I Blame Morrissey

by Jamie Jones

  I stood on my own for a minute, outside Andy’s Records, taking in what a crazy old day it had been. Then, with another skip, an inane grin on my face and clutching my trusty cans of Carlsberg Export I went to join my mates and the celebrations. Well, first of all, I found a quiet phonebox and told my mum that I’d be late home.

  It was one helluva party in Cathedral Square, crowned by our victorious manager and captain turning up to show the trophy to the delirious fans. They were promptly mobbed. I was just happy that I had finally had a good night out and not broken my glasses.

  Reading, Writing & Tim Burgess

  WITH the football season over, thoughts turned to the summer and what we would do to celebrate/commiserate our GCSE results. Our little group had talked a lot about going to our first music festival. As Glastonbury had already taken place, we had little option but to plump for the Reading Festival, which was set to for the August Bank Holiday weekend.

  The excited chatter was of going to the festival and undertaking the classic British rite of passage into adulthood, namely: drinking, standing in a field listening to live music and sleeping in a leaky tent, hopefully with a member of the opposite sex. I joined in heartily, not least because Mega City Four were scheduled to play a Friday afternoon set. The reality was that I had a growing sense of certainty that Mum wouldn’t let me go. I knew that she would point out that I was only due to turn 16 three weeks before the festival and that I was too young to go. When I told Mark about my concern he simply said “You’ll be 16 by then, you can do what you want!” Ah yes, the 16th birthday landmark that we all looked forward to, knowing that once we had reached it we had the key to total freedom. Suffice to say, it didn’t quite work out that way for any of us. The day after that landmark birthday, I was still doing the washing up and looking after my kid sister during the school holidays whilst my mum and dad went to work. It’s pretty hard to rebel on a diet of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll when you are looking after your kid sister for 8 hours a day.

  In early July we had reached decision time, and I had to talk to Mum about whether I could go to Reading. Everyone else had already obtained their parents’ permission, and a group of intrepid, youthful adventurers was forming. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t see any way that Mum was going to let me go. Six weeks prior to this she hadn’t let me travel to Wembley for the football via train as it was “too dangerous”. Now I was all set to ask her to let me go away for 4 nights to sleep in a field, drink beer, watch bands and potentially share tent space with girls. I decided to sit her down one night after tea to discuss this thorny issue.

  I made a big deal of sitting Mum down at our dining table. I didn’t bother involving Dad as I knew that he would just defer to Mum anyway. We all knew and accepted where the balance of power was in our house. I was a jangling bag of nerves as I stood up (for extra gravitas) and blurted out, ‘Can I please go to Reading Festival please? Doody, Jacko, Mark and all the others are going and it will be brilliant and I will be sensible as always, and there are loads of bands I want to see and you can trust me because I am too boring to do anything bad. It’s for 4 nights and we will stay in a tent and it will be a top birthday present and to celebrate my GCSE’s finishing and I won’t drink too much and will walk into town every day to phone you.’

  I stood panting, knackered from the exertion of getting all that out in one breath, and waited. After only a moment’s hesitation she said:

  “If you take the coach there and back, rather than the train, then you can go.”

  I stood catching flies, the shock kicking in, and was rendered temporarily speechless. I eventually recovered my senses, gave her a huge bear hug and a ‘Thanks Mum, you won’t regret this I promise.’ I had a feeling that my looking nervous and worried swung it. I think she was so relieved not to hear that I had got someone pregnant or started taking heroin that she was happy to agree to almost anything. I dimly recall her saying that, as Doody was virtually an adult (he would turn 18 in October), that she was sure that he would be sensible and keep us all in line. Thankfully Mum had only met Doody a handful of times, and his Irish heritage meant that he already had a Master’s Degree in charming relatives from the University of Life.

  The Wayahead Box Office once again provided us with the ticket and travel package for the festival. I had to get a sub from my Nan to find the £80 needed, and then thoughts turned to tents. None of our group owned one so we decided to hire one for the weekend. Mark’s mum drove us over to the tent hire shop and we stood there listening to the “tent man” giving us his marketing spiel. I quickly realised I had made a mistake in not bringing my dad along. Dad knew about everything practical in the world and would have known exactly what we needed. Tent man realised that an easy kill was available and somehow managed to persuade us that we needed a huge 6-man tent that didn’t have a fully waterproof fly-sheet. As he stood lustily counting our hard-earned cash, he offered us a shark like smile and assured us that the tent was “showerproof”.

  As the excitement around the festival began to take hold, I would get photocopies of the line-up and make lists of all the bands that I wanted to see. For some people, festivals are all about drink, drugs and copping off. For me, those things were all minor interests compared to the music. Packing for your first festival is not an easy task. I’m sure arctic explorers take less food and toiletries than my mum insisted on stuffing into my rucksack. As well as the “essentials”, I also had to make sure I had enough room for at least 2 band t-shirts per day. I had to look the part.

  It was only a few days before we due to depart for Reading that we realised our coach was due to leave Peterborough at 10am. The problem with this was that our GCSE results were to be made available for collection from our school on the same day but not until 10.30am. This caused some mild panic amongst our travelling party. Personally, it worked out exceptionally well. My mum was delighted that she would be the first person to see my results by going to collect them on my behalf. Other kids in the same situation may have made their mums promise not to open the envelope until they could locate a telephone box and call home. I knew it was an absolute waste of time even mentioning such a scenario to mine. No matter what anyone said, she was going to be the one opening that envelope. My thinking was that this was one of those rare ‘win-win’ situations. I got to attend my first music festival and Mum got to be the first person to find out whether I had an academic future.

  I didn’t sleep very much the night before we left. I wasn’t worried about my GCSE results; I was concerned about whether I would get to see all the bands that I was desperate to see over the course of the weekend.

  I was up and about early on the morning of travel and got the standard pep talks from my parents:

  Dad – ‘Be careful’ – simple, efficient and broad enough that if I did anything wrong he could be annoyed with me upon my return.

  Mum – ‘Don’t let me down and don’t do anything that will show me up, Jay.’ The use of my name provided the desired extra menace. In my wired, excited state I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the festival or my impending GCSE results.

  As our gaggle of hormonally charged teenagers boarded the coach, I paid only fleeting notice to the fact that it was raining. I had taken my coat out of my rucksack to make room for that week’s edition of the NME and my emergency Carter USM t-shirt. Not to worry, I’d thought, it’s August bank holiday weekend, I won’t need a coat.

  The journey consisted of eating all of our lovingly made packed lunches and sipping on illicit cans of Special Brew that Doody had sneaked aboard. Upon reaching Reading we were dropped off at the entrance to the site. After we had politely queued to exchange our tickets for the festival wristband, we entered the campsite and it struck me how normal the place looked. It was simply a scattered array of tents, some portaloos and the kind of burger van that it was always wise to avoid in Peterborough city centre on a Saturday night if you wanted to get out of the bathroom on the Sunday. I couldn’t see my life ch
anging here.

  While we finished the last dregs of the, now warm, Special Brew, we put up our marquee style tent whilst arguing over groundsheets, flysheets and guy ropes. Once our weekend accommodation was complete, we decided to take a walk into the town centre to stock up on vital alcohol supplies. This meant dragging 24 cans of Hofmeister each back from Reading town centre. That mile-long journey was unbridled agony. I don’t know about “follow the bear”, I reckon the bastard had been sat on my back during that particular ordeal.

  Mark and Jacko used the cover of the long slog back to the festival site to find a phone box to call their respective mums and discover their GCSE results. I didn’t. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in my results, it was more that I wanted one night at the festival enjoying myself in blissful ignorance, before calling home and getting the potentially bad news. Mark and Jacko knew that they were going to get good results; they were both intelligent lads who had worked hard. I was more a middle of the class student. I’d always done reasonably well, not due to any natural intelligence but thanks to a love of reading, the ability to retain a few salient facts and the gift of waffling.

  Doody had taken his GCSE’s the previous year and was working in a local factory. We were all envious of him having “cash on the hip” and not having to count his loose change to see if he could afford another pint of lager or portion of chips. Fair play to Doods though, he was always generous and was never shy in buying me and Jacko a pint when we were invariably skint.

  The sun was starting to set as we returned to the campsite and recovered from our lager march. The sun going down seemed to ignite something in this small corner of Berkshire. Campfires were lit, cans were opened and a lingering, pungent smoke filled the air and clung to my nostrils. For the first time in my life, I heard a wolf howl. It took me a full five seconds to realise that wolves didn’t inhabit Reading.

  Watching my first festival come to life, I was a gibbering muddle of excitement and apprehension. I saw people with piercings and hairstyles that I’d never imagined were possible, let alone seen on the streets of Peterborough. As these older teenage miscreants and fully fledged adults began their rapid descent into the Village of the Damned, we sat and quietly sipped our lager and ate our Mini-Cheddars. Slowly but surely the alcohol kicked in and we finally felt brave enough to put some music on the ghetto blaster that we had brought along and had ourselves a little party. We had recently discovered a sparkling wine called “Pink Lady”, which tasted foul but was cheap and, most importantly, the pressure inside the bottle was so strong that the cork could be fired over the top of a house when popped. We’d carried out scientific experiments on Doody’s estate to produce such findings. At Reading, like the children we were, we stood in the campsite and cheered as the cork flew from our bottle and over the sea of tents. We glugged down the sweet, sticky contents and lost another layer of our inhibitions.

  We must have resembled a group of young antelope as the festival lions picked up our scent and began to hungrily visit our encampment. As night descended, we were offered everything from beer at £4 a can, hash, trips and pills that I was pretty sure my mum took for backache. I’d thought that I was pretty streetwise when it came to drugs as, like every other kid in the UK, I had watched enthralled as Zammo got hooked on heroin in Grange Hill. But, up until that night, I hadn’t ever been in a situation in which I had to “just say no”. As darkness began to descend, a crusty type in a Levellers t-shirt and the worst dreadlocks I’d ever seen sat down in our camp to educate us wannabe rebels about the joys of hash. I wasn’t bothered about getting involved but peer pressure and the fear of ridicule saw me taking my place in the eagerly formed circle as a spliff, that was the size of the Camberwell Carrot, was handed around. I sat there secretly dreading the moment that it would be my turn for a toke. I suddenly felt like the squarest kid in the world as I’d never even smoked a full cigarette. It looked easy enough though. All you had to do was suck as hard as you could on the end of the spliff and take as much smoke as possible down into your lungs before casually letting it drift out of your mouth. I’d always looked up to Doody and would turn to his 17 year old wisdom when I was having a crisis of confidence. He could see the apprehension scrawled across my face and said simply “It will be ok mate”.

  As the spliff came to Doods he took a long drag and then a couple of seconds later calmly blew a plume of smoke out of his mouth. He looked at me with a mixture of hope and pity, then passed it to me. As if sensing my fear, the weasel-faced crusty, piped up, ‘Go on Joe 90, you’ll enjoy that hash, man.’ Joe 90, Jamie & The Magic Specs, and the simple “Four Eyed Twat”, I’d been called them all over the years but, coming from the wannabe hippy it prodded my anger gene into action and I replied with a blunt; ‘Piss off knobhead.’

  He made an exaggerated show of being offended, by holding his hand to his mouth and cackling; ‘Hark at Joe, looks like you need that spliff more than any of us, you need to chill out, man’.

  A combination of murderous thoughts, a desire not to look a prat in front of my mates, coupled with an inability to smoke, meant that I knew this wasn’t going to end well.

  With the red mist descending, I placed the spliff gingerly between my lips and took the longest pull my chest could manage. I had a glorious second of thinking, “wow, got away with that, I feel fine”, before the burning sensation hit the back of my virgin throat and my chest reacted by doing everything it could to expel the poison from my body as quickly as possible. The smoke flew back out of my mouth and left me wracked with body-convulsing coughs. I could hear the laughs from the hippy and some of my so-called friends before I could even manage to open my eyes.

  The utter humiliation was building with every cough and tear that rolled from my eyes and I became aware that I was now making enough of a scene to attract the attention of everyone within a 100 yard radius. Just as I thought the end was coming and that my cause of death would be recorded as “smoke inhalation and shame”, Doody stepped forward and poured lager down my red-raw throat. I used this slip back into reality to grab my own can, my Walkman and stomp off into the distance. As I pulled my headphones on and the comforting bark of Billy Bragg filled my ears, I could still hear the bloody hippy laughing and shouting; ‘That was magnificent Joe, come back and have some more.’

  I set out to get away from our campsite and explore the festival as my coughing fit slowly died out. I would soon discover that being alone at festivals and getting lost in them was something that I greatly enjoyed but as a lad who had only left Peterborough for football matches and the odd gig to the non-bohemian towns of Northampton and Lincoln, the walk around the site that night was a real eye-opener.

  Even though the festival didn’t officially start until the following day, many of my fellow festival-goers had already imbibed their recommended yearly allowance of cider. This was truly the age of the crusties, and even Reading with its rock music reputation was seen as fair game for them to invade. Of course they didn’t want to do anything as crazy as actually pay for a ticket to get in.

  With “Workers Playtime” on my Walkman, I wandered the site and saw people passed out, face down in the mud. Others were stripped to their pants, dancing to some industrial rave track, while jugglers and fire-eaters seemed to be around every corner. I made my way round to the entrance to the main arena, only to discover, with a genuine leap in my chest, that the gates were open and anyone with a wristband could wander in. There is a strange mix of the urban and the countryside when a festival arena is devoid of people. I sat there for a couple of hours, propped up against the crash-barrier at the front of the main stage, drinking my beer and taking in my surroundings. Everyone has those special places where they can go and feel utterly relaxed, and I had found mine, sat in front of that stage in a deserted main arena. No music playing, people rushing around going about their business but not noticing me sitting there, was heaven. As it was August Bank Holiday weekend, my period of Zen-like calm was eventually disturbed by
the rain starting to pour down.

  Everyone was absolutely plastered by the time I got back to our campsite, with plenty of them supposedly feeling the effects of the spliff. As the heavens remained open, we took shelter in our tent, only to find that showerproof did not mean “able to cope with a biblical downpour”. With soaking wet clothes and sleeping bags, we attempted to settle down for the night. A couple of minutes later, the girls tent fell to the ground under the weight of the rain and wind and suddenly, 10 of us were trying to sleep in our dripping excuse for a tent. As we shuffled around in the dark, we realised that none of us had thought to bring a torch, so had to scramble around by the light of a glow stick. Faced with such conditions we decided to crack open the emergency bottle of Pink Lady and have a party in the rapidly forming puddles that were invading the groundsheet.

  Despite the storm rumbling above their heads my fellow campers all slept well, but I was up early on the Friday morning and eager to go for a wander. As I slopped through the primordial mud in my sodden Mega City 4 shorts and Billy Bragg t-shirt, I happened upon a large tent with ‘The Samaritans’ emblazoned on the front. A friendly woman in her mid 30’s beckoned me inside and offered me the bargain of a lifetime; a cup of tea and 2 slices of toast for 40p. To an impoverished schoolboy, battered by the worst the weather had to offer, this was a sanctuary. I looked around the tent to see the only other guest being quietly and carefully talked down from a drug nightmare by one of the charitys volunteers. Thankfully I didn’t need that kind of help from these lovely people but tea, toast and a dry bale of hay to sit on was a joyful relief from the elements. Every morning for the rest of the festival I would undertake the same routine of tea, toast and a chat while the rest of the campers snored their way through their collective hangover.