Educating Peter

by Tom Cox

  The other strange thing about Peter’s emails was something I didn’t notice until perhaps the third or fourth communication in the wake of the Nottingham trip. It was to do with the way he signed off:

  ‘Laters,

  Petter’

  I understood the ‘Laters’ bit. Even I was still hip enough to realise that this was an insouciant young person’s way of saying, ‘Goodbye, take care, and – you know what? – I’m really going to miss you!’; it wasn’t unheard of for people my age (people my age in complicated athletic footwear, anyway) to use it. What I didn’t understand was the bit below it. Had Peter changed his name without telling me? Or was it possible that in all our time together I’d been spelling it wrong? Not wishing to hurt his feelings, I approached Jenny about the matter.

  ‘Oooh yes. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. He’s decided to have a little bit of a change,’ said Jenny.

  ‘What? So he’s called Petter now? Isn’t that Swedish?’ I said.

  ‘No. You don’t pronounce it “Petter”. One of the “t”s is silent.’

  ‘I don’t get it. What’s the point?’

  ‘Well, to be honest, I think he’s a bit cheesed off at having such a normal name. You know, all his mates have these unusual names like Zed and Raf and Jonti. He’s always having a go at me about it, so I figured, What the hell?, let him add a letter to it. He’ll probably grow out of it. I think, really, it’s just a bit fashionable to spell words in a weird way. There’s the band, isn’t there – what are they called? – Staind, but without an “e”. And there’s the other one. I think they’re called Soil but they have a “d” at the end. I called them Soiled and he got very angry with me and started doing that stomping thing on the stairs on the way to his room.’

  ‘Actually, I think they are just called Soil, without the “d”. At least, that’s how he’s written it on “This CD Will Self-Destruct”.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Oh, the compilation CD he made for me. It’s very professionally done. He even drew his own “Parental Advisory” sticker on it.’

  ‘Oh, one of those things. I sometimes think manufacturers only stick those on to sell more records.’

  The next time I saw Petter, I opted to keep quiet about his new moniker. Going by what Jenny had said, it was clearly a sensitive issue, and I didn’t want to do anything to detract from the new level of musical understanding we’d reached. Despite what Roland might have had you believe, I still felt secretly proud of ‘Tom’s Peasant Island Discs 1993’. When I’d fished it out of an old box in my parents’ attic at the beginning of the year, I’d been surprised – considering just how much unlistenable hogwash I’d pretended to like as an eighteen-year-old – at the quality of its track selection. Astonishingly, it didn’t feature one band that sounded remotely like a broken dishwasher or some furniture falling down some stairs. Sure, I would have been happier if Petter had joined me in my love of Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but nevertheless, having him join me in my old – and, in a small way, still burgeoning – love of early Madder Rose and Pavement singles represented a bona fide result. I felt, for the first time, as though I was only a few short steps away from gaining a better understanding of my pupil’s musical universe.

  ‘This CD Will Self-Destruct’ took me a tiny bit closer. It might have mystified me, but between all the growling, thundering, dying and destructing, I could find the beginning of a line of musical aesthetics and trace it back, if not to my old self, then at least to some people my old self had been slightly intimidated by. What Petter listened to still scared me, but at root it was surely just a slightly heavier version of what the DJs at Rock City’s Alternative Night used to play, with more dying in it. It reminded me of a specific breed of alternative rock fan I used to know: slightly hairier than the people I used to hang around with, and almost certainly with bigger shorts. But most of all, it reminded me of the Reading Festival.

  Ten years ago, the Reading Festival had been Britain’s second biggest annual outdoor rock event: a less mellowed-out, smellier rival to the Glastonbury Festival. These days, it was still enormously popular, but seemed to have lost its personality somewhat. Or perhaps I was just out of touch. Whatever the case, I was pretty sure that, in late August, Reading town centre would be full of people who looked just like older versions of Petter. I was also sure that Petter would jump at the chance of being there and feel even greater respect for me as a tutor if I was the one to offer him his first taste – and, more to the point, smell – of festival life.

  I hadn’t attended the Reading Festival as a punter since 1995, chiefly because I’d been put off music festivals for ever after one particularly dismal Glastonbury where, on the same day that I’d had my wallet pilfered, one of my friends had been mugged and another had had his tent stolen. Since then I’d been to Reading a couple of times for reviewing purposes, but never for more than a day, and always with the emphasis on clean, comfortable people-watching in the backstage area rather than on getting crushed in the moshpit next to the Melody Maker stage. Possessing no desire to sit in a muddy field watching metalheads paint their faces and sing along to Smurf songs in an ironic fashion, I had no intention of going back on my anti-festival stance now. Instead, I decided, I would take Petter to Reading on the day after the festival. By doing this I would a) avoid having my eardrums punished by Amen, Slipknot and Incubus, and b) give him the opportunity to see the day-lit downside of spending four nights without sleep in a field full of people shouting ‘Bollocks!’ at the top of their voices for the hell of it. Yet, simultaneously, he would be grateful, in the special way that only a fourteen-year-old being plunged into a scene of chaos, alcoholic abandon and ear-splitting music can be.

  In a sense, I was using Reading as a pay-off. A couple of days before we arrived there, I’d taken Petter to Peacehaven, near Brighton, to meet Bob Copper, the head of The Copper Family, a folk group whose story could be traced back well over a hundred years. The trip had been tough going on Petter. A few miles past Crawley he’d started to complain of a headache. I’d initially assumed that his discomfort could be entirely attributed to Crawley, or at least to the grating a cappella sounds of Come Write Me Down, the Copper Family album that was playing on the Focus’s stereo. I’d convinced him that he’d be fine once we’d stopped for a Burger King, and that there was no need to turn back. But I’d made an error of judgement. Around Rottingdean, with the Copper Family CD on its second rotation, Petter had spoken sharply to me for the first time ever and asked for the music to be switched off, and I’d realised he was in genuine pain. He’d also expressed a wish to wait in the car and read Kerrang! while I spoke to Bob.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he’d mumbled. ‘My brain feels like a goat farted in it. I don’t think any folk’s going to help at this point. All those songs about “drinking a pile of ale” – it’s too much.’

  ‘But I thought you liked booze now.’

  ‘Yeah. But that doesn’t mean I want to hear a bunch of old men sing songs about it.’

  Locating Bob’s ancient storybook cottage in the middle of a decidedly non-ancient, non-storybook housing estate, I steeled myself for another slightly futile encounter in the absence of my student. Fortunately, Bob was in his late eighties and seemed to have forgotten that I’d said I’d be interviewing him with a teenager in tow. A former shepherd, he had a fascinating life story, which he was eager to tell, and had home-baked some rather tasty cookies, only a few of which had his wiry grey hairs embedded in them. At one point, he even sang me a song about ale. But to be truthful, my eye was on the clock and my mind was on the ailing Petter. I’d been with Bob an hour, and he’d only reached 1957. I dearly wished I could stay longer, but I could feel my duty as a guardian overtaking my duty as a musical historian, and I made my excuses, stashing a couple of cookies in my coat for my poorly friend.

  Reading was a far easier study proposition. For a start, it only had a couple of de
cades of history, as opposed to umpteen. Not only that, very little of this history involved sheep (although there was no denying the profusion of ale). Petter hadn’t really blamed me for taking him to Peacehaven and exposing him to the delights of indigenous, ancient folk music, or at least had forgiven me from the moment I’d mentioned Reading, and as I steered the Focus through the throng of Slipknot t-shirts and matted hair running parallel to the festival grounds, he seemed in higher spirits than ever.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he said. ‘It was this really cool Jimmy Eat World shirt. Long-sleeved! One I’ve never seen before. This guy who looked like the kid from Third Rock From The Sun was wearing it.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I missed it. I was too busy trying not to run over that guy in the road.’

  ‘What guy in the road?’

  ‘That one there. The one lying down.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Shit. Is he dead?’

  ‘No. I think he’s just passed out. You can see his hand twitching towards that can of Red Stripe.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘He’s a big fella.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t understand how people get that fat. I don’t know why, but I never seem to get on with fat people.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because they’re jealous of you, eating all those crisps but never putting on any weight.’

  ‘Mmm. I dunno. Hey. It was really funny . . .’

  ‘Hold on. This is a tricky bit . . .’

  ‘Shit. Did he—’

  ‘Nearly run into the back of me? Yeah. He did. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Riding a bike when there are all these defenceless cars around. Very dangerous. Especially when you’re giving a croggy to a goth girl.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A croggy.’

  ‘What’s one of them?’

  ‘You know – where you have someone on the back of your bike.’

  ‘Oh. We call them seaties where we come from.’

  ‘That’s a bit crap.’

  ‘No. Croggy’s crapper.’

  ‘We’ll agree to disagree on that one. Anyway, carry on . . .’

  ‘Yeah. So . . . it was really funny. One time when we were doing Physical Ed at school, there’s this fat guy – Colin? – and I don’t really get on with him, but Raf does, and it’s so funny ’cos Raf starts using him as this human trampoline, and throwing this really small kid – Nero? – at him and he just keeps bouncing off.’

  ‘What? The fat kid was lying on the ground?’

  ‘No, just like leaning against the wall. But he still had a lot of, er, bounce.’

  ‘So why don’t you get on with him?’

  ‘Oh, he said The Crow was a shit film.’

  ‘But I said that too, when I first met you.’

  ‘Mmmm. Yeah. I guess. But that’s different.’

  Outside Reading train station, the t-shirts, rucksacks and sleeping bags were queuing up around the block. Sandwiched in between them were some of the sleepiest, most starey eyes you could find outside of a hypnotist’s convention. Surely it would take a week to clear all these people, and at least twice as long to rejuvenate their spirits. Some of them yawned, some picked unidentified granules from their armpits, some just stared at the vehicles on the adjacent road longingly, like eighteenth-century savages contemplating space travel. I felt certain that, in two or three years, Petter would be among them.

  It suddenly struck me that I’d never seen queues this long – moreover, that I’d never really been fully exposed to this end of the festival experience at all. I’d always left festivals a little bit early as the result of an argument with a girlfriend, or a stolen wallet, or a stomach problem, or a Levellers headlining slot. In short: I was always a bit of a wimp. Now, though, I could hardly say I regretted it.

  Slowly – because we were walking against the vast flow of human traffic – Petter and I made our way back to the festival site from our city centre parking spot. It felt odd, being cleanly showered in the middle of all this organic body paste, and I’m sure our shiny skin would have elicited funny looks if the punters travelling in the opposite direction had possessed the energy to dole them out. There was a pungent aroma in the air – a mixture of pot and potty – and to take my mind off it I indulged Petter in a game of Spot The Band T-shirt (Slipknot won). Part of me wished Roland was here: it had always been one of his favourite pastimes.

  Now I might be speaking a little rashly here, having never cleaned up in the wake of a nuclear war, but there’s nothing quite like seeing a festival site the day after a major rock event. Even a freshly evacuated Evel Knievel run could not have matched it for wanton devastation. Of course, it isn’t quite so shocking if you’ve been at the festival and experienced the deterioration of your body in tandem with that of the turf beneath you. But Petter and I were thrust into this apocalyptic panorama straight from the everyday, sweet(er)-smelling outside world, and it hit us hard.

  Well, it hit me hard. Petter seemed to quite enjoy it.

  ‘This is so cool!’ he exclaimed. ‘They didn’t even ask us to pay at the gate.’

  ‘Well, they couldn’t, really, could they? I mean, what would they have said if we’d asked who was playing? “An old baseball boot with a hole in the toe, supported by an empty baked bean can with a dead Rizla stuffed inside.”’

  It was remarkable what you could find in the wake of a festival. There were the usual festival leftovers, of course: the forlorn, dust-caked bucket hats, the torn-up programmes, the ripped sleeping bags. But, as Petter and I ventured further beyond the main arena and adjusted our eyes to the carnage, the objects on the ground became more esoteric, until finally we couldn’t resist putting them into a top ten of unusualness. This process involved a small amount of disagreement, but eventually could be narrowed down to:

  10.A tyre.

  9. A Downfall box, empty except for a tiny toy squirrel.

  8. An Action Man.

  7. Two half-inflated footballs, sellotaped together, with eyeballs drawn on them.

  6. Three brassieres, hooked together to form a wobbly triangle.

  5. A crumpled picture of the American punk band The Strokes with a cut-out of Shannon Doherty’s face pasted over the lead singer’s head.

  4. A Cabbage Patch Doll.

  3. Many crushed cans of Stella Artois, arranged to spell the phrase ‘Talk to the hand ’cos the face ain’t listening’.

  2. A bag of cat litter.

  1. A Teasmade.

  You had to marvel at the decision-making processes that had brought these objects here. People frequently did surreal things at festivals and revived obscure items from their past – a case in point would be the night during the 1994 festival when, out of nowhere, the thirty tents nearest mine had all shouted, ‘Bob Carolgees and his dog Spit!’ in unison – but that still didn’t explain why, while packing his rucksack, someone would have thought, I know: I better take some cat litter. Because, well, you never know, do you? I didn’t like The Strokes and I thought Cabbage Patch Dolls were hideous, but I still felt sad that they had to die here, defaced and unloved.

  Unlike Glastonbury, which was held in a genuinely charismatic place, the Reading Festival site, without all the crowds and the noise, was an eyesore: a few very ordinary fields overlooking some even more ordinary car dealerships and a leisure centre straight out of The Alan Partridge Book Of Architecture. It was all rather frustrating. Over the last few months I’d driven Petter through some truly beautiful, and sometimes spectacular, English countryside: he’d been over the Humber Bridge, he’d travelled the coast road to Hastings, and he’d hung out in a tree in Oxley’s Wood. But it was here, of all places, that he walked around with his head up, breathing in his surroundings like an old-time country squire recovering from cabin fever.

  ‘Look at the size of that mixing desk!’ he marvelled, as we passed by the main arena.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘The traditional thing at Reading is to say to your mates, “Meet you by the mixing desk.” It looks quite easy now, but at ni
ne o’clock on a Saturday night it’s virtually impossible. Also it’s quite dark. You might think you’ve met your friend, but actually discover later that you’ve gone back to your tent with a forty-three-year-old Paul Weller fan from Southampton.’

  ‘When I meet Raf at the weekend sometimes, we say we’ll meet each other outside HMV in the West End. But we always forget to say which branch and end up going to different ones . . . Ugh. What’s that?’

  ‘I think it’s some kind of bandage.’

  ‘But that’s blood inside it.’

  ‘Yeah. Horrible. Weird things happen in this field. I camped in this one in 1994. A drug dealer unzipped my tent in the middle of the night and tried to sell me speed. Then the next night, me and my girlfriend had gone to bed and there was this creature outside talking to our friends. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. It had this voice like someone had swabbed the inside of its throat with meths. Someone probably had. Later it fell on our tent and broke it.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘No. Just annoying, really. You see that? That’s where they had the bungee jump in 1995. I remember one person getting up there and then not being able to go through with it. The whole site was yelling “JUMP!” at him.’

  ‘My neck’s really sore.’

  ‘Why? You haven’t been bungee jumping, have you?’

  ‘Oh. No. Just headbanging.’

  ‘Why do you do it, then?’

  ‘I dunno. There’s no real point to gigs if you don’t, is there? And it was Slipknot yesterday. It wasn’t like I was going to stand at the back and not go into the moshpit.’

  ‘What do you mean, “yesterday”?’

  ‘They were here, on the main stage.’

  ‘You came here yesterday, to the festival?’