wine that weekend
and think, yes, that could be right now. You could think a lot of those kind of
acts, are still, somewhat, in the same kind of slots at the same kind of
festivals.
You could think 14 years is not such a long time looking at
Sam Beam here, a man alone, framed in darkness. But events like Green Man were
always outside time. It’s everything else has changed. Most music has changed, including
what rock music has been confident or not trying to do, as well the way we
consume music, film, the way we consume TV and the internet, generational
relationships, movements and moments. I mean, even beards have changed. A beard
like Sam Beam’s used to mean “he’s probably a peace-lovin’ vegetarian folk
musician” now there’s just as much chance it mean’s he’s a gym bunny racist.
Summer of 2008 - Obama is a couple of months away from the
presidency, Gordon Brown has been PM for a year, though already on the
downslope, with the Financial Crisis in full swing and the Camerosborne pincer
already affecting the weak minds of the terminally complacent, London has a new
blue mayor, despite my best efforts to warn all of four or five people of his
dangers. It’s the weekend Usain Bolt has, on the Saturday night, shocked the
world for the first time by breaking the 100m world record in Beijing (whether
I was able to find that out on my portable radio or my non-smartphone, I can’t
quite recall). The first ‘Iron Man’ film has come out a couple of months
earlier. Facebook is a burgeoning big deal, not many are using twitter yet.
I, David McGaughey, am skinny, and fit. Probably as skinny
and fit as I ever was. I’ve had one blood clot but no broken leg. The weekend
after, I’m travelling up to the isle of Coll to participate in my first
half-marathon, which I will run in such a solidly fast way as to encourage me I
may be able to run a fast marathon in a couple of months, despite the nagging
knee pain I will start to feel on the journey home.
I’ll never run a fast marathon, but, right there, at Green
Man, at the end of the National’s early evening’s set, which I’ll have hugely
enjoyed, as the sky shows the first signs of clearing and I look forward,
somewhat, to hearing a few songs from Iron and Wine’s 2007 album ‘The
Shepherd’s Dog’, I’m probably feeling pretty satisfactorily peaceful.
I think I am alone, though I may not be. I am certainly
alone when, a short way into Iron and Wine’s set, I take the opportunity to
grab my supper from the pie van at the top of the hill from which one can view
the stage. Even in the queue for the pie van, the music sounds strong and true.
I settle in a spot on the hill for the second half of the set. The pie is good.
Then here comes ‘The Trapeze Swinger’, a song I’ve never heard before, and
which, 14 years later, I still love. It’s in the realm of Cave and Cohen, in
the sacred and profane, simple, repetitive, epic, beautiful.
For weeks and months to come, I will extol its virtues to
anyone who’ll hear me. For years, I’ll be baffled that it doesn’t become a
cultural landmark. An interesting moment, I think, with some songs we adore, is
when we first hear them with someone else’s ears, when we first imagine being
the person hearing it and saying “it’s ok, but I don’t really know what you’re making
a fuss about”. They move then into the realm of the ordinary. We might carry on
loving them, but in a different way. It’s a testament to how much I loved ‘The
Trapeze Swinger’ that that moment didn’t come for several years, but it did
come eventually, of course.
Still, I watch this video occasionally, remember that
feeling of being among people, but people I didn’t mind being among, of that
time when moderately successful indie-folk ruled the small world, and when I
weighed less than 11 st 7 and I was one of a very small number of people who
truly knew what damage Boris Johnson could do if given many more chances.
There was another song I remember hearing at a festival around
that time, I think at End of the Road in 2007, in mid-afternoon in an ornate garden,
a song played on the piano by Joan as Police Woman, called ‘Furious’, where she
asks “Are you not furious? Are you not furious enough?” and I remember thinking
“No, I’m probably not, not quite”. There seemed like there was less to be
furious about then, but there wasn’t really.
