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Music

The Story of How My First Music Festival Was Nearly My Last

We drove there in my mate Steve’s yellow Datsun Sunny, which was so fucked you could only enter and exit it via the boot.

There is no question that summer festival season is upon us, and at The Levi’s® Tailor Shop (found in every Levi’s® store nationwide in the UK) you can customise, personalise & repair new or old Levi’s® products in an infinite number of ways in preparation for your extended weekend of misbehaviour and fun. In that spirit, the mighty John Doran – he of Menk, and latterly his book, Jolly Lad - was kind enough to share with us a number of stories of his various extended weekends of misbehaviour and fun. Enjoy.

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My first rock festival was nearly my last for several reasons.

In August 1989, I’d just turned eighteen, got good A-level results and had saved up enough money from working as a ride operator at Knowsley Safari Park in Merseyside that I could finally afford to go to a festival. There wasn’t any discussion about where we were going. It had to be Reading because Texan maniacs the Butthole Surfers were playing on the main stage.

We drove there in my mate Steve’s yellow Datsun Sunny, which was so fucked it had a hole in the floor that you could fit your foot through and, more importantly, it was also so fucked you could only enter and exit it via the boot.

Despite having been a member of the cubs when I was nine, my entire camping-related knowledge base had already been eroded by Thunderbird fortified wine and teenage fecklessness by the time I turned eighteen. To be fair we did take tents, a Trangia portable gas stove, a bottle of vegetable oil, a packet of curry powder and a large bag of rice. But we also took 16 bottles of Thunderbird Blue fortified wine and several four packs of Special Brew. And a packet of milk chocolate digestives. And thus the seeds of our undoing were sewn.

Also to be fair we did a good job of putting the tent up. But as soon as we had erected it, we were immediately accosted by some older herberts who said, “We’re from the NME… we need to get our car off the site immediately. Take this tent down so we can drive out.”

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We formed a huddle to discuss what we were going to do but they simply drove over our tent the second our backs were turned. Our digestives were destroyed and our shelter was compromised.

It soon became clear that away from the life-support system of our parents’ homes (and refrigerators), the unmediated access to superpowered booze and lack of essential survival skills was something of a double edged sword.

I had never eaten “foreign” food before and only knew how to cook chips, burgers and Fray Bentos pies, so I set about making my first festival meal not really in possession of all the facts given that I had never even seen a curry before, let alone cooked or eaten one.

My first mistake was not realising that you need to boil rice to make it work. I simply tipped it into a pan of boiling vegetable oil, attempting to cook it in the same way I would have done with chips. Then I poured in half a sack of extra hot curry powder. I think I managed to eat three spoonfuls of the teeth-meltingly hot, disgusting savoury gravel before giving up.

“This curry”, I announced to my companions redundantly, “is not very nice.”

They nodded glumly in agreement and thus we were reduced to attempting to survive for the rest of the weekend on fortified wine alone. This would account for why my memory of the music is pretty hazy. Although to be fair, Loop, The Butthole Surfers, the Wedding Present, TackHead and World Domination Enterprises were all brilliant but every single day I was drunk to the state of unconsciousness well before any of the headliners - New Order, The Pogues and The Mission - played.

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I remember coming round one night lying under the Datsun Sunny. I was woken from my drunken slumber by the thunderous electronic bass line of "Blue Monday". Above the campsite the sky was ablaze with the lights from the mainstage. It sounded like the greatest thing ever.

“NEWWWWWWW ORRRRRRDERRRRRRRR!” I slurred and started dragging myself forward along the mud by my hands like one of those mad rotting tramps from Walking Dead. But I gave up after six feet and went back to sleep and when I woke up it was time to go home.

When I got back to Merseyside I vowed never to go to another rock festival for the rest of my life.

In fact I was so traumatised by that event that it would be another 15 years before I returned to Reading Festival by which time I was a 33-year-old rock journalist and now slightly more able to look after myself.

True enough, musically it turned out to be an exemplary trip out of London where I now lived. In a haze of beers and smokes I saw Hope Of The States and British Sea Power summon up a righteous thunder from England’s iron core on the smallest of the stages, and then saw a blazingly on form Metallica play "For Whom The Bell Tolls" on the main stage. And there were enough good sets from the likes of The Darkness, Junior Senior and Mark Lanegan to leave me just about satisfied. On the last night I wandered back to my tent as happy as hell and sat down on a log next to a roaring bonfire. As I stared into the flickering flames of Halloween orange and yellow thinking to myself that maybe I had been too harsh in my initial judgements about rock festivals, a Spaniard with dreadlocks sat down next to me with an acoustic guitar and said: “Hey dude… do you know the song ‘More Than Words’ by Extreme?”

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As the crusty bellend strummed away, yet again, I swore I would never go to another rock festival for as long as I lived.

However, 2003 was the year I realised that a festival didn’t necessarily have to equal camping in a muddy field, huddling round a bonfire constructed solely of empty plastic water bottles for heat and watching Bowling For Soup play on a stage situated five miles away on the horizon. 2003 was when I went to my first ever All Tomorrow’s Parties weekender, held in a Pontins holiday camp in Camber Sands, East Sussex.

The Autechre curated weekend was an embarrassment of riches and still stands up as one of the best musical events I’ve ever been to. It was something of a dream to watch The Fall, Coil, Kool Keith and LFO in the kind of seaside venue that was probably more used to hosting bingo or talent shows. The setting threw up some pretty weird sights like that of all of Public Enemy and the S1Ws in full stage gear playing crazy golf. A lack of research on my part led me to assume that the oddly named Sunn O))) was actually a Berlin based techno DJ - as opposed to a spine-pulverisingly loud and heavy avant garde drone metal act - purely because they were on before Aphex Twin. After some extensive and intensive preparation for a night’s raving care of Richard D James, we stumbled into the Sunn O))) show ready to dance. I remember lasting about five minutes before collapsing, and I can remember vividly rolling around on the floor shouting: “Aiiieeeeeeee! What the fuck’s going on?!”

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Sunn O))) would very quickly become one of my all time favourite musical acts.

I ended up going to nearly every single UK ATP weekender that followed. At the height of their powers they were running four major UK events a year, so that’s a lot of festival time and I couldn’t begin to list the amazing shows I saw, from The Arkestra to Nick Cave and from LCD Soundsystem to Broadcast… not to mention their ‘house bands’ Shellac and Lightning Bolt. Most of my best friends went to ATP festivals at one point or another and I fell in love with my girlfriend there. I have great memories of us, blissed out and happy in our chalet, listening to ‘our’ song: "Stabbed In The Face" by Wolf Eyes.

The party always went on all-night long at ATP. I got locked out of my chalet one night and a pair of enterprising fashion students took pity on me, invited me into their place and then made a huge wedding dress for me out of all of their bed linen and some pins. When they were finished they got me to pose for photographs. The sun’s first rays illuminated my lengthy train and flowing pleated gown while the gentle breeze of dawn rustled my veil. And my giant beard.

Musically, the people who always get it right are Incubate in the Netherlands though - and I’ll never miss the chance to go there. This arts and music festival is held annually in the town of Tilburg - which is also home to arguably the world’s best metal festival, Roadburn, and the largest gay funfair in all of the Benelux region, Pink Monday. The line up will range from double necked lute players, to necro black metal bands, to acid house DJs, to afrobeat orchestras, to Egyptian chaabi MCs. One year they had a performance from avant garde Viennese artist Hermann Nitsch. He took over an entire warehouse. At one end he hung three naked people from crucifixes and ordered a whole bunch of other naked people to fling pig entrails and pig blood all over them. Up in the rafters were another big group of people - also butt naked - playing free jazz on saxophones or wildly swinging wooden football rattles. The only person clothed in the packed warehouse (bar the audience) was Nitsch himself who was sitting in a director’s chair, getting slowly hammered on red wine while barking orders through a megaphone at naked people covered in pig blood.

It was exactly like the sort of thing you never see at T In The Park.

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