LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Glastonbury Festival 2014

Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Sunburnt, sleep-deprived and covered in mud I stumbled home from Glastonbury. I had a brain full of bad wiring and a body that was in the process of shutting down, organ by organ.  This is the physical impact of living in a muddy field for five days, grabbing two or three hours sleep each night, eating the odd bit of junk food to keep fuel in the tank and dancing dancing dancing furiously from noon until 7am the next morning. Like some thousand-year-stare GI returning from the shit you glassily gaze out at the uncomprehending world, muttering "you weren't there man, you don't know".

Though there's 200,000 people in attendance most people experience Glastonbury through a TV set.  Digitally flitting from stage to stage, you catch highlights here and there and marvel at the headliners from a comfy sofa.  It's a decent way to watch live music on TV, but the music is merely the icing on top of the cake.  Great icing though; my highlights were the body-thudding laser-chaos of Skrillex, the future rock performance art of St Vincent and, of course, Dolly Parton, whose performance took me to hitherto unknown heights of joy.  But if you want to read gig reviews go check out The Guardian's coverage.

Glastonbury by night.  Photo by Mikki Sandhu

This review is about the side of Glastonbury that's left out of most article; behind the A-list music glitz, behind the pyrotechnics bursting from the main stages; behind the huge crowds lies the real joy of the festival: exploration.  Glastonbury is pretty much a fractal experience, the more you burrow into its deepest corners the more you find squirrelled away.  Squeezed into every darkened nook and cranny are secrets that only the intrepid and attentive will ever discover, a ever-shifting kaleidoscope of woozy, half remembered interactions that now feel like dreams than something that actually happened to me.

Most of these take place in the darkened, fiery labyrinth of Shangri La, Block 9, the Unfairground and The Common.  These are the intense, crammed late night hangouts, teeming with a crowd that has pupils like saucers and tense, rictus jaws. Walking around here is like being stuck in a tumble dryer full of the demented.  You get jostled left and right, dazzled by lasers and building wide projections, freaked out by professionally trained weirdos. Eventually you're lost deep within this whirlpool, hoping desperately you don't actually lose your mind.

London Underground at Block 9.  Photo by Peter Podworski.

My favourite of these areas was Block 9.  Having arrived from the grimy city I was initially a bit non-plussed to see that they were constructing a grotty tower block in the middle of all this greenery.  If I'd wanted to wander around damp council shitholes I could do that quite easily back home.  But at night, with sickly green lighting illuminating everything, trashy transvestites dragging it up through shattered holes in the buildings and pounding dance music filling the air I was totally in my element.

A little birdy had tipped me off about some secret stuff going in the corner of this tower block; telling me to make my way underneath the tube train that'd smashed through the building and ask to jump the queue into the club within.  I did and got hustled into a pen outside full of chatty people.  What followed once I was inside was a blizzard of intense oddness; hell-nurses wanted to shove suppositories up my arse, lovelorn women living in trash that I got pregnant and being threatened that my cock was going to be cut off while having a close-up polaroid of a puckered anus shoved in my face.  

And yes there was a lot of mud.  Photo by Mikki Sandhu.

It was an experience designed to fuck with the chemically altered mind as much as possible.  This was the Roundhouse Theatre's contribution to the festival, and it was so good I couldn't shut up about it all weekend.  I made it a mission to drag as many friends as possible along, taking a sadistic pleasure in watching them pop confusedly through the double doors only to emerge with twisted brains and big silly smiles on their faces.

On a slightly less psychologically intense front was the excellent Back O' Beyond bar in The Common.  Taking on a slightly slanted Day of the Dead theme, the bar was staffed by skeleton boys and girls.  To the sounds of rickety retro-rock I lay down in a coffin and got turned into a skeleton man, then capered around the garden outside to You Know You Make Wanna (Shout) like a madman.  This bar was off the beaten track, yet stuffed with teeny-weeny details within details.  Within a Jesus knick-knack shrine at the back was a fence - I spotted a hinge in it and found a small shed with another man inside.  He made us burst out onto the dancefloor to make a scene.  We did.

Me being turned into a skeleton man.

Eventually the nights took on a freaky pattern.  We'd find a series of tiny, packed out raves, each hotter, smaller and crazier than the last.  Everytime we ventured somewhere we'd find faster and faster dance music; culminating in a 4am arrival at a tent playing music like this.  It was full of freakshow circus performers and an audience who looked like someone had shoved an egg whisk in their brain and hit omelette.  In my burnt-out, ruinous state I thought for a moment that I was actually going mad, figuring there was about a 50/50 chance I was imagining all this from within a padded cell.

There is nothing and nowhere on earth that matches Glastonbury.  But for all the amazing experiences, fantastic music and beautiful scenery the real highlight was spending the weekend with amazing people.  It's the tiny personal moments that are going to stay with me the longest; everyone holding hands and snaking through a packed crowd; linking arms with a friend and negotiating especially slippery mud; pretending to sleep in someone's lap to get away from a boring man at the Stone Circle; bumping into old friends I haven't seen in years and years; hiding from a torrential downpour next to a veggie burger van; waking up in a boiling, sweaty tent and grinning as I remember where I am; helping a stranger out who's stuck in a muddy pit; even something as simple as catching someone's eye and both smiling like idiots at how much of a great time we're having.

Sunset at Glastonbury.  Photo by Mikki Sandhu.

Dolly Parton said "Wouldn't it be great if we could all just live like this?", a thought I guarantee has gone through the mind of everyone who's stared out contentedly at the sun slowly setting over a throng of ludicrously happy, mud-stained people.  But we can't. We've got to head back to the boring old real world where there's music doesn't bubble up from everywhere around you and things don't randomly emit vast plumes of flame into the sky. After Glastonbury everything else feels desaturated and muted, the rest of the world a joyless, unfriendly place in comparison. 

This was the best weekend I've ever had in my life.  I've made new friends, discovered fresh music and raved harder than I've ever raved before.  I only wish I could go back and do it all over again.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Skrillex at Building Six, the o2, 22nd November 2013

Monday, November 25, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

I've never been so profoundly affected by a gig in my life.  It wasn't anything so high-falutin' as musical virtuosity or poetic, lyrical genius.  No, Skrillex affected me on a far more fundamental level: by deafening me. This gig was fuckin' loud man, the kind of loudness where you walk into a place and think “ooh, that's a bit loud”.  About an hour later your eardrums have been completely blown out and the jet engine exhaust screaming into your ear becomes the new normal.  Even now, writing this more than a day after I walked out of the club, a shrill, high-pitched pain rings in my ears. Julianne Moore in Children of Men said this tinny scream is the death scream of ear cells – a requiem of frequencies that you''ll never hear again.  I don't know if that's true or not, but the idea is disquieting.  Is this kind of thing worth sacrificing your senses for?

Skrillex is the pseudonym of Sonny Moore, former singer of various hardcore bands who spotted the burgeoning dubstep trend and promptly switched genres.  His brand of hyper-aggressive, pop-trash dubstep is heavily rock influenced, with powerfully pulsing synth lines in place of guitars and a constant, body-shaking boom from the bass.  Since his rise to the top of the pile he's put out a number of hugely successful songs, played sets all over the world, dated Ellie Goulding and co-written the soundtrack of the best film of 2013.

Despite this success, Skrillex isn't thought of particularly highly.  This is perhaps understating things: dubstep fans despise him for infecting their pet genre with a cheesy pop sensibility, serious musos won't give him the time of day and those in the general public that have heard of him regard him as a trivial manchild with stupid glasses and a ridiculous haircut.  This isn't surprising - his music isn't for everyone – but for those that crave a bit of aural brutalisation it's just the ticket.  I'm firmly within this group:  you can only sit around sipping a glass of wine and listening to bloody acoustic guitars before you feel the urge rising inside you to freak the fuck out and go bonkers to silly/trashy music.

Before I get bonkers, I've got to get into the club.  The security at Building Six is about comparable to boarding a plane.  After getting my photo-ID scanned into their database, having my socks searched for drugs and my wallet rustled through I'm finally in.  Stepping inside the place is absolutely ram-a-jam.  Building Six is a pretty big club but you can't move without having to squeeze yourself through a mass of sweaty, writhing,  happy flesh.  

Eventually I carve out a space for myself in a crowd that, to put it bluntly, looks pretty damn drugged out.  After a bit of straightforward dubstep to get us in the mood, the music takes a swerve and suddenly we're listening to the greatest hits of Bob Marley and the Wailers.  In the stygian depths of a dark, dank nightclub Marley's positivity is a breath of fresh air.  

It turns out to be an oddly appropriate build-up for Skrillex, who, for all the opprobrium thrown at him turns out to be a rather loveable sort of chap.  He's short and wiry, jumping up and down behind his decks excitedly, getting off on the way his basslines roll right through the crowd.  He's uncynical in way that only Americans can really be, restricting himself to platitudes like “Oh my god guys I'm so happy to be here!” or “Let's hear some noise London – yeah!”.  Not exactly Oscar Wilde levels of repartee but his heart in the right place and anyway, as witty as Wilde was his bon mots never got a thousand people going mental for a big drop.

As for the music?  Well, as Woody Allen said “the body knows what it wants” - and it turns out my body wants big dirty stinking bass.  Skrillex's music is as shallow as a puddle, his not-so-secret weapon the big bass drop that's been endemic to pop music since about 2009.  It's dumb.  It's repetitive.  It's  completely tasteless.  But boy oh boy is it fun to dance to.  He pulls out some of his biggest hits relatively early on, the crowd whooping maniacally over the synth swell of the first bars of Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites: the greatest minds of my generation lolling their heads from side to side in an anoxic daze, shaking their asses hypnotically to the crazy pulsating beat.

Soon after comes his collaboration with with Damian Marley Make It Bun Dem, a car crash of dub reggae with Skrillex's wubbiness.  It's great: the bass thumping through the body kinetic dancefloor of Building Six, my heart beating to the rhythm.  Skrillex's rock roots shine through in the epically cheesy Bangarang, a very, very silly song with an undeniably insistent and irresistible pumping beat and one hell of a big drop.

It's songs like these when realise the genius of Skrillex's formula – a weird portmanteau of rock and dance that's neither one nor the other.  This isn't just about putting some electric guitar sample in a dance song, or adding some bleepy bloopy backing track to an indie number – it's a telepod fusion of the two.  Behind me forms a mosh pit full of gasping wet sweaty bodies, eyes rolling madly around their skulls like marbles in a porcelain teacup.  It's primal and instinctive; the characters in a Hogarth painting wrapped in glow sticks and illuminated by sickly sharp green laser light. 

At the climax of Skrillex's many thumping drops, there's a whoosh as pipes spray choking clouds of dry ice down upon us.  The stuff leaves an acrid taste on the tongue, temporarily blinding you in a nightclub fug.  Getting caught up in this kind of surging, searing barely controlled dance panic feels dangerous.  I walk out of there a damaged man: ears blown to fuck, eyes stinging with sweat, clothes stuck to my skin, an unsettled stomach rolling in my gut and a mind ringing like a badly forged bell.  Was it worth all the pain?  Fuck yeah it was.

Photographs by Chris Wilcox