Are You Ready For The Rain?

Outdoor festivals are oddly popular in the UK, aren’t they?

I mean, they’re not when you take into account that we’re a affluent nation that spends god-knows how much on music each year, but then you have to think about the weather and it becomes more puzzling.

There seems to be more and more festivals each year. From the old favourites of Glastonbury, T in the Park, Reading & Leeds, the resurrected Isle of Wight and Guilfest to more recent additions such as Lovebox, 02 Wireless, The Big Chill, Hydro Connect, Cornbury, Latitude. Given that they’re not exactly cheap, though, I’ve been looking for the perfect line-up.

Which is why we went to the Hop Farm Festival. The main attraction was, obviously, Neil Young (and I’ll write that again: Neil Young!) but with Primal Scream, Supergrass, My Morning Jacket and Rufus Wainwright also on the bill (plus others, of whom Laura Marling in particular was excellent) we couldn’t not go.

And then we come back to the weather.

I’d been monitoring the BBC all week and it was looking shaky at best, veering between light showers and, I believe the technical term is, pissing it down.

It always amazes me how thirty-thousand people standing dripping in a field can remain pretty optimistic if the music’s good enough. Bear in mind most were probably hoping to spend the afternoon sitting around drinking, smoking and eating, half-listening to bands they’d never heard of, waiting for the main acts and you can understand the rippling disappointment at having to hunker down under cagoules or bin-liners.

When we went to see the Red Hot Chilli Peppers in Hyde Park a few years ago it chucked it down and the irate crowd decided to boo and throw bottles at the opening act, Chicks On Speed, until they went away and left us to our damp misery.

Of course, they were crap, but the bands this weekend were significantly better.

And this is the power of music. Sometimes it just completely floods your nervous system with emotions.

By the time Rufus Wainwright came on it’d been raining increasingly heavily for over three hours. He was playing an acoustic set, which for Rufus means a grand piano and an acoustic guitar, and he rattled through several songs in that gloriously voice of his that sucks your heart into your mouth. I recognised the set closer from the first couple of striking piano cords. There’s no mistaking Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah for anything else, that hymn of lament and joy wrapped up in a melody that makes your soul shiver and then, before he’d even reached the end of the first chorus, the clouds parted and streams of melodious sunshine poured down over the crowd, tingling at the nape of my neck. Hallelujah, indeed. It just couldn’t have been any other way.

(I googled ‘Rufus Wainwright Hallelujah’ to see if anyone had posted it online, on youtube or something and found out that he covered it for a Shrek soundtrack which kind of spoils the image I had of him choosing it as the only song that could possibly beat the weather. Oh well…)

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And that’s all I intended to write for this week’s blog, but things never quite go to plan. For every moment of beauty there’s got to be something that makes you go ‘urgh!’ The above all happened and I’d composed bits of it in my head whilst Beck nipped for a wee in-between Supergrass and Primal Scream, but the moment kind of got spoiled.

Not by the weather. That more or less held. Not by Neil Young. He was suitably fantastic.

But, the disadvantage of arriving at these things early, getting a good spot and making sure you see all the acts is that the first cars in are usually the last out. The lights went up at eleven o’clock and I didn’t move the car as much as a centimetre until twenty to two.

People handle long waits in different ways. Beck slept. I tried to work out the life history of a secondary character in my novel. The mid-forties couple in the car parked next to us played Hallelujah, the original Cohen version, at maximum volume and snogged. Tongues out in the air, over noses, along cheeks and everything. Then, after a while they lowered the seats and he lay down on top of her.

At this point I decided to discreetly turn around and look at the rows of stationary brake lights shimmering through the returned rain. However, I couldn’t help but be aware of the gentle tilting to and fro of the car.

Someday I’ll tell you about the time I parked next to a guy getting a blowjob in the back of his car slap in the centre of Greenwich.