I Blame Morrissey

by Jamie Jones

  Late on Saturday night, we took our place in the primordial goo that had previously been the Pyramid Stage field to watch the headliners, the much heralded Radiohead. A weary crowd, battered by the weather, was picked up by Oxford’s finest as they threw themselves headlong into a intoxicating set. It was a performance that took your mind away from the cold and wet and proved to be a real ‘I was there’ Glasto moment. For 90 minutes every member of the crowd was captivated, from the mass shoutalong to “Creep”, through to the lighters in the for “Fake Plastic Trees” (70,000 people deciding not to notice or care that “Fake Plastic Trees” was one of the least romantic songs ever written.) It was that kind of night. It was impossible to dance due to the mud but you could turn around and see thousands of people vigorously swaying and waving their arms around. As they left the stage for the final time and we stood clapping our hands red raw, I thought back to their gig in Peterborough supporting the Frank & Walters and felt a strange twinge of pride at how far they had come in 4 years.

  None of us could sleep after watching that performance. We knew that we had witnessed something special and wanted to keep the buzz going. We went back to our tents and experienced the unbridled joy of taking off our boots and sipping on a warm lager. The downpour finally stopped at 3am so, with a sheet of dry tarpaulin to lay on the floor, Amy and I headed down to the front of the Pyramid Stage. I had wittered on for hours about how much I loved sitting there and I was ecstatic to finally share it with her. The festival bosses had laid down tons of straw in an attempt to soak up the mud so, with the tarpaulin laid down, we were even able to sit down right up against the stage barrier on the dry but squidgy ground. I felt happier than I had done in a long time. Sat in my special place, I looked at Amy properly for the first time in months. I didn’t think about the future, or our arguments or how much she annoyed me when she didn’t put the Flora back in the fridge, I just looked at her. I sensed the merest hint of the same feeling I had felt the first time I met her in the queue for The Tavern almost 2 years previous. She was still my girl, I hadn’t totally ballsed it up. Huddled together as the sun was rising and with the lager all gone, we fell into a contended sleep in each other’s arms.

  I awoke a couple of hours later to find that we had been encircled by the lake of mud and were now cut off from civilisation. Thankfully, a kind steward spotted our predicament and instructed a passing tractor to dump some bales of hay so that he could build a makeshift bridge for us to escape over.

  That Glastonbury was the first festival where I saw people diving headfirst into the mud and sludge. They would normally do such a bloody stupid thing to get themselves noticed by a passing TV camera or press photographer. My only thought was, “No matter how drunk, stoned or desperate to be on TV you are, in about 10 minutes time you are going to be bloody freezing and picking 3 day old noodles out of your hair”. By the Sunday afternoon, we’d had enough of slopping around in the mud. This, coupled with the fact that Sting was headlining the Pyramid Stage that night, persuaded us to leave early. After watching the customary Billy Bragg Glasto performance, we decided to pack up our tents and begin the long journey home.

  The train from Castle Cary to Birmingham New Street was full of festival-goers who, like us, didn’t want to watch Sting attempt a mass tantric sex session and were encrusted in mud. On the journey from Birmingham to Peterborough however, on a now warm, dry summer evening, we looked like swamp creatures let loose on a train. When we eventually got home, Mum initially wanted me to stand in the garden while Dad hosed me down. Even he realised that this was taking her OCD-like desire for a clean house too far and I was allowed to get undressed at the back door and run to the shower. Amy was allowed to simply take off her shoes and walk through the house chatting away to Mum as the wet mud from her socks stained the carpet.

  That night, Amy and I lay on my bed watching the Channel 4 festival coverage that Mum had videoed and reminisced about what an immense weekend we’d just experienced. Aside from the music, drinking and laughing, we also hadn’t argued once during the whole weekend. We’d even managed a rare intimate moment in our rain battered tent one night. I think Amy was concerned that we might not make it out alive, so wanted to go out with one last moment of passion before the Grim Reaper reached his arm up out of the mud and took her. Such moments of intimacy had become a rarity since the Paris debacle and we were hurtling towards the “just good friends” stage of a relationship. But, in my mind at least, our mud stained Glasto lovemaking had given our relationship a boost and I was determined to keep it going.

  To celebrate my 21st birthday, I’d bought Amy and I tickets to the V Festival in Chelmsford. Despite my protestations the previous year, V had returned and with Blur and The Prodigy headlining, and the likes of Beck and the Chemical Brothers on the bill, we were all set for another big weekend.

  Somehow, my 16 year old sister persuaded Amy and my mum that she should be allowed to tag along. Amy and my sister had always got on well enough but what 21 year old wanted to go to a festival with his girlfriend and his kid sister? A couple of days before we headed to Chelmsford, Mum gave me almost the same talk she’d had with me before my first festival at Reading in 1992, but this time it was full of warnings about what to not let my sister do:

  ‘Keep an eye on her at all times, don’t let her smoke, don’t let her have any more than 2 alcoholic drinks a day. If she even looks at a boy then make sure you put a stop to it. If you are going to get drunk then make sure Amy looks after her, she is a lovely responsible girl. I do wonder sometimes what she is doing going out with you.’

  She went on to tell me that my Uncle Mick was also going to be there with my cousins. I knew that V was billing itself as a family friendly festival but this was getting ridiculous. I wanted to have a few drinks, watch bands, get involved with the late night partying and to end the night under canvas with my girlfriend, not go on a family outing.

  As it turned out, I was an absolute, complete and utter tosspot at that festival. From the moment we arrived on site and Amy and my sister didn’t want to head immediately to the bar area the second we’d pitched our tents. I was annoyed and went into grumpy toddler mode.

  V had a system for buying alcohol where you had to queue up and buy tokens which you then exchanged at the bar for your drinks. On the Saturday lunchtime I decided that, in order to avoid queuing up again, I would buy enough in one transaction to keep the 3 of us drinking for the next two days.

  I drank my way back into a good mood that afternoon, helped by the ever impeccable Teenage Fanclub and then James playing cracking sets on the Main Stage. Things began to darken when I went to the bar in the early evening. Stood in the queue, I looked at my beer tokens for the first time and saw that they had “SATURDAY ONLY” stamped on them. When I got to the front of the queue, the bar staff confirmed my worst fears that they could indeed only be used that day and that no refunds were given on unused tokens. I demanded to see the bar manager who reiterated the no refund policy. Never one to accept the wasting of money or beer, my inner Liam Gallagher came up with what seemed a simple solution. We would just have to drink all of the tokens that evening. By that time, my sister was already a pint over her daily limit, so it was down to Amy and I to get through the 10 “Saturday” tokens that I had left. I explained the potential 5 pints each or 6 pints/4 pints scenarios to Amy who just rolled her eyes.

  Inexplicably, after only a couple more drinks, Amy announced that she, ‘didn’t really fancy any more.’ I was apoplectic but, rather than cause a scene in front of 50,000 people, I marched off in the direction of the bar, muttering; “Fine, I’ll find someone else to drink with”. I didn’t find anyone else to drink with, as that would have involved talking to strangers. I sat at the back of the field watching that nights headliners, Blur, and drank myself into a horrible mess, a really horrible mess. I sang along with gusto to Albarn and co as they blasted through ‘Popscene’ and ‘Country Sad Ballad Man’. I even attempted to get up and dance to ‘S
ong 2’ before the deadly combination of alcohol and gravity saw me tumble into the back of a couple who were enjoying a light petting session.

  Despite throwing lager down my neck, I still had 2 tokens left when the bar closed, which didn’t improve my mood at all.

  As Blur finished their set and the crowds headed back to their campsites, I made a valiant attempt to do the same. The fact that neither my arms or legs were responding to the commands from my brain was a problem but I headed for the vague area that I thought our tents were located in. I fell over the guy ropes to the first tent I tried to manoeuvre around and, as my face smashed into the adjacent tent peg, I could do nothing other than laugh. Thanks to not managing to get my paralysed arms down to break my fall, blood was now flowing from my mouth and nose. In my bewildered state, I thought that my injury would make Amy feel sympathetic to my plight and would see her wrap me up in a big warm hug. As my bearings were scrambled by lager interference, I decided that the best thing to do was to shout Amy’s name as I wandered through the rows of tents. After what seemed like a week of my shouting, her head popped up like a meerkat from inside a tent and she hollered “Jay, get over here NOW!” I’m pretty sure she then said “Honestly, I am fucking sick of dealing with him” to anyone within earshot. Upon reaching our 2 tent mini-campsite, Amy looked me up and down and said, in what I thought was a very brusque tone; “You’re drunk.”

  As I stood swaying, with blood dribbling down my front, I decided to go with the humorous defensive plan:

  Me – ‘Not just a pretty face are you my love, your vision is sparkling as well. You are perfect all over, absolutely perfectly perfect. Where are we sleeping?’

  Amy – ‘Why have you got blood all over your face, did someone take offence to you being the most annoying prat at this festival and smack you one?’

  Me – ‘As if I’m annoying sweetheart… No, what happened was, in my rush to get back here to kiss you, I fell over a tent rope and hit my face on the ground.’

  Amy – ‘I knew you would spoil this weekend. You’re pathetic, Jay, you really are.’

  Me – ‘Thanks for pointing that out, my love.’

  Amy – ‘Me and your sister will sleep in our tent, you can sleep in the other one.’

  Me – ‘Don’t be stupid, I’m fine, I will just have a bottle of water and then I’ll…..”

  I didn’t get to finish my sentence, as I stumbled into and over a guy rope and went spinning to the floor. Amy rolled her eyes so fiercely they almost fell out of her head and said, ‘Look, we’ll talk about you ruining the festival in the morning, but for now just go to sleep.’

  Me – ‘You do realise you sound like my mum not my girlfriend, right? You used to love having a few drinks with me but now you’re a miserable cow. I know what, why don’t you go and find a charming man from Cambridge, I bet they wouldn’t act like this, they would be sat with you sipping champagne, listening to classical music, not bringing you to festivals and getting leathered. Wankers. Your Cambridge wankers can go fuck themselves.’

  She didn’t respond, her eyes were enough to tell me that she wishes she had never met me. As Amy went to close the tent, I reached in and grabbed our emergency bottle of vodka. As she padlocked it from the inside, I opened the vodka and knew that I only had myself to blame. I slumped onto the grass and began to glug from the bottle which was the cheapest, crappiest brand so tasted foul. I began to loudly sing The Stone Roses debut album, track by track, whilst playing air maracas until the darkness finally took over.

  I awoke the next morning to find my sister trying to drag me out of the puddle that I had slept in and into the tent.

  My sister: ‘C’mon Jay, get in this tent. Amy’s still asleep, and you don’t want her to see you in this mess. She’s furious enough with you as it is. Are you trying to fuck up your relationship on purpose?’

  Me: ‘Don’t swear.’

  My sister: (laughing) ‘Look at the bloody state of you and what you did yesterday and you’re having a go at me for swearing. Get in the tent you idiot.’ With one last push, I toppled inside and my 16 year old kid sister took off my muddy boots, put my glasses in their case and dried my hair with a towel, like I was a 2 year old kid who was incapable of doing it himself, before I passed out again.

  When I regained consciousness a few hours later my tongue was stapled to the roof of my mouth and I felt like death. I quickly decided that the only way to quieten the banging noise in my head was to start drinking again, so a warm and hearty swig of rancid vodka was my breakfast. As I waited for the alcohol to flood my veins, I took a look around and found that Amy and my sister had, quite understandably, left me to my own devices. Amy had very kindly left me a note stuck to the side of my wellies, which said simply “See you at the usual place”. At every festival I’d been to, the first thing I did was to establish such a place, a meeting point that all members of the group can always head to. If you got lost, or went to watch a band on your own, you always knew that at least some of the folks from the group would be residing back there. The best ‘usual place’ was normally in the Main Stage area, by an object that couldn’t move, such as a tree or the bar. At Glastonbury in 1993, our place had been an ice cream van but the bloody thing kept moving, causing much confusion to our cider addled teenage brains.

  I trundled off to the “usual place” which was a huge tree to the side of the stage in the Main Arena, stopping to get a veggie burger to line my stomach and a pint of cooking grade lager for each of us, which I thought would make Amy and my sister happy. It was 11.30am after all, and we were on holiday! Neither looked particularly ecstatic as I stumbled through the mainly seated crowd, spilling beer on random strangers as I struggled to keep hold of the paper pint pots.

  They hardly spoke to me for the first hour. Luckily we bumped into my Uncle Mick later in the afternoon, who cheered everyone up by gently taking the piss out of me and the ‘bloody state’ I was in. Slowly but surely the icy, perilous landscape between Amy and I began to thaw.

  As the lager and rain flowed, the bands got gradually worse with Placebo, Apollo 440 and Fluke failing to hold anyone’s attention on the V Stage. In the early evening lull, as we waited for Beck to reinvigorate the drenched masses, Amy and my sister decided to go back to the tent and change out of their drenched clothes. When they returned 20 minutes later, without having brought the bottle of vodka as I had politely requested, Amy informed me that all of her clothes were damp so she was wearing my Pepe jeans and Morrissey t-shirt. This meant that she was clad in my only set of clean and dry clothes. If I’d been sober I would have been annoyed. As it was I just kept drinking. It seemed like the only sensible course of action. I had a good jump around to Beck. A few months previously we had been so in love watching him, but this time she resisted all my attempts at a smooch or a dance. After he’d finished we stood in the rain, looking in other directions to avoid making eye contact, and didn’t say a word.

  I wandered off to the bar as the sun began to set and got lost coming back from the toilet prior to The Prodigy as, in the descending darkness, I could no longer find the “usual place”. The Prod were scarily captivating as usual and during their set I befriended a group of Essex wideboys who insisted that I shared their spliff.

  After politely declining their offer of continuing the night in the fleshpots of Chelmsford, I wandered back to our campsite, happy that I’d had a cracking day out. By the time I had stumbled back to the tents, ours was padlocked shut with Amy and my sister inside. They both pretended to be asleep when I banged on the canvas, so I sat in the small tent, stripped to my pants and finished the vodka.

  The next morning Amy appeared to have forgiven me for being a prat, but she may have just decided to give up on me. I had punched another hole in the tapestry of our relationship.

  I went home and shaved my head into a suedehead style in an attempt to cheer myself up. It didn’t work. Instead, with my “Meat Is Murder” t-shirt on and this new hairstyle, I looked like an unhinge
d devotee of the Cult of Morrissey. Which is exactly what I was. Amy, with predictable disdain, hated it and initially refused to see me until, ‘Your hair’s grown a bit and you stop looking like a 1970’s football hooligan’.

  She relented to attend my celebratory 21st birthday dinner at our local Beefeater a couple of weeks later, where she was all painted on smiles to my parents and then the ice queen to me.

  After the double whammy of my behaviour at V and new haircut, Amy didn’t want to complete our summer festival hat-trick by joining me at Reading. She decided instead to go and spend a week volunteering for the National Trust, rebuilding old walls in Cornwall. She did ask me to go with her but I think that was more out of a sense of duty rather than actually wanting me to go. I curtly dismissed the idea as I was determined to reach my aim of going to 3 festivals in one summer. In the spring, Amy had suggested that we didn’t go to any festivals that summer and instead should save up and go away on holiday together. Oh how I laughed at such an idea.

  Amy set off for Cornwall to spend a week doing something worthwhile and I headed to Reading with Lou and her cockney mates. I had free reign to do whatever I wanted, with no girlfriend or sister to cast disparaging glances in my direction. Ironically, I didn’t drink anywhere near as much as I had at V and didn’t make a complete tit of myself either. Instead, I spent a lot of time on my own wandering the festival site, watching bands and thinking. Bands wise, it wasn’t a classic line-up but Suede, Super Furry Animals and Stereophonics were all on festival-friendly form. I spent whole afternoons watching crap bands and picking over my relationship with Amy, wondering why it was all falling apart and whether I had the heart or maturity to save it. The only thing I worked out for sure was that I had no clue what to do next, other than get a drink and settle down to watch Mogwai unleash their sonic experiments on an unsuspecting Melody Maker tent crowd.