Uncool fun
Charles Spencer
My body aches, my bones creak and I have a nagging headache that paracetamol won’t shift. It’s a bit like having a hangover again, but mercifully without the attendant guilt.
As I write, my son Ed, his friend Ollie and I have just spent the weekend at Guilfest, accurately and succinctly billed in the Daily Telegraph’s bumper festival preview a few weeks ago as ‘An unlikely success. Not bothered with cool, thus unpretentious fun.’ What I like best about this festival, held each year in Stoke Park on the outskirts of prosperous Guildford, is that it’s just 20 minutes down the A3 from our house and has plenty of parking. This means that I don’t have to sleep under canvas and can come back home each night to the comforts of my own bed and bathroom. At 53 these things begin to matter.
There were lots of people in their fifties at Guilfest, quite a few in their sixties, and one or two who looked as if they were in their seventies and even eighties. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Rock and roll music has been around for more than half a century now and it is a hard habit to kick. The presence of so many oldies, however, did mean that the gently sloping field that declines towards the main stage was liberally dotted with those handy fold-out canvas armchairs complete with personal drinks-holder that have become such a part of the great British outdoors in recent years, and which are so much more comfortable than the old-fashioned deckchair.
Even I felt these weren’t quite the thing for a rock festival, and thus spent my time either sitting on the grass or else standing up and jiggling about in a faintly embarrassed way when the proceedings got livelier, hence today’s aches and pains.
A couple of the bands didn’t exactly warm to an audience in which a large number were seated in comfy chairs with the papers and a picnic, most notably the splendidly named Brian Jonestown Massacre, a bunch of recalcitrant San Franciscans who mingle psychedelic and shoe-gazing styles with weedy droning vocals in a manner that is right up my alley. Almost everyone else, however, reacted to them with complete indifference, which goaded the band into accusing those out front of being one of the most boring audiences they’d ever encountered. The band’s notoriously temperamental founder, Anton Newcombe, in particular, delivered mutinous mumbling monologues in a manner that made Syd Barrett sound like a model of coherence and played much of the set with his back to the crowd. It was just the grit in the oyster this friendly, laid-back festival needed.
The big event was the return of Blondie on Saturday night. During my days as a cub reporter in Guildford 30 years ago, Blondie was my favourite band, and the cool and beautiful Debbie Harry the apple of my eye. How odd it was to see the once über-hip New Yorkers, veterans of CBGBs and the American New Wave, performing in leafy Surrey. They were terrific, delivering their immaculate back catalogue of hits with a panache and freshness that, to my ears, had more balls than the original recordings. As well as pop, punk and disco, there’s a touch of funk in Blondie, too, and the band really stretched out and got into a groove here, powered by the virtuosic drumming of Clem Burke.
It seems age cannot wither Debbie Harry, who is now 63, but according to Ollie looks younger than his Mum (who’s 42 and won’t thank me for repeating her 14-year-old son’s ungallant remark). Blondie is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its greatest album, Parallel Lines, and Harry took to the stage in a chic red beret and a blackand-white-striped poncho in tribute to the LP’s cover art. Soon both were discarded to reveal the familiar mop of blonde hair and a catsuit most women half her age couldn’t get away with. Her voice remains fabulous, both insolent and coolly seductive, and, as the group powered their way through the whole of Parallel Lines and a host of other hits, I experienced one of those rushes of pure pleasure that only the greatest pop music can give you.
It wasn’t all plain sailing. The Levellers, who topped the bill on Friday, struck me as the most boorishly unappealing folk group I’ve ever encountered, not helped by the white-faced buffoon who comes on and plays the didgeridoo and the fact that almost all the songs sound exactly the same. Their raucous music also seemed to bring out previously unsuspected yobbish tendencies in the crowd.
Far more welcome was the return of Dodgy, who looked like real contenders for the big time when I went on the road with them for a piece in the Telegraph in 1996 only for them to break up soon afterwards. I do hope it wasn’t something I said. Their melodic, sunshiny pop sounded as good as ever in Guildford and I was delighted to learn a new album is in the works. Welcome back, boys.
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