[ originally published 09/04/2014 and 16/04/14 ]
READING FESTIVAL
28th-30th August 1992
It’s generally accepted that Glastonbury is the mother of all festivals. In the early 90s, I attended four consecutive Glastos, culminating in the 25th anniversary festival with that legendary Pulp headline slot.
But the festival I have the fondest memories of, certainly the one I have more stories about, was the 1992 Reading Festival. This was back in the days when it was a stand-alone event, before it became ‘Reading-Leeds’. And of course, this was the year that Reading hosted what some regard as the ultimate festival performance – ‘twas the year Nirvana headlined, their last ever UK show.
Of course, no one was to know it would become the stuff of legend. Nirvana were the biggest band in the world at that moment, so there was obviously a lot of anticipation for that coveted Sunday night slot, but it would be another 20 months before Kurt Cobain’s premature death so the real significance was unthinkable. Strangely though, when I think about that weekend, I don’t immediately associate it with Nirvana. I think of Public Enemy.
Anyone that’s ever been to a music festival will tell you that it’s the event itself that makes it, not a particular band or artist. In fact, the more festivals I attended, the less it became about the music for me. I loved exploring, absorbing the sights, sounds and smells that would inevitably come my way. The people you meet, the company you keep, the food you eat, the various, um, other things you try out – the collective experience of festivals really has to be sampled by everyone at least once before they die.
And so my Reading weekend started out in my beloved VW camper van with five mates – Wayne of course, Andy G, Stu, Steve P and Clive – each of whom was determined to get to the site totally trashed. We arrived early Thursday evening. My camper couldn’t accommodate six pissheads for the whole weekend, so it was decided Wayne, Andy and I would kip in the van, while Stu, Steve and Clive would pitch a tent outside. My grandfather had kindly given me a large polythene sheet when I mentioned to him that the van had a leaky roof. He suggested it could be used as a makeshift awning which when tied to one side of the van, could be pulled up over the roof to keep the rain out and pitched down the other side. That’s what we did, and the lads set their tent up underneath, thus doubling their chances of staying dry in the event of rain.
The weather – the bane of festivals. We always see images of mud-covered throngs dancing in a quagmire that resembles the Somme, and this is how it seems the media loves to portray such occasions. Truth is, I attended four Glastonburys on the trot and came home with sunburn each time. Not a drop of rain whatsoever. The summer of ’92 was generally a good one if I recall, but it had rained the weekend prior to the festival. By the time we arrived at the Reading site though, there had been a couple of dry days and the ground was firming up nicely. The forecast was good and the mood was upbeat. Regardless, we felt rather smug that we had prepared for rain just in case. Van parked, tent pitched, awning in place – we were set. “Crack open another bottle of cider and roll a fat one boys,” I announced to my already inebriated compadres. “It’s time I caught you up!”
My real story begins on Saturday, day 2 of the fest. Friday had passed without incident. I watched the Milltown Brothers, Mega City Four, an immense performance by PJ Harvey, the legendary PiL (during which the ever-affable John Lydon mooned his bare buttocks at his adoring public) and the Wonder Stuff on the Main Stage. My one regret in hindsight is that, for some inexplicable reason, I failed to wander over to the Session Tent to see the magnificent Cardiacs. Stu delighted in letting me know how great they were.
I don’t recall what bands I saw on Saturday, though I’m fairly sure I caught Buffalo Tom’s set, seeing how they had recently released ‘Let Me Come Over’, their third album, a record which I still rate in my all-time top 10. Wayne raved about Shonen Knife in the Session Tent and I immediately felt pangs of jealousy that I hadn’t seen anyone yet who had blown me away like that. Until…
I had no desperate urge to see either headliner that night. I wasn’t into rap music at all, so Public Enemy held very little appeal to me. The other stage hosted BAD II, a ‘new’ version of Big Audio Dynamite. I knew little about them and despite being fronted by Mick Jones, I couldn’t get that excited about them. So I decided to catch the end of Ride’s set, watch the start of Public Enemy, then stroll over to see a bit of BAD II, before finding a doughnut van for supper. What happened instead was one of the most mind-blowing musical experiences of my life.
The one thing I never prepared myself for was the sheer power of rap music. When Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Professor Griff and Terminator X bounded onto the Reading stage and let rip, they bowled every one of the thousands of witnesses into the middle of the following week. I mean, seriously – Reading had always been traditionally a rock music festival, yet here was a hip hop act, practically unheard of at such an event and almost the antithesis of what many felt live music should be, completely stealing the show.
I stood, open-mouthed in awe, as they fired track after track after track at me with such ferocity, such emotion, such raw unrestrained power – Shut ‘em Down, Bring The Noise, Don’t Believe The Hype, Fight The Power – BANG! BANG! BANG! Public Enemy slayed me unlike any band had ever done before or indeed since (though the White Stripes and Arcade Fire came pretty close). That show was a true epiphany for me. That show took everything I thought I knew about music and shredded it mercilessly in front of my eyes. That show wiped the canvas clean and forced me to think again.
That show completely fucking changed me.
You see, music has to touch you personally for it to really make sense. There has to be something that resonates in you before you can truthfully say ‘I get it’. Alas, some never experience this and are destined to forever remain tuned into soulless commercial radio stations. Rap music had never touched me like a lot of other music had, so it is safe to say I never ‘got it’. I was 12 when White Lines by Grandmaster Melle Mel came out in 1983. While I now acknowledge it as one of the greatest singles of all time, I could never have been expected to connect with the anti-drugs message of the lyrics. Its delivery was even newer to me – these guys weren’t singing, they were just bellowing stuff aggressively. But then, rap was still pretty new back then – the first proper rap record Rapper’s Delight by Sugarhill Gang had only come out four years previous.
For nearly a decade I carried with me the theory that rap music wasn’t really worthy of the classification of ‘music’. But that Saturday evening in a field in the south of England I had my perception of the genre altered for good. Rap wasn’t just music, it became performance art.
“IS EVERYBODY HOT?” Flavor Flav yelled to the crowd. A tumultuous “YEAH!” resulted. “We’re gonna pray for rain to cool everybody down,” Flav continued, before leading the crowd in prayer.
Now, I’m not a religious person, but something tested me that evening. Not only were my musical beliefs coming in for a severe battering, but my almost non-existent spiritual side was dragged out of hiding when, within hours of Public Enemy and tens of thousands of disciples (old and new) calling to God to open the heavens, it actually happened. It rained... and how. The first I became aware of it was being awoken by a loud banging on the side of the van (a dodgy lock on the side door meant it could only be opened from the inside). The guys in the tent wanted to come in.
“We’re flooded!” they wailed.
“Has the tarp blown off?” I asked.
“No, we’re pitched in a puddle!”
It was true. The makeshift awning was holding true, but the rain was filling a dip in the uneven ground right where the tent was – they were being flooded from underneath! There was one hell of a storm outside and unfortunately, Steve, Clive and Stu were in the thick of it. Before we knew it, the van was full of the lads’ kit that they’d salvaged before they clambered in themselves and all six of us – one half dry and warm, the other half soaked – attempted to drift off back to sleep. There was mixed success. It was now cramped and humid in that van and I never completely managed to get comfortable again. Besides, I still had She Watch Channel Zero thumping around in my head. Sleep? Not a chance, boyeeeeeeee…
When it was time to get up, Wayne, Andy and I decided to wander off site to get some brekkie in town and let the others get themselves sorted. Truth be told, me and my soft, country boy ways, I really wanted some clean dry clothes that morning, but there were none. All the bags saved from the tent overnight were soaked through. They had been inadvertently chucked on top of the other bags in the van and soaked them through too!
I went about the rest of the weekend in a daze. Tired, and wet, and still reeling from the previous evening’s assault on my senses, it all seemed rather surreal. The Sunday started with a stroll to a takeaway just offsite and the chance to use a proper toilet. But the site itself was a quagmire. Once we assessed the damage, we realised how lightly we had gotten off. The two Scottish lads who were pitched near us lost pretty much everything. Their tent was destroyed. (I seem to recall we invited them to spend the final night in the van with the rest of us, but can’t remember if they accepted.) That final day resembled to a ‘T’ the media’s clichéd depiction of music festivals. It rained incessantly, there was no escape from mud. The Session Tent – a huge marquee like a circus tent which hosted the festival’s ‘second stage’ – had lost its roof in the storm and half the bands scheduled that day were cancelled! But, perhaps more bizarrely than anything, everyone had a smile on their face.
I reached the main stage on that Sunday just as John Peel introduced Björn Again, the world’s most famous Abba tribute band. Yes, really. For 40 minutes, everyone there sang every single word to every single song. We were knee deep in mud and all everyone was talking about was Nirvana, but here we were bellowing Abba classics at the top of our voices. This was years before it became supposedly cool to love Abba again (you know, before people who had long forgotten about them flocked to see the godawful cheese-fest that was Mamma Mia and subsequently declared Abba as the greatest group ever or such like.) This was the closest you could get to seeing Abba live, and we were cold, wet, muddy and waiting for the noisy rock bands to come on. Maybe it was ironic; or maybe it was recognition that Abba actually were one of the greatest groups ever. Most likely it was a bit of both. Either way, Björn Again really rekindled the festival spirit and when they finished, several thousand soggy people were grinning like idiots. This was all swiftly followed by the ever-reliable Peelie spinning Nine To Five by Sheena Easton…
Of course, where there is mud and an inebriated festival crowd, there will be mud fights. Some of the battles will be amongst the audience members. Watching someone on the main stage (I forget who exactly), I suddenly saw a section of the crowd disperse and a big pool of mud was revealed. In the middle of it, writhing and wrestling, were two complete nutters (male, female… it was impossible to tell), covered head to toe and trying to grab random onlookers to join them as they wallowed (hence the crowd dispersal). It was later that evening, as I relayed these events to the boys back at the van that Stu piped up: “Yep, that was me and Clive! You saw us? Aw man, if I’d seen you, we’d have definitely dragged you in too!”
Inevitably though, some of the mud was always going to be hurled towards the stage. It seemed to start with L7. For the uninitiated, L7 were four female grunge-punks who weren’t exactly backwards at coming forwards. I loved that whole Riot Grrrl movement they found themselves part of, in spite of the fact that, being male, it really shouldn’t have appealed to me. Bands like L7, Babes In Toyland and Bikini Kill were all about female empowerment and sticking a big one up to the male chauvinist-dominated music industry, media and rock music consumer. But I admired that, modern man that I was. Not in a patronising way either, women always offered something different to the male perspective in rock music and these bands were exactly that – different.
Earlier that year, L7 performed their hit Pretend We’re Dead live on trashy late night TV show The Word. As the band thrashed the final chords of the song and proceeded to trash the set, the cameras caught singer Donita Sparks with her jeans around her ankles and her bits in full view on national TV; it was enough to leave even host Terry Christian speechless! Now, being pelted with mud during a frustrating set at Reading, Ms Sparks took things one step further. Rather than simply telling the offending audience members where they could stick their mud, she simply rummaged around in her pants, removed a blood-stained female sanitary product from inside herself and lobbed it into the crowd, yelling: “Eat my used tampon, fuckers!” Cue another rapid crowd dispersal…
The mud-flinging continued for a while (predictably it reached a peak during Mudhoney’s set!) before things began to settle down as the time for Nirvana drew nigh. Sadly, I hadn’t quite gotten into Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds by that point, so couldn’t appreciate the majesty that adorned the stage as the sky darkened, but I was there as Kurt Cobain was pushed onto the stage in a wheelchair while wearing a blonde wig and hospital gown (a sardonic swipe at the rumours of his and Courtney’s health in the media), and the legendary headline slot kicked into life and what would become a significant moment in rock music history began to unfold.
That history would have it that this was Nirvana’s defining moment; that this really was the world’s greatest band at the time at their absolute zenith. It is believed by many that this was one of the greatest rock shows of all time. Yet I was rather underwhelmed. Sure, I remember it and yes, it was a pretty good show. The band was on form and Kurt seemed surprisingly cheerful and boyish, quite charming in fact. Yet I wasn’t blown away. I left the Reading Festival in 1992 with loads of great memories and stories, but while everyone else spoke of being there as Nirvana ripped the place up, I recall how on the previous night Public Enemy absolutely destroyed me.
That PE show made me feel like I’d been assaulted, physically beaten by a gang of politically-aware African-American freedom fighters wielding the most powerful weapons in existence – passion, words and FUCKING IMMENSE BEATS.
Note the very eerie last paragraph of this NME review...
No comments:
Post a Comment