Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 August 2009 07:48:54
Yesterday I discovered that I'm turning into a "graver". That is a middle aged person who is old enough to remember the rave scene and now inhabits festival fields. Well, that's according to the article "Never too old to party if you're in middle youth" by Clover Stroud in todays Times. The article reflects on this years festival fields saying, "Suddenly, there seemed to be an awful lot of people in their late thirties, forties and even fifties".
I am tempted to say have you taken a look at the headliners around most of the festivals this year. Third Party was impressed at encountering the Prodigy at Glastonbury.....I was impressed when I saw them in concert a decade ago (and they had been going for nearly another ten years before that). The fact is that alot of the headliners around at the moment are bands that were around when those of us the article describes as "middle aged" were living it large, as they used to say. On this basis surely it should be no suprise that we're enjoying going to see these bands.
Another element that comes out in the article is the way that people of a certain age now plan their enjoyment in a way they didn't previously. Although they're still looking for the feeling of community they got through the rave scene. One interviewee said "It’s about being a little bit more in control, although we’re all after the same feeling of togetherness that raves first gave us when we were teenagers”.
Have to be honest that this all sums up the way I do Greenbelt and what I'm actually looking for from it. When I went in 1988 for the first time I remember the thrill I got going into the big top and discovering the Fat Band. There were a mass of festival goers moshing, (or slam dancing as it was called back then). I ended up wandering back to my tent with a split lip, after somebodies elbow had ended up in my mouth, blissfully happy at what I had discovered. Over the next couple of years there was "rave" worship - I think led by Visions in York, all night parties on the camp site (when my friend politely explained to the policeman we didn't go to Greenbelt for trouble, if we'd have wanted that we'd have gone to Reading) and so forth. There was like the person in the interview said a special kind of feel to that time which you felt at the raves, (of which I only ever went to a couple including one down at Longleat), and it was a feeling of togetherness.
These days though, it is all far more carefully planned. The Greenbelt planner has been downloaded, mobile numbers have been collected and far less is being left to it these days. I guess that is the difference between the 80's and the naughties generally.
This week is A Level results week and as Never Conforming has already shown the annual media s**t has started. As I have posted, probably on numerous occassions, before it's not getting easier it's just getting more clinical in many ways. Rather than go on a rant this year I simply leave you links to what I said in 2008 + also here, in 2007 + here, in 2006, (probably the best brief explanation) and finally in 2005.
So as I prepare for Greenbelt, and think back to a time summed up by Fantazia and memories of the Prodigy singing about "Charlie Says" rather than "Invaders Must Die" I realise that whilst life has changed the dreams, in many ways haven't. It's just we know a bit more about how to reach for them now.