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Music

Hell On Earth (AKA V Festival)

Our guide to V Festival – the most bizarre, quirky, wacky and edgy festival on the planet.

All sorts of crazy stuff happens at festivals – that’s why you attend them, right? But for some reason, the things that go on at V are more bizarre, quirky, wacky and edgy than most. What follows are one writer’s top six V Festival memories.

SPONSORSHIPS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO GOUGE YOUR EYES OUT

V is where brands come to life. It’s like Night at the Museum for brands. For instance, before V, you used to only be able to be offended by Lynx ads on television at home. But had you turned up at V2007, you would’ve seen Lynx’s sexist dreams come to life in the form of the Lynx Man Wash. This involved a string of volunteer male campers in their boxer shorts being scrubbed down head to toe by paid “babes” in bikinis in a perspex booth, while below a gallery of onlookers whooped and hollered. When, we wondered, would Bernard Manning turn up and declare 1973 officially open? Sadly, he died only weeks later. Last year, there was a Nissan Micra Bar, where you could party around a real-life Nissan Micra on a plinth. Imagine all the fun you can have drinking watery lager next to a Nissan Micra while Professor Green DJs! “Brands,” says V, “are real. They are as real as you and me. And therefore they deserve to have as much enforced, self-conscious ‘fun’ as anyone else.”

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SHED SEVEN AT 4:15 PM

What’s particularly odd about V is the number of seemingly forgotten about bands that it dredges back into existence solely to fulfill some annual retainer with the powers that V. Every year, for instance, Shed Seven play the second stage at 4:15 PM. At 4:18 PM, Rick Witter announces that it’s time to rock. At 4:21 PM, Rick thanks the crowd for attending. At 4:35 PM, they play “Ocean Pie”. At 4:45 PM, they drop “Speakeasy” (which is a song about fantastic mobile phone deals), then Rick tells everyone they’ve been wonderful, and the Sheds will be back next year for more. “We most certainly will too!” agrees everyone. Rick then descends into his pod to be refrozen in Carbonite for 11 months and 29 days, so that he’ll still be fresh even when the Sheds play their hundredth show, at V2096. Then Travis emerge from their pods and take to the stage.

APOCALYPTIC PISSING WOMEN

As a member of the press, V had provided me a Portakabin to work in. For technical reasons, it was just behind a chicken wire fence, along the same perimeter as the stage-side fence. And yet, for the tenth year running, the organisers seemed to have forgotten that lots of people were attending the festival – people who would be drinking lots of beer – and would therefore need to use the toilet.

By 3:15 PM, just as Pink was taking to the stage, the first rogue pissers had abandoned the infinite bog queues and started to make like zombies for our outer fence. Many were men, many more were women. Some of these had friends covering what remained of their modesty with coats as they squatted on the soggy ground and urinated. Of course, they were shielded from the punters outside, but had seemingly forgotten that we were inside this Portakabin on the far side of this ringed area.

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All day long we were treated to close-ups of the flabby arse cheeks of good time girls and ageing slappers. As Matchbox 20 after the Kooks after Kasabian played, they drunkenly pissed until the brown ground ran thick with beery-yellow, and the stench killed children. To me, something of the essential mystery and majesty of femininity died that day, and even now I still can’t eat two glazed hams and a cheese straw without shuddering involuntarily.

A LIFETIME’S WORTH OF PADDLING POOL IRONY

Do you think David Hasselhoff is a complex figure who has been cruelly overlooked by history, and whom you are on a personal quest to have reinstituted into some sort of pop-cultural pantheon? Alright, put it this way: do you bellow shout-outs on the Scott Mills Show while requesting Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”? Well then, friend, V may be just the place for you to share your unique sense of humour with a bunch of like-minds who’ve also recently discovered that the 80s are amazing. In general, V’s punters assume that festivals are about “being crazy”, and “expressing yourself”. However, these people are mostly depressingly sane, and if they truly expressed what’s in their hearts, it’d be nothing more than the sound of a swill stick rattling in an empty pail. So they have to plan their spontaneity in a dull, uniform way. Thus, on an average day at V, you will see at least 300 people dressed as a comedy-moustache-wearing twat in the style of, say, the Cuban Brothers. Now that’s irony!

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GREAT BANDS BEING IGNORED

In 2007, Iggy got the original Stooges back together, and had you seen his mid-afternoon performance on V’s third stage, you would’ve been breaking bottles over your head in sheer joy. But very few did, because, this being V, no one had heard of the Stooges. Inside that half-empty tent you could still hear KT Tunstall’s set wafting across from the packed main stage arena. “Who is this twat?” people muttered as Iggy dragged his leathery torso across the stage floor. “Where’s Remi Nicole?”

THE CAST OF HOLLYOAKS PRETENDING THEY’RE FAMOUS

You wouldn’t expect to see the entire cast of Hollyoaks in a nondescript field in Staffordshire, would you? Of course not. The cast of Hollyoaks has much better things to do. Unless, of course, it is the second weekend in August and that field is the V Festival site. In pursuit of C-list glamour and hardcore pap action, the organisers dish out armloads of free passes, and these actors comprise roughly 50 percent of any given part of the festival site. Mostly, they hang around in some backstage VVVIP area (V is very good at stratifying punters into VIP, VVIP, VVVIP and upwards: market segmentation is, as ever, the key to revenue maximisation), wearing £700 wellies, guzzling free quarts of whatever energy drink mixer is trying to launch itself that week, as they wait patiently for Rick Edwards to interview them about how they’re having a really great time.

WORDS: GAVIN HAYNES
ILLUSTRATIONS: SAM TAYLOR