Festivals

It must have been just before starting Kingsway in September 1976 that Miranda and I went to the Reading Festival. I suppose we took a tent, although I can’t actually remember. Maybe we didn’t – maybe we just took sleeping bags. I do remember we took a lot of acid though, and we took our tops off too. Everyone else had, and it was hot – like it always seems to have been in my memories of summers in that decade. Once you got over the initial strangeness of not wearing anything much, it was really nice. There were no men in suits to leer.

The only scary people were the hell’s angels . They were all in one place and they seemed like trolls from a fairytale to us.. Whenever we got near where they were, we would break into a little scurry to get past them as quickly as possible, but the scurry had to be nonchalant, which is a difficult combination, so as not to draw attention to ourselves. Sometimes it didn’t work, and they’d see us, and shout something, and then we’d just run. They were bogeymen, just like trolls under the bridge.

Apart from the angel’s place, we could stroll around everywhere, smiling, happy, feeling safe, making friends, drinking the warm beer in the flimsy plastic cups, or the odd tasting turkish coffee, all thick and grainy and bittersweet, with the aftertaste of Styrofoam.

We didn’t eat much. We spent our money on more important things. There was a free food place, organized by Hare Krishna people I think, but the food was really horrible – always lentils. We also worked out that the more you ate the more you had to go to the loo and they were truly disgusting. You could smell them from a long way away. It was almost impossible not to gag as you got closer. I remember getting to the doors, retching, taking a deep breath and holding it, stepping inside, trying to avoid the pools of urine on the floor, then rushing out as soon as I could – running fast to escape the horrible stench.

I am trying to rely on my memory only (it feels like cheating somehow to look it up on the net) – but I think we saw Hawkwind – they seemed to play everywhere those days, and Peter Frampton. I might be mixing it up with the Watchfield free festival that we’d been to the year before – or all the various one day concerts in Hyde Park – or even further back, something in Charlton – way across the other side of London from us, where the Who were the headline act. There was also always a slightly sinister looking man with grey hair and a little beard called Ivor Cutler. He would recite odd things in a Scottish accent.

The only proper just for the evening gig I can remember clearly was much longer ago – maybe 1973 or 4 – the first big one I was allowed to go to. That was with Penelope, before we ran away from school – a really special evening. My heroes at the time - Mott the Hoople, with Queen opening for them. I so wanted hair like Ian Hunter – and his mirrored shades too. Each time I doodled my dream boyfriend in my schoolbooks, he came out looking like Ian Hunter. We giggled at Freddie Mercury in his funny skin-tight jumpsuit. Even then we weren’t allowed to go to the London gig they did. Not suitable. Another baffling unfairness. We were driven down to Oxford by my parents, who left us at the door, had dinner with my uncle who was a don there, and then collected us and took us back to London. We were speechless with excitement and tiredness.

Once we’d got to sixteen the music became more of blur - more the backing track to the whole event. We were also off our heads the whole time. The acid made everything surreal. Concorde flew past and broke the sound barrier, or whatever it did. We watched the stars at night change colour and move around the sky leaving little trails of light, like our hands did when we waved them slowly to and fro. The trees all had day-glo coloured outlines, and some people’s faces morphed into horrible masks – their noses growing hideously big as they peered into our faces. Once, I looked in a mirror and my eyes seemed to have grown to double their normal size.

After Reading, at the tube station, trying to ring for a lift, and it took me five goes before I dialled the right phone number. That’s when I decided it was time to stop doing acid.