Part One is HERE

Part Two is HERE





My world has been turned upside down, inside out and my heart is crawling out my chest; bodies are blurs, smiles are screams, a small round shape keeps flying past my peripherals and I can’t tell whether it’s friendly or foreign.  I decide it’s probably okay and after checking myself remember that I’ve agreed to take part in a binocular football match with a bunch of strangers.  I’m in a boiler suit, goggles are on my face and I’m going head-first into a challenge on someone who may or may not be on my team.

Barrett is watching me from a a hay bale, posing and vaguely amused by what he’s seeing in front of him.  Every now and again I remove my goggles to give him a wave and a quick ‘Jesus-fucking-Christ’ headshake. 

He gives me the finger back.

It turns out they are filming the whole ruse for Channel 5, which only appeals to the me!-me!-me! in me, and I start trying to target the presenter who is playing for the other team, barging into him with a serious of wilder and less considered tackles that see me asked to calm down.  I get back into the game, which we are losing and (though I do say so myself) drag us back onto level pegging.

 ‘Next goal wins!’

I’m bearing down on goal, vaguely aware of a human shape coming between me, the glory and moolah of the winning goal.  I’m two steps ahead and have got wild heady cheers from the crowd already on my mind; victory cigars, maybe a surreptitious though, given the dilution of my bloodstream, ultimately fruitless blowjob from one of the girls on my team.  2 yards from goal I draw my right foot back for the winning shot.  As I do so the ill-fitting boiler suit slips under my left foot, my heel ran across it and I swan dive onto my back with a curdled ‘FUCK!’  The derisory laughs from the crowd prick my heart, the daggers from my team made even worse by the fact the goalkeeper hoofs it straight up the field, they score and the other team emerge triumphant.


It’s Saturday morning and its time to take stock, since getting onto the site the hedonistic narcissism on show has gauged at the eyes of decency, so it was time to re focus on just what it was we were doing here.

‘Have you got anything for the article Barrett?’

 ‘Dave, I think I vomited blood this morning, the article will have to wait’

 ‘Well let’s just try and focus a bit more shall we…lets just observe.’
 
I think it was 4 hours later when I was stood watching Dave shout barley legible instructions to a bemused band during the guitar break in ‘Born to Run’.
 
‘Play it Stevie... yeah’

 I can assure you that the man he was encouraging was not called Stevie. What had happened in the proceeding hours was the slow demise of the sober man. As the pints had sharpened this oft-discussed focus and gave direction to our intent we arrived at Rockeoke,  essentially karaoke with a live band. Like all great ideas is was that simple and given the cider levels in Dave’s system were currently running at a healthy 90 % it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened

 As he set foot on stage, he was offered the song-book; on it were the lyrics of the song he had been singing all his life. He declined, steadied himself, turned to face the crowd and with a wink he was away…

 ‘In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.’

What Dave lacked in voice he offered in commitment , as each verse went by the crowd although still unconvinced that what they were hearing was music were at least convinced by his conviction. It was in here that Standon lost its knowing sense of cool, which up until had been beginning to grate; within that tent people were genuinely enjoying themselves, lost in their own teenage record collection.

 ‘Tramps like us baby we were born to run!’

 With his right arm raised and head bowed Dave took his applause, milked it a little and strode off.

 ‘I thought you said we had to observe Dave’

 ‘I was Barrett; I was observing them, observing me.’ 


Metronomy are brilliant. Is there, I ask, a better band to get you warmed up for a night’s tramping? By now we have picked up a band of wide-eyed cohorts, and each and all of us shakes, dips and dives to the unabashed pop of their bleeps.  They go off stage, are told they can play one more song and for the rest of the weekend our go-to singalong is ‘R! A! D! I! Ohhhhhhhh! L! A! D! I! Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

From here straight to Fucked Up who, though a world away musically from the band we’ve just seen, are no less entertaining.   They are loud, very fucking loud, and have drawn the biggest crowd yet for Twisted Licks.   I was concerned before coming in that Barrett won’t take to them- I knew he wouldn’t actually, devoid as they are of a good looking frontman and an aspirational chorus pilfered directly from an old  Ronettes tune- but I hadn’t banked on the awesome power of Pink Eyes to keep him interested.

Although aware of Fucked Up’s prodigious live reputation,  little am I prepared for this huge, hairy beast of a man to spend the majority of his set in the crowd, stomping around, screeching into his mic, welcoming the love of a crowd that’s desperate to get a piece of him.  He eventually barges his way out of the tent, still screaming and flanked by a couple of nervy looking security guys longing for the dull predictability of We Used To Make Things, and is grabbed by bemused passers-by, some of whom he blesses with a piggy back.  I personally get a couple slaps of the head in, and come back with a hand soaked and soggy with the sweat of the adored.

Details from here become sketchy at best; we go to Club Alcatraz sometime during the Liars set, and emerge  six hours  later, bloodied, sweaty and eyes shining.  In that time I encounter the best  and worst that Standon has to offer; a man who conducted an entire conversation with us using only grunts before cart-wheeling back onto the dancefloor,  a girl  who may or may not have been lying when she tells me she once fucked Dougie from Mcfly, a glorious rendition of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ that I swear brought Barrett to his knees on the sodden dancefloor, a pair of jailbaits that follow us around and we eventually have to tell to fuck off, a couch in the corner that felt as if bass sent down by Lucifer himself was coming out of it, a scenester who bristles when I play with the tail of the racoon hat that he appears to be wearing un-ironically.  During a quiet (at least in my head) moment, as I stare blankly at the green lazers that the driving rain is slicing through, I experience that most unlikely of moments, that of clarity. I realise it is as if some rather clever people at Standon HQ have found a way to prise open the gates to my mind, take all the things I want in a venue and transported them to this filthy, soaking open cowshed in the heart of Hertfordshire.   It’s dirty, it’s a little depraved and everyone is talking, taking and skipping onto another plain without a care for the pressure of something so boring as an outside life. 
 
Truly, in my dreams, all clubs are like Alcatraz.


 

Posted In Festivals, Jul 12 2011. Words - Dave and Barrett