POP FESTIVALS
Blue weekends
DUNCAN FALLOWELL
Last year, apart from the Glorious Isle of Wight, most people spent their festival weekends being drenched in the Dales or frozen stiff in the Mendips, for it is a sad truth that the British weather consistently frustrates one's attempts to get back to nature in any comfort. Even those alfresco dinner parties, where the hisses of the hostess are drowned only by the relentless gurgle of a bottomless coffee pot, cannot possibly take place within Mini distance of anywhere truly English. Foreign propaganda, it must be. Or Stan and Doreen bravely trying to resuscitate memories of Lloret de Mar last summer with a candle and bottle of Spanish burgundy outside the french windows; what has Pinner done to merit a monsoon on their night?
Geography, that's the rub. If you want a green and pleasant land you must pay for it in hailstones and hurricanes, yes, even on your night. Pop promoters too are at last learning the lesson and scaling down their ambitions : which is a pity for us non-promoters since if you put on enough festivals at least one is bound to hit good weather and when that happens — pow! A long weekend of sound, sun and sublime debauch, with enough legit nudes to keep the News of the World in clover until the wife-swapping season starts. And maybe, if we're lucky, even a question in the Commons.
The Glastonbury Fair last month, given some more sun, could have worked wonders in this direction. It was free, it was deep in the country, it was uncommercial, it was happy. In fact with several thousand arriving at Andrew Kerr's farm "to feed the earth during the summer solstice " it was rather like a very large house party. Even the rain was accepted as an "inevitable environmental artefact," although when a small group of pilgrims went off to pray on Glastonbury Tor they were told that a force field had been generated by the assembly to keep them dry. Thus provoked, the heavens opened.
Harry Pendleton, with the sort of good faith which built the Empire, had a bash at something more conventional in Reading a few weeks ago and almost pulled it off. He wasn't helped by the fact that his fields had been under water only a few days before. And this "glorious riverside site" does not need the flood of the century to make it inhospitable : it has a natural tendency to crotte. He wasn't helped by the paranoia of the locals who hadn't seen anything like it since the execution of the abbot. And although he would be the last to say so, he wasn't helped by the police either whose conduct, when it wasn't plainly absurd, was just cheap opportunism. To pick up people by the hundred as they arrived at the station or by road in the hope of catching out a few is not the nicest way of saying " welcome" to a town whose pop events were only part of a much more general six-week Reading Festival. When the juicy little number in tangerine hotpants — approaching one with a smile like a karate chop which surely reads "Have you got the time, sailor?" — turns out to be PC Matilda Mumps doing her good deed for the day as saviour of the silent majority, my residual schoolboy morality calls it playing sneak. Not to mention the special courts, coachloads of bobbies waiting for the riots which never happened, and the waste in energy, time, goodwill and money (07,500 for this police operation — who pays?). All this despite the Home Secretary's explicit request that there should be no random checks. A spokesman for the police admitted in the Reading Evening Post to conducting "searches which could be described as random, yes," a remark which the Thames Valley police made embarrassing attempts to disown some days later.
Anyway, Mr Pendleton is having another bash somewhere else before the summer is out and short of the flood of the century or a cranky chief of police, he might well pull it off altogether. In the meantime there are various one-day events in Hyde Park and at Crystal Palace to keep your spirits up, failing which you can always return to Lloret de Mar. You probably will.
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