by Jamie Jones
I came face to face with a lad, with a Suede “Drowners” t-shirt on, who was probably in his early 20’s;
Me: ‘What the hell are you doing mate?’
Drowner: ‘What you wanted me to do!’
Me: ‘You what?’
Drowner: ‘You’ve been grinding your arse against me for the last half hour, thrusting against me and brushing your arm against mine.’
Me: ‘Fuck off. I wasn’t doing anything, just dancing. I’m straight!’
Drowner: ‘I’m bi-sexual….’
Me: ‘Well not with me you’re not.’
At this point the previously effeminate Suede fan suddenly recovered his guttural cockney accent and spat out:
Drowner: ‘You prick-tease, you’ve led me on, I’ll…’
At this point the world went dark. The Drowner had head-butted me and made good contact with the bridge of my nose. Thankfully, I had taken off my glasses and stored them in their case, in my shorts pocket. With the help of a kind young lady in a “James – Sit Down” t-shirt, I made my way out of the crush and flopped down in a sweaty, bloody heap at the back of the crowd. As the ringing in my ears slowly receded, I went back over what had just happened and happily concluded that I didn’t deserve the “prick-tease” title that the Drowner had foisted upon me. I shook my head clear and showed an adolescents ability to get on with life by running back to my tent to get a clean t-shirt. I didn’t want my mates to find out what had happened, so wiped the worst of the blood away with my now ruined Wedding Present ‘4’ t-shirt. Looking in one of the girls make-up mirrors, I found that, miraculously, the mark on my nose was tiny and was covered almost entirely when I put my glasses back on. I pulled on my own Suede ‘Drowners’ t-shirt and jogged unsteadily back to the arena.
I got back just in time to see The Wedding Present leave the stage. Maff bounded over, wreathed in sweat and exclaimed “Bloody quality gig mate, weren’t it!” I nodded my agreement and off we went to the bar to get a pint. I never discussed the incident with anyone and it didn’t make me angry or vengeful, it was all just a bit odd.
Pyramid Stage at 7am
OUR summer was taken over by music festivals. We had decided way back in the depths of winter that we would make our first trip to the Glastonbury Festival.
We left Peterborough on the Thursday morning and arrived onsite in the middle of the afternoon. We managed to get the supreme camping spot, up on the hill by the Eavis farmhouse, looking down over the whole site. Maff’s Dad, Rob, had driven a group of us to the festival and decided when we got there to climb over the flimsy perimeter fence and have a couple of days with us. Rob was a great bloke, he was the cool Dad that all of us wanted. All he did that weekend was watch the bands, have a drink and a laugh. He never tried to act like a teenager, he just loved the music.
Glastonbury was a special place. I fell for its charms from the second I got on site. By 1993 it certainly wasn’t the hippy love-fest that it had been through the 1970’s. Instead, we discovered that it was full of northern lads who had jumped over the perimeter fence without paying for a ticket and were determined to rid the world of its pharmaceuticals by Sunday lunchtime, at the very latest.
The festival was bathed in glorious sunshine and the bands that I’d wanted to see were on top form, with Teenage Fanclub followed by Suede lighting up the NME Stage on the Friday night. My sentimental side was in full flow and, as I looked around during Teenage Fanclub’s glittering set of indie-pop, surrounded by my mates, with the sun setting, I thought, “This really is the best place in the world.”
I wasn’t one for spirituality, stone circles and crystals with positive energy, but found that when you’re at Glasto you would need to have a swinging brick for a soul not to feel inspired. My favourite place on the site wasn’t spiritual, it wasn’t in one of the stone circles or even 4am in one of the rave fields. It was sat in front of the deserted Pyramid Stage. I had seen some beautiful sights in my life but nothing could compare to sitting with my back against that stage at 7am, looking back up the valley with the mist rolling down and watching the late night casualties trying to locate their tents. I couldn’t get enough of the place and would go and sit in front of the stage as soon as I woke each day. I would then get mildly annoyed when it got to mid-morning and the festival would start to wake up and invade my quiet time.
I even had a quick fling at that Glasto’. I had known Sarah since we’d started secondary school. She had always been one of the girls in our little group but, to be honest, her intelligence and beauty meant that she should have been hanging around a better class of lads than us. From the first night at Glasto and our awkward drunken kiss, we both knew that we weren’t going to have a relationship. It was to be a festival romance that would expire the second we left the site. We sat up talking rubbish about music, life and the future through Saturday night and as the dawn broke, I decided to invite her to experience my special place. We gathered up the last cans of Holsten Pils and took the long walk down the hill to the Pyramid, occasionally falling head first over guy ropes and wetting ourselves laughing. I felt on top of the world. Here I was, in what had quickly become my newly discovered favourite spot on the planet, drinking and giggling with a girl I fancied. We cuddled up against the stage barrier, masters of all that we surveyed.
That blissful scene lasted for about half an hour before Sarah got bored:
Sarah: ‘How long are we going to sit here?’
Me: ‘I normally sit here for hours at this time of the morning, it’s an amazing view don’t you think?’
Sarah: ‘Not being funny Jay, but this is getting boring and I’m cold. I’m going back to the tent. Come on, come with me and we can warm up.’
Any sensible 16 year old lad would have realised what she had subtly suggested, and quickly agreed to follow.
Me: ‘Nah, you’re ok, I like it here. I’ll sit here for a while yet.’
Shaking her head, Sarah stomped off back up the hill. That was the end of our fling.
I was still in front of the stage supping my first cup of tea of the day when she came back down the hill, a couple of hours later, to get some breakfast with Doody’s girlfriend, Lisa. I knew they were giggling about me being sat there on my own but I didn’t care. Then, just in case I was in any doubt, Lisa’s foghorn voice broke the calm Somerset morning by cackling;
‘Christ, Jay, you’re a sad bastard.’
I figured that given our romance had ended at the Pyramid Stage, Sarah would no longer want to come with me to see the ever festival friendly Billy Bragg later on that Sunday. It was her loss.
Two weeks after Glastonbury ’93 we went to the inaugural Phoenix Festival. Where Glasto had been a spiritual setting, Phoenix was what I imagined music festivals to be like in North Korea. Set on a disused military airfield at Long Marston, about 10 miles south of Stratford-Upon-Avon, each festival-goer was handed a leaflet at the entrance with a strict set of rules. We were told exactly where to camp, that no fires were allowed and that the arena would shut promptly at 11pm. None of these slightly petty rules would have been an insurmountable problem if they had provided some decent facilities. The problem was that we had to queue for everything all weekend, whether that be for a burger, a pint or a pee. Throughout the Thursday and Friday you could feel the tension building on the campsite, with large groups gathering to moan at nobody in particular about the lack of a bar and the rules that were being enforced by stewards who appeared to be inspired by the Sergeant Major from ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’.
The main reason I had been looking forward to going to Phoenix was a 2nd stage headline slot from Billy Bragg. At 9pm on the Saturday night, he walked out onto the stage and said “Hope you’re all in a singalong mood!”, before 5000 people joined him in a mass rendition of “To Have and To Have Not”. It was a party atmosphere that night as Billy and his band produced exquisite versions of “Sexuality” and “Cindy of a Thousand Lives” for the crowd to sway along to. I was there with Maff, who had
become my Phoenix buddy, and we joyously danced along to the tunes as they spilled out. Billy must have also thought it was a cracking gig as, a few months later, he released a recording of it as an official bootleg called “No Pop, No Style, Strictly Roots”.
After the bands finished on the Saturday night, the masses were unceremoniously marched out of the main arena at 10.45pm by the crack team of stewards cum bouncers. We dutifully made our way back to our tent and cracked open a bottle of Pink Lady to celebrate Billy’s brilliance.
Within half an hour we could hear the shouts of defiance from folk all over the site and the unmistakable sound of glasses being smashed. My first reaction was, ‘Ohhhh you’re not allowed to bring any glass onto this site, they’ll be in trouble’. We stood up to get a better view just in time to see a telegraph pole being torn down and then used as an impromptu but effective battering ram to knock down the entrance to the main arena. A guttural roar of celebration broke out amid shouted confirmation that it was ‘a fuckin’ riot’ going on. At midnight, Maff and I went for a wander to see if anywhere in this totalitarian state masquerading as a festival was still serving food and ended up getting tacked onto the end of this rural riot. We stumbled around the darkness of the main arena, parts of which were being illuminated by fires set by the rioters. We weren’t the kind of lads that wanted to smash things up so, despite being urged by the ubiquitous white blokes with dreadlocks to “Rip this place apart man”, we soon got bored and went back to the only food stall that had remained open, smiled slyly at the lack of a queue, got some chips and went and sat up on the hill watching the scene play out.
As the fires burnt and the once aggressive stewards awaited the arrival of the police to quell the seething anger of the rebellious youths, my only concern was that my mum might see the scenes on the news and have her worst fears about festivals confirmed once and for all. Despite being only two weeks away from my 17th birthday, Mum was still very much in control of my future festival going destiny.
When we got back from Phoenix, Doody, Shin, Mark and I decided that the indie-pop world needed shaking up and decided to form a band. We figured that being in a band was a rite of passage for any music loving juveniles looking to grow up but we were particularly bad. None of us could play an instrument but we’d read about the punk ethos of just picking up a guitar and playing it so thought we would give it a go. Yet again I secretly raided my Building Society Savings Account and bought myself a 2nd hand bass guitar, 10W Amp and a microphone. Mark and Doods both bought guitars and amps from the local music shop, whilst Shin got himself a set of the yellowest drums I had ever seen.
It was only after we bought all the equipment and had our first rehearsals that we realised that the punks were lying or were too drunk on cheap cider to care. In order to make some half decent music you needed to learn how to play your instruments. That seemed like far too much hard work to us.
Like all good teenage bands, the vast majority of our time was spent on choosing a name. After much debate we decided on “Mooncat”. Mooncat was a puppet, of a cat, who came from the moon, funnily enough. He appeared in various kids TV shows in the early 1980’s and it seemed a suitably twee name for an indie band.
The rest of our spare time that autumn was spent on Mooncat. We would attempt to write songs, learn our instruments and, most importantly, bond as a band. In reality, this meant spending Sunday afternoons in Shin’s dads freezing cold garage, drinking Southern Comfort and discussing how long it would be before we would be ready to headline Glastonbury. We didn’t get round to playing any gigs, we knew we weren’t good enough for that but it was bloody good fun being in a band with my mates, dreaming of being indie-pop stars.
Mooncat split up in December of 1993, not through musical differences but because it was too cold to sit in that garage any longer. We had gone as far as we could as a band.
1994
Britpop Is Mine
1994 was, musically, the best of my life. It seemed that almost every week another amazing single or album was released and, with Glastonbury and plenty of gigs thrown in, it couldn’t get any better. It seemed incredible to me that Blur’s “Parklife” and Pulp’s “His ‘n’ Hers” were released in the same month (April). These were albums that I adored from the first listen. Add in Oasis “Definitely Maybe” (released in August), The Charlatans “Up To Our Hips” (March) and of course Morrissey’s “Vauxhall & I” (March), and you had 5 of my favourite albums ever right there, in that 5 month period.
Those albums also helped me to expand my music collection back into the 1960’s. When Tim Burgess and Damon Albarn talked of The Small Faces and The Kinks, I went out and bought up their cheap £3.99 greatest hits albums, which always featured some badly recorded live tracks. Even my dad approved of me howling along to songs like ‘Afterglow’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ in my room, as they were ‘proper music’.
Pulp’s seminal “His ‘n’ Hers” was an album of nylon based beauty and was a constant in the CD tray of my stereo. I had discovered Pulp thanks to their “Razzmatazz” single the previous year which, upon its release, was the 99p CD single of the week in Andy’s Records. We had been to see them play at Northampton Roadmenders in 1993, supported by an energetic and gloriously shambolic Elastica. From that night onwards Jarvis Cocker was right up there in the exalted company of my heroes. He was the geek anti-hero that all us indie kids wanted to be. He gave us all hope that us nerds could make it as a popstar in the 1990’s.
“His ‘n’ Hers” boasted one of the best singles of the era in “Babies”. It was sparkling pop, with its tale of suburban sex and hiding in wardrobes. Songs like ‘Joyriders’ and ‘Pink Glove’ would flow out of my stereo every evening after school with me throwing my Jarvis shapes and Dad shouting that I would; ‘Go through the bloody floor dancing like an idiot to that rubbish’.
The Charlatans latest slab of effortless cool was packed full of melodic, Hammond-driven mod influenced rock ‘n’ roll. “Up To Our Hips” t-shirts became my gig uniform, and Doody, Jacko and I got to see another landmark Charlatans gig at Trentham Gardens in Stoke that April. I was a Charlatan for life.
It wasn’t all about newly released epic albums that spring though. On 5th April, I tuned in to the Radio 1 Evening Session expecting Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley to be playing the latest indie tunes to be met with the news that Kurt Cobain had killed himself. That was a bit of a downer when all I’d wanted to hear was the new Primal Scream single. It was a shame though, as I had finally started liking some of Nirvana’s songs on “In Utero”, in particular the gorgeously bleak “Heart Shaped Box”. I was sad that he’d died but I didn’t go out and buy a Dennis the Menace style jumper, a pair of Converse boots and suddenly start telling everyone how I wanted to move to Seattle. I had Britpop on my mind.
The two albums that changed the Britpop scene and propelled it firmly into the mainstream were “Parklife” and “Definitely Maybe”. Blur were the established indie band who had gone from baggy with their first album (Leisure) through to mod with their second (Modern Life Is Rubbish), and had found a magic formula with their third (Parklife). It was packed full of blistering tunes that would get nightclub dancefloors jumping (Girls and Boys) or bring you down to earth with a loving bump (Badhead). It was the first Britpop album to really crossover and make the leap into the mainstream. The vast majority of the people that bought “Parklife” weren’t geeky like me when it came to indie they just recognised great pop tunes and wanted to listen to them over that long hot summer of 1994.
From an early Oasis live session on The Evening Session in February, I was hooked. They were the gang of lads, making rock ‘n’ roll tunes that spoke to us, the band that the times needed. I cut a huge picture of Noel and Liam out of the NME, stuck it on my bedroom wall and wrote on it in marker pen “The Best Fuckin’ Rock N Roll Band In The World”. That lasted about a week before my dad spotted it, ordered me to take it down and advised me, not for the first time, that “When you have your own hou
se, you can put whatever you want up on the walls”.
I’d just turned 18 when “Definitely Maybe” was released, and it was like a hurricane blowing into my brain. It smashed to smithereens everything that I thought I knew about indie music. It was an album that I carried around with me, often singing the words to ‘Columbia’ without realising, as I walked down the street. I had to have it close to me at all times. I knew it wasn’t ground-breaking in the sense that Noel wore his influences like a badge of honour, but his songs were the unifying force of that summer. I would stand in my room, (it wasn’t an album you could sit down and listen to) and screech along to “Live Forever” and “Supersonic”. It wasn’t subtle or smart but it was glorious, life defining music to my teenage ears. They were the band that I’d been waiting for. The Stone Roses debut had me spellbound but I was too young to be at Spike Island or experience the buzz of that album when it was released. For “Definitely Maybe”, I was smack bang in the middle of it at the perfect age and I bought into the cult of Oasis with every penny and ounce of sweat that I possessed.
Despite being loved by the indie hordes, Oasis were never really an indie band. From the first listen, whether you liked their music or not, it was obvious that they were going to be huge. “Supersonic” was a cracking debut single, and I sat in front of our TV on a Saturday morning and watched Noel and Liam in the video on the Chart Show, looking effortlessly fuck off cool. Afterwards I ran upstairs, put the CD single on the stereo, stood ram-rod straight, with feet at ten to two and my chin pointing upwards like a baby giraffe searching for food and sang along at the top of my voice.
I was lucky enough to see them twice that year, once at Glastonbury and then in the week that “Whatever” hit the charts in December, at Cambridge Corn Exchange. I had passed my driving test a couple of months before the gig, and Dad agreed to lend me his trusty Vauxhall Cavalier so that I could drive my mates to the venue. In the week leading up to the gig the weather was atrocious and on the afternoon of what was a key day in my entire life, Mum decided that I “couldn’t drive the car as it’s too icy out there”. I decided, in a fit of blind panic at potentially missing the gig, to show some Gallagher attitude of my own and ignore her. I waited until she went into the front room, grabbed the keys, ran out to the car and went to pick up Doody and Jacko. I was going to see the band that were set to define my generation. I knew that I didn’t want to have to look my kids in the eye years later and admit that I missed seeing Oasis in the early days because my mum had told me that I couldn’t go.