Ah, finally.
Gambling? Nope. Impulse buys? Not really. Unexpected nudity? A little, yes. But here, at last, is a subject upon which I feel I can speak with some authority. Having discarded my festival V plates* at the tender age of 17, I am now a veteran of God knows how many mud-strafed, pharmaceutically irresponsible weekend jaunts, spanning two decades and both hemispheres.**

There are just so many stories to tell. Like the time at Glasto when my mate R lost his virginity to a girl who, I was euphemistically assured, “had a lovely personality”, who was seemingly unfamiliar with the sound-proofing qualities (or lack thereof) inherent in Argos’s range of camping & outdoor requisites, and who made a noise like a cat being ironed when she got into the swing of things. The following morning he pinned his previous day’s underpants to the floor with a tent peg, then set fire to them, either as some sort of sacrificial thanksgiving or a rudimentary exorcism.

Or the time when, approximately 40 hours into a weekend bender that the late Hunter S Thomson would probably describe as “a bit fucking much, to be honest”, I decided that the best and safest course of action would be to propose to my then girlfriend. I staggered into the market area at Reading at 1am, barely able to gurn convincingly, let alone speak, accosted a deeply unimpressed stallholder, and announced my intention to purchase a ring. He fixed me with an expression, doubtless honed from years of dealing with semi-conscious twatbaskets such as myself, that said “however much you believe in your heart, right now, that you need to buy a ring, please trust me that you absolutely don’t.” The cunt still sold me one though. The engagement lasted 3 weeks, and I don’t take drugs any more…***

Or the time we got arrested in the middle of the day for smoking a casual lunchtime spliff in the doorway of our tent, by two of HM’s finest who looked like they’d graduated from Cop School that morning. Seriously, the male one looked like he hadn’t quite begun shaving yet, however his female counterpart was definitely ensconced in the ‘comfortable footwear’ enclosure, and gave off the impression that she’d castrate any one of us in a fucking heartbeat if the urge took her. They even had a crack at ‘good-cop-bad-cop’, with the work experience kid chatting amiably about the best food stalls on site while his colleague searched my mate’s bag (thank Jehovah she’d been holding the doobie when the constabulary showed up – if they’d searched my bag, we’d all have gone to jail). We did what I considered at the time to be an Oscar-worthy performance of wide-eyed naivety, claiming to have purchased a ready-rolled spliff from some random crusty the previous evening, because “none of us had taken drugs before and we fancied trying it”. Arf. The best bit, and I swear this is true, is that while this was happening, the compilation tape on our little stereo was playing ‘I Fought The Law’ by The Clash, followed by ‘Get Myself Arrested’ by Gomez.

Or the time my mate Paul came to Reading specifically to see Nirvana and nobody else, spent the entire weekend telling anyone who’d listen that he was there to see Nirvana, then drank a litre of supermarket vodka on the afternoon they were headlining, and passed out in the main field an hour before they came on stage. Subsequent attempts to kick him awake proved fruitless, but during one briefly lucid moment he did manage to utter the immortal words “Ah, fuck it, they’ll be on next year”. Oddly enough, they weren’t.

And then there’s been the music. I’ve seen some of the greatest bands in history perform some of the finest sets of their careers. I’ve seen virtual unknowns blow away an entire festival, and established megastars who turned out to be a staggering disappointment.

I couldn’t tell you my favourite – there are just too many. But I once saw The Levellers stop a headline show at Glastonbury, in front of 150,000 people, and announce that they weren’t playing another note until my mates and I (and about a dozen others) got down off the sound tower. Which is pretty cool, I reckon.


*Not at an actual ‘V’ festival, thank fuck. V Festivals are effectively a crowded barbecue/corporate branding exercise with Dido playing in the distance. For all eternity.

**The British do festivals way better than the Australians. I have never been able to figure out why.

***…than Motley Crue did on the Dr Feelgood tour.
(Monkey Tennis isn't Spartacus, Sun 7 Jun 2009, 18:21, 1 reply)

Haha a good one
But the one line that made me burst into laughter was

'a weekend bender that the late Hunter S Thomson would probably describe as “a bit fucking much, to be honest”'
(Meatfish BAH, Mon 8 Jun 2009, 15:26, closed)