I end every summer at the Green Man festival in Wales. It’s the first weekend where you notice how slow, and gold, the evenings have become. How you finally know summer is coming to an end. The days may still be T-shirt hot, but the cold bites hard enough at night for you to see Bonfire Night from here. The filament-like gnats, dancing in the sunset, will be dead soon. The frost is travelling south.
Sitting with a pint of Two Trees pear cider – “a perry with a toffee apple flavour” – I idly worked out that this was my 50th festival.
I have done more than 20 years of packing my filthiest rucksack with the essentials – wipes, fags, cheap spirits decanted into a plastic lemonade bottle – and heading to the fields.
I’ve tried many – Latitude, The Big Chill, Port Eliot, Festival No6, Reading, Laugharne, V – and keep coming back to two: Glastonbury in June, and Green Man in August. They bookend the season of summer loucheness, the months of outdoor drinking, talking until dawn, finding children and adults asleep under tables, covered in blankets.
Since the age of 17, it has been festivals that I look forward to as the summer holiday – not beaches or the hotel pool. All my holiday pictures show me wearing a heavy-duty Gore-Tex anorak and a lot of eyeliner, singing along to Pulp or Lady Gaga or Jack White.
Advertisement
Festivals came for me when I was young. My first was Reading, in 1992. I was 17, in a pair of second-hand black velvet shoes with red-ribbon laces, which essentially melted in the ferocious mud. I had no idea what you wore to a festival. I didn’t even have a waterproof coat, just a floor-length men’s tweed overcoat that still smelt of the previous owner, who, I presume, died in it.
I spent the whole weekend soaked. I don’t think I ate. I had no money, but at 17, you don’t really care. Especially when you have a bottle of vodka. Nirvana were headlining – their last UK gig before Kurt Cobain shot himself.
He was wheeled onstage in the bloodied hospital scrubs he’d worn while Courtney Love gave birth, the week before, and played what was, at that point, the most famous album on the planet, in a state of wild-eyed, end-of-world fury. It was astonishing.
I couldn’t believe that this could happen. Any of it. That I could come from nothing to this place where the stage was radiating light and noise like a landing UFO. A moment in rock history happening here, right in front of me – just for me and the people here.
That, within the world, there were other, smaller, more exciting worlds, such as this: shining kingdoms under sullen skies, where there was rock, and thrills, and AMERICANS, and boys who would get off with you, and three hard days of partying looked like a career you could possibly string out into a full-time job – if you could hitch a lift on any of the gigantic tour buses, trundling out of the site like migrating brontosauri, and on, across the world, to other festivals, all summer long.
Advertisement
I had found what the summer was for, if you knew: pilgrimming to assigned fields in Britain and waiting for all the other self-chosen pilgrims to turn up. And then keeping yourself in a state of mild alcoholic frenzy, while waiting for astonishing things to happen. First, at the beginning of summer, at Glastonbury, when the nights are midsummer long and the trees are fresh and green, and then again at the end, at Green Man, as the shadows grow long on the burnt-gold grass.
And even though I sometimes catch myself wondering how much longer I’ll be doing this – because my children are teenagers and four days of bacchanale are apt to bruise me a little now; sometimes Sunday finds me as broken, see-through and crushed as the plastic glasses on the ground – I know that I’ll never really stop. That as soon as the days get longer, my heart pulls intractably, like a dog on a lead, back to these loud, magic colour-fields. That this is the right place for a human to be, when the nights concertina up into stars, with wine and everyone you love.
Because before we ever headed to the beaches, or the airports, this was what the summer was always for: gathering in fields, woozy on cider – not to relax, but to become euphoric, instead. To double in size. To explode. To screw and sing and dance all night. To roar when the sun comes up and to hear thousands of other people all around you do the same as the drums start up again.
So by the end of this weekend, I will be ready for the winter again. On Monday, as they pack away the marquees at Green Man and take down the silk flags and the signs and store them in a barn, ready for next year,
I can pack away the summer, knowing the next one will be waiting to start on the train to Glastonbury next June.