Song 97: The Trapeze Swinger (again)

 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 17^th 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.