Once, rock concerts were riotous assemblies.
Now, they are instruments of social control. As a couple of far from gruntled Stones fans discovered at Slane.
Not that, way back then, the assemblies of rioters threatened anything much, apart from good order in a disordered society. What were widely referred to as “rock and roll riots” were more often or not a simple matter of bouncers or cops insisting that people sit down, and people, instead, standing up for themselves.
To rise up and jiggle at a gig was to kick over the traces. Audiences since anybody could remember had held themselves motionless in silence so as not to disrupt fellow listeners or performers on stage. To utter a shout of encouragement or a snort of derision was to become the focus of frowns and stern disapproval. Concerts consisted of entertainers entertaining. The function of fans was to sit tight and listen.
Quaint as it now surely seems, it was defiance of this paradigm that once made rock music seem dangerous. It appealed as much to the blood as the brain and brought audiences into the action. The thump of the rhythm triggered a tremor, incited a loosening of individual restraint. Its appeal to huge numbers of young people lay precisely in this – that it bound them together in communal rejection of the restrictive authority that bore down on their lives.
That’s what gave the genre its edge at the outset, and again at the onset of punk, and then at the eruption of rave, and so on. Every time music sets audiences in motion anew, it’s seen as a subversive movement, inspires nervousness in dead-heads to the same degree as joy in hearts that are jumping.
In Dancing In The Streets, published earlier this year, Barbara Ehrenreich recalls Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver describing white rock fans “swinging and gyrating and shaking their dead little asses like petrified zombies trying to regain the warmth, rekindle the dead limbs, the stone heart, the stiff, mechanical, disused joints with the spark of life.”
The last thing authority ever wishes is people sparked to life.
Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, they insist; get up, stand up is the only proper response.
It was in this framework of mind that I happened on a letter in a Dublin Sunday ‘paper from Sally and Rod Bruce, who had apparently visited Ireland for the very first time to see the Stones at Slane. The letter complained about the “lethal” condition of the site, the spectacular inadequacy of the loos, the fact that the comfort of fans appeared to have been low on the Slane scale of priorities. Most of all, they complained that they’d been allocated seats in the stand – where they discovered that dancing was strictly verboten, on grounds of safety and health!
Tens of thousands had been herded onto a muddy escarpment where lost footing might precipitate tragedy– but the folk in the seats were forbidden to dance.
From Satanic Majesties to angelic servility, and an accurate illustration of how, over the period of the Stones’ transition into a tribute band to themselves, the suspicion and fear in which fans are held by the interests which control the industry have come to dominate and drain the life out from music.
You only had to stroll onto the Glasgowbury site, in contrast, to feel the warm vibes of authenticity eddy softly across your face.
Glasgowbury isn’t an angry experience. It’s counter-cultural, experimental, original, dissident and thrilling. Rough sounds and sweet airs that you hadn’t previously heard, sound-checking around every canvas corner. Music deep in the mountains for cheerful mutineers. Band members mingling all around, sprawled in raggedy circles or staggering towards a tent. No bullying, no bullshit, no barriers.
The only ungenerous thought I encountered all day was the certain smugness we all felt at being part of it.
And that was the key. The sense of being a participant in rather than a recipient of whatever was on offer, which was a peaches-and-scream smorgasbord of sound, from the alt-Americana catchy tunefulness of Lurgan duo Cat Malojian, a bit Leo Kelly from the forgiven 1970s, to the frantic aggression of Magherafelt’s Mantic, lead singer straight down to his dirty business in provocative wedding dress and shock-pink pantaloons before mysteriously transmogrifying to minimal punk, to And So I Watch You From Afar, from Belfast that is, committing assault and brain-battery then slowing to sooth the savagery induced, Furlo from the badland of Limavady full of melodious rage, Sandino’s Skruff, showing off (and why not?) their range and rake of healthy influences, Desert Hearts from Belfast, a dizzying revelation since last time, cool as fuck and hot as hell, brimming with gentle, ominous threat, Paddy Nash and Diane Greer, now accoutered with a string quartet – now there’s an innovation – and a clutch of killer songs, Farago from up and down Waterloo Street, mellifluous melodies emerging from a mayhem of noise, Belfast’s Delawares, as earthy as new spuds from Henry McCullough’s allotment, with story-line songs that enclose the throng in wrapped attention, Fighting With Wire, out from the Nerve Centre spoiling for aggro, a considerable influence on half the bands in Derry, which is a more formidable achievement than somewhat, Deci’s midnight stunners, aka the Jane Bradfords, of Belfast, whose roaring mega-sound from upstairs in Mason’s has laid waste to Magazine Street on recent occasion.
And that’s just the selection I managed to catch some of.
As well, of course, as Henry and Oppenheimer and Duke Special. And the band whose pleasurable blare was still bouncing around my buzzy mind’s ear as I ambled away in the balmy small hours through the camp-site where the sweet din of iniquity came floating from within half of the tents to lull us virtuous others to dreamy, stoned sleep, was SuperJiminez from Dublin, a rich mixum-gatherum of styles assembled from exotic locations from Savannah, Georgia, to Shop Street in Galway, with a set of songs that could stand up to competition on any stage anywhere, including a cracking tune called ‘Gonna Live Like This For The Rest Of Our Lives’, or maybe it was “Ain’t Gonna Live Like This...” I heard them after an encounter with Hooky McDermott, which is no state from which to reassemble sequences of words.
What helped make every band I’ve mentioned mighty in its way and on the day was the liberating charge that comes from stepping en masse out from approved, straight society into the “collective joy” of sharing in a sense of freedom and self-expression and relaxed couldn’t-care-lessness about the stupid rules that constrict us and the lies we are required to accept. Glasgowbury was the most truthful place I’ve been all year.
It helped, too, that the crowd was manageable, maybe 2,000, so by the end of the day you knew somebody in every company, or thought that you did and acted accordingly, which is exactly the same thing.
The burgers and chips were the best ever at a gig.
The setting was gorgeous.
There wasn’t a hint of a wisp of aggression all day. No suspicion, no fear.
Back home in Derry next day, I heard ‘Paint It Black’ over the PA in Sainsbury’s. Naturally, nobody stirred.