Kill Your Friends (19 page)

T
he tailback is long
and we’re surrounded by tolers—goths, ravers, punks, hippies,
everything—carrying their backpacks, tents, huge plastic bottles of
cider, cases of cheap lager, acoustic guitars, ghetto blasters, all
that crap. They stumble along the sides of the road, pressing
around the cars, all of them soaking wet and spattered with mud.
Through the softening quartz of the windows of Trellick’s Range
Rover it feels like watching a CNN bulletin about an evacuation, a
refugee trail somewhere. Incredibly enough it has stopped raining
for a few minutes. The sun filters through weakly and all the
losers cheer.

I pull the handbrake on just enough to allow me to turn on the
dashboard TV. Trellick, in the driver’s seat, is patiently arguing
with
another
security guard (“We’re from the record company.
One of our acts is playing in fifteen minutes. We need to get in
now
”), while, in the distance, the boom of the festival
shudders around the hills and vales of Somerset. In the back Ross
and Darren—already drunk—are ‘ironically’ singing ‘Here we go, here
we go, here we go—’

A guy suddenly bangs on my window. He’s stripped to the waist,
tattooed, crew cut. I press the button and the window hums down a
few inches, admitting a reek of lager. “Fucking hell!” he says to
some people behind him, pointing at the dash, “There’s a fucking
telly in there!” I just look at him. “All right, mate!” he says
cheerfully. “What you watching then?”

I make sure the door is locked before replying. “Dole office is
that way, mate,” I say, pointing back down the road as I hit the
button and the window slides efficiently back up. The guy pumps his
fist, wanking an imaginary cock off at me, as, he falls back into
step with the other losers.

Finally the security mutant, having examined our VIP tickets and
backstage parking pass for an hour or so, seems satisfied and waves
us out of the queue and towards a closer, more discreet entrance.
“Thank you
very
much,” Trellick drawls, then, when we’re a
few yards away, he adds, “you fucking loser.” There is a banner
over the main entrance—the entrance where thousands of weary,
footsore tolers are being herded in—which reads ‘Greenpeace
Glastonbury Festival 1997’. “It should read “
Arbeit Macht
Frei
”,” Ross says sourly.

We come to another gate, endure more tedious negotiations, and
then we’re on the site proper, driving past rows of tents. Scumbags
and jizz-buckets sit around their tents drinking Stella and
Woodpecker and Christ knows what. I see a guy drinking fucking
Newcastle Brown
.

I do not understand the festival experience. These people, these
disgusting lowlifes we’re driving through, they
fought
to
get in here. They think they’re
lucky
. They spent hours on
the phone trying to get tickets, happily paying hundreds of pounds
for a pair when they managed to find some. Now they’re
celebrating
being here, celebrating the fact that they can
lie around in urine-flavoured mud drinking warm lager and eating
burgers prepared by some syphilitic gyppo while fucking Cast knock
out their greatest hits in the distance.

I turn round in my seat and give Darren a playful slap.

“Get the fucking pooey open and rack ‘em out then!”

He pulls another bottle of Mumm’s from a cooler at his feet
while Ross digs the corner of his Amex into a huge bag of chang and
we all do a quick card-edge.

“All righty!” Trellick shouts, thumping the wheel. “
Let’s
fucking rock!
”

Darren hands me the champagne and I shake the bottle up a bit
before I fire the cork out of the open window of the Range Rover
“Oi! Oi! Oi!” we shout in delighted unison as a few scumbags look
up from their cups of piss and tinfoil barbecues to give us what
they imagine are withering looks. “We’re larging it, mate!” Ross
shouts into the uncomprehending face of a passing middle-aged
hippy.

The champagne cork sails up in a high arc over a row of filthy
tents and disappears into the sun, finally, one hopes, hitting some
filthy toe-rag right in the fucking eye. We roll off, clanking
along the metal vehicle path towards hospitality parking.

♦

The backstage beer tent is
rammed
. We elbow our way into
the crush at the bar. Ross, viciously drunk by this point, says,
“It’s like fucking Hillsborough in here,” to the clear disgust of
Tony Crean, who literally
is
a fucking Scouser. Debbie Harry
from Blondie walks by, dressed head to foot in crimson—topped off
with a bunch of red roses for a hat. She looks shocking, like an
old hooker who’s fallen on hard times and gone crazy. “Oi, love,
how much for unprotected anal?” Ross shouts after her.

Across the bar I see Dean Wengrow, recently moved from London
Records to Island. He waves and then mimes bending over and
slapping his arse while giving me the thumbs up and pissing
himself.

Last week, after I put the release date back four times in the
demented hope that something,
anything
, positive might
happen around the record, “Why Don’t You Slap Me on the Ass?” was
finally released. It sold 1112 copies and charted at N°68 for a
week before disappearing forever. We spent about a hundred quid for
every copy, of the record we sold. We might as well have made the
sleeves out of jewel-encrusted platinum.

Finished. Game over. See you later, Sooty.

I mime wanking an imaginary cock in Wengrow’s direction.

We get absolutely fucking
muttered
at the bar and then
someone’s saying that the Lazies are about to go onstage in the new
bands tent.

“Hang on,” Trellick says as we finish up our drinks.

We huddle in a corner of the muggy, crowded bar. Darren—who has
been deputised to carry the bulk of the drugs—produces a bag of Es
and we all bosh one, washing them down with a swirl of flat, sour
lager. Ross produces a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, we buy a load of
Cokes, tip the last of our lager out of the paper cups and
improvise pints of Rockschool. We lean in for another quick
card-edge and we’re ready to go.

Walking from the backstage area at Glastonbury into the main
arena is like stepping from a drug-addled village fete into the
Holocaust. Or from a field hospital onto the battlefield itself.
The mud, the devastation, is incredible. It’s only Friday afternoon
but already, everywhere you look, you see the casualties: tripping,
wall-eyed Scousers who haven’t slept in three days; Jocks who’ve
been living on speed and lager and who have, somehow, even with the
downpour,
still
managed to get sunburned; and crying teenage
girls. Unconscious bodies (corpses?) lie broken in the mud and
hooded Kaffirs stand by the walkways, muttering their “
speed?
‘ash? aceed? coke?
” mantra out of the sides of their mouths.
You see forty-five-year-old blokes with their faces painted;
accountants and estate agents off their nuts on mushrooms, having
their one big weekend of the year.

Clean and shining, bright with coke and bourbon, it all looks
very funny to us. “Hello, tolers!” we chirp as we pass by.
“
Arbeit macht frei
!” we say brightly to their red, confused
faces.

The Lazies are on early, it’s only four o’clock in the
afternoon, but there’s an incredible surge into the tent. It takes
us forever to crawl around the side and then push our way in at the
front. Steam is rising in great clouds off the crowded bodies at
the crash barrier. I count no less than fifteen other
A
&
R people around us as the band walk onstage.
No Parker-Hall in sight. Got to be good news. (Or is it? What if
he’s changed his mind? Maybe the Lazies are actually shit. How can
you tell?)

Marcy runs out last. She is wearing a black catsuit as tight as
a surgical glove and now, elevated by the stage, italicised by the
lights, she looks about twelve feet tall.

“Sen-say-shunal,” says Trellick. People start yelling and
screaming.

“What’s she like?” Ross asks me.

Are you hitting on me?
“Bang up for it,” I reply
automatically.

Marcy grabs the mike from the stand, “Hey, Glaston-bury!” she
yells over a deafening squawk of guitar, two ribcage-moving thumps
on the bass drum, “are you motherfuckers ready to fucking
rock!”

“NO!” shouts Ross.

“FUCK OFF, YOU SHERMAN CUNTS!” some wag shouts and then the
drumsticks click together fast—one, two, three, four times, the
wooden slap echoing through the huge walls of speakers in front of
us—and they pile into the first song. The place goes
berserk
.

Two songs in and people are being pulled out of the crowd
unconscious. People are stage-diving. For a band just two singles
old, it’s an incredible reaction.

Ross: “They are going to be fucking massive.”

Trellick: “We have to get this deal. We should up the
offer.”

Me: “I’m all over it.”

♦

Later in the evening I find I can’t remember much about their
set because I was so traumatised by what happened at the end of
it.

What happened was this: the last song was grinding and juddering
to a climax, the E was kicking in so I was actually, incredibly,
just enjoying the music. I had my eyes closed, swaying, when
Trellick tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to something. I
followed his finger woozily, looking along it like a gun barrel
towards the stage where the band were flouncing off, waving and
blowing kisses to the baying, ecstatic crowd. I watched as Marcy
skipped offstage and jumped delightedly towards someone standing at
the side of the stage, someone with a stage-laminate dangling
around their neck, the only pass greater than ours. With
gut-pummelling agony I recognised the shaved head and grinning
features of Parker-Hall, as Marcy embraced him.

♦

Outside the tent the rain has stopped again and a weak purplish
sun is setting over the fields. Time to spend the summer’s evening
experiencing all that the biggest, most diverse music festival in
the world has to offer. We stomp sulkily backstage to someone’s
Winnebago where we pull the blinds and spend the next five hours
angrily drinking brandy and snorting cocaine.

It’s all broken, out-of-focus snapshots from there. We’re in the
backstage bar; we’re walking across the site, through lakes of mud
and along rattling metal paths; we’re buying mushrooms (mushrooms?)
and pints of cider (cider?); and we’re walking, walking, walking
and then I’m tripping my nut off in the middle of a huge crowd
are you hitting on me
and the rain is falling lightly on us
as we strain to see something in the distance, something far away
in the dark, glowing red and blue and gold and green and there’s
music and
fucking Parker-Hall
it’s getting louder and
there are people singing something I can’t make out and hugging
each other all around us and
120 grand unrecouped
this music is building and building and then suddenly it all pulls
into focus
crossover
and brilliant white light washes
over the crowd and you can see the raindrops—billions of
them—suspended in the light above us and I realise we’re watching
Radiohead and he’s singing “
Rain down
…” everyone’s singing
“
Rain down…
” and I don’t like Radiohead because I don’t know
what they
marketing spend
want but it’s really
beautiful and Darren turns to me and I think he’s crying and maybe
you are not alone in the universe
sound of impact
and
for a moment there I lose myself.

But then we’re off again. We’re dancing in some packed, steaming
rave-tent and I’m kissing some rave-boiler, then I’m pulling her
zipper down, freeing her breasts and trying to suck them right
there on the heaving dance floor and there’s a slap and some
rave-guy wading in and then we’re heading somewhere else and I’m
high on a Ferris wheel with Ross, snorting poppers and roaring with
laughter as the cold black air swirls around and around us, and
there’s thousands of orange fires and coloured lights stretching
off into the night, and then there’s an argument with the owner of
an ethnic foods stall, who goes lunatic after I career into his
falafel wagon or tofu cart, smashing it to pieces and simply
thrusting a bunch of fifties into his hands in lieu of an apology,
and all the time I’m thinking
fucking Parker-Hall, fucking
Parker-Hall, fucking Parker-Hall
.

Now the dawn is coining up and a bunch of us are stretched out
up in the Green Field. For some reason I can’t remember we’re all
wearing hats—huge felt jester caps in grape, canary yellow and red.
How did we get them?

I’m lying flat on my back and listening to a three-way
conversation between Darren, Ross and Leamington that goes
something like this:

“How long do you reckon it takes to clean this up?”

“Wimbledon?”

“The hats?”

“No, I mean…”

“On the centre court?”

“Hats?”

“Cheese?”

“I want to know what’s happening at Wimbledon…”

I don’t know who’s saving what and it doesn’t really seem to
matter much.

“Oh God…” I moan quietly and I sit up and survey the field in
the chill dawn mist. It’s an almost cliched post-apocalyptic
landscape. Doomed, lonely figures wrapped in tattered blankets
stumble through the cold mud. Bodies are littered all over the
place. The smoke from all the thousands of fires has created a
battlefield pall over the place. It’s like someone dropped the
bomb.

“Is this the Green Field?” someone says.

“Who gives a fuck?” says Trellick, pulling his Nokia out, the
screen already glowing a beautiful civilised green, like it’s the
only piece of technology to have survived the epicentre. In the
context of where we are Trellick’s mobile looks like the black
obelisk from
2001
, gleaming in the desert among the
apes.