Half an hour had passed and I’d felt nothing. People seemed surprised when they asked, I could see it in their eyes: the “is there some wrong with you?” look. But then I was thinking the same thing and having tried a mushroom cap the night before I suspected that I'd somehow fucked up swallowing tablets. While watching City City City and Okkervil River on the Friday night, I stood there staring at the lights asking myself whether the colours were normally this vivid and wash-bright and am I normally so fascinated by singular things such as the colours of these lights when I really should be paying attention to the music. The answers being yes and sadly yes again. Rob, another campster of ours joked that at least I could say I got my shot of B2 vitamins.
Well now… mushrooms aside, this Saturday night as we headed towards the stage I did feel a little strange, floaty even, but it really wasn’t anything that I couldn’t put down to my sustained alcohol consumption over the day and it being a red wine day... well we all know that those histamines can do funny things to your head. We positioned ourselves midway between the stage and the sound tent, our little plot that we’d staked out on Friday amongst the littered beer cans. Here we danced to a band called Sons and Daughters, Scottish post-punk with toe-tapping highland flair, dark and with a sense of end-world drama that Johnny Cash would’ve tip his hat to. Indeed their song, his namesake and another Rama Lama, a tune about a girl who drowns in a bathtub were set highlights of mine; their sound, the essential elements mortared by pestle into definitely my thing.
I left the “supernatural amphitheatre” during Wolfmother (the following band), not feeling the overwhelming tour-de-force that I’d been promised, so I worked my way through an increasingly dense and hostile crowd. I felt irritated and claustrophobic, annoyed that this band’s fans were conspiring to ruin my mood. “Who do you think you’re kidding?” a girl shot at me as I stepped through the maze of people. “Obviously not you,” I backhanded, still unsure what I meant but certain it sounded cutting and sarcastic. *Swish* to me! While I am sure that the band members of Wolfmother are entirely proficient in the use of their instruments I cannot profess to like their music or their stage performance. Richard called them “derivative.” When I asked him whether this was a nice way of saying that they were just one notch above a cover band he just laughed.
Finding company away from the stage I sat under the large oaks where beams of silver light reflected off a mirror-ball suspended high in one of the trees’ branches; the circles of light moved in larger circles around us, the wind blowing tree trunk and branches, and one could be mistaken in thinking this was timed to the music. We sat and compared our favourite live music shows of all time and still I felt nothing. No overwhelming ecstatic joy or love for my fellow man or women. Nothing extra-ordinary. But I was with friends and it was all pleasant enough. Fuck the drugs.
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