Snowden: Bluetonic

---

Sleeping at a festival is a funny business. Apart from the loss of home comforts and getting used to sleeping on hard, lumpy ground, there is the strange sensation of sunrise. Not the sight of it, as you might imagine, but the sound, because at sunrise, everything changes. After the bands finish at the big festivals, the night rumbles, people stumble and the drinks keep flowing. Once you decide it’s time to leave the party and close the tent door for the night, all you can hear is a steady noise, thousands of mingling conversations all merging into one. It’s a noise that you eventually get used to, and it soon becomes a friendly lullaby that rocks you to sleep. It’s probably something I wouldn’t even have ever noticed if it wasn’t for the sunrise; for some unknown reason, this is the point when the rumble stops and silence falls. More than any other experience I have had, this is where the phrase ‘silence is deafening’ is most appropriate. I can’t remember a single night at a festival where I haven’t woken up with a strange feeling that everything is quiet, and in a way it feels like something is wrong. Before long though, there is always a late straggler that trips over a guy rope and makes as much noise is possible in apologising to the unknowns whose tent he has just pulled down, and a sense of normality returns. Napton, of course, was not the same as every other festival, and almost the opposite experience was true. Despite the big party on top of the hill that was most definitely not happening at the top of the hill, the camping field was almost in silence until, at sunrise, everything changed. The cocks crowed, then, in answer, the sheep baaed and the cows mooed, all fully in support of the approaching day. It was a good reminder that we were nothing but a few tents in a farmer’s field, as oppose to the mini-cities of the major league festival camps. No sooner had the animals begun, than they stopped, and peace was such that I turned over and went back to sleep.

When we finally did get up, we headed into Napton village to find out what was going down in the area before the bands picked up again, just before noon. We found exactly what you would expect in a country village on a busy Saturday morning; one or two people were gardening, the local vicar seemed to be preparing for the Napton Flower festival, and the only shop open was the village post office. It was quaint, quiet and wonderfully different from home. We found out The Crown, a pub right in the middle in a village, which had specifically opened to provide breakfast for the festival goers, and for the small fee of five pounds, we were treated to a locally reared fry up and a cup of tea, which was exactly the order of the day, especially as Lyndsey was suffering the ill effects of a long week at work and a lingering cold.

After breakfast, we headed back to the tent, and relaxed to watch the first few bands while we got the camp stove going and readied ourselves to pack up. Though Lyndsey was dubious of us plonking the tent on top of a windy hill, here is exactly where the idea came into fruition; the sun was out, the now gentle wind cooled the tent nicely and the sound travelled up to us just right. It took a while to get the kettle on as the wind took the stove out at every opportunity, but it was a small price to pay. Eventually we packed up our stuff and headed down to the main music area to see the rest of the afternoon’s bands. As with the previous night, they were mostly local, many of them covering old hits, some 70’s funk, some modern rock, some with guitars, others with bongos. The sun kept disappearing behind clouds, but the threat of rain never came true, and so, though it was chilly at times, it was never anything that a hot chocolate from one of the stalls couldn’t solve.

As afternoon became evening, the local bands cleared up and made way for the two better known bands. First up was The Total Stone Roses, the most popular Stone Roses tribute act in the country. Suddenly, where people had been lazing on the grass for most of the day with the odd person getting up for a dance by the stage, everybody now stood at the front, bouncing and jigging to ‘I Wanna be Adored’. The band themselves were excellent as a tribute band; technically they played the songs to perfection, the lead singer was a convincing Ian Brown but they were always tongue in cheek enough to make sure everyone knew they were a tribute band and that ego hadn’t crept in to start making them believe they were the real thing. By the end, the flimsy rails that acted as a crash barrier were flattened and a small crowd of people danced right up to the stage, while the smiling security guard from the entrance and the only other two security people that appeared to have been at the whole event desperately tried to herd them back out.

After the Stone Roses were done, we headed right to the barrier, which wasn’t in the best shape. The event’s organiser and the smiling security guard had managed to get it back upright, but spent the rest of the night holding it up. Any push from the crowd and they would have been as flat as pancakes, but the appearance of having a barrier was there at least. The Bluetones were, as expected, the weekend’s highlight. They played all of the big hits from their 90’s heyday, which kept the hecklers at bay (there were cries of ‘play some old stuff’ after they had finished playing ‘Never Going Nowhere’, probably the best and most underrated bittersweet pop song of the last decade, ungrateful sods), and also the best of their lesser known, but by no means weaker output from the last 10 years. It is sad to see a band fall into the scrapheap of commercial realism when the music is consistently good but doesn’t fit into the chart fashions of the day, but with the chirpiness both of the tunes and of Mark Morris’ banter, they ensured that, when they were gone, you would remember them for the good times. All good things come to an end, and life is so much better if you happily comb over what was, rather than think bitterly about what might have been.

With the music done, we headed straight home. We had a reasonably early start in the morning followed by a two hour drive into Wales, so it made more sense to go home rather than camp uncomfortably and add the extra hour and a half to the drive the next day. We may have missed a big party at the top of the hill doing this, we shall never know, but we filled up the journey home playing Bluetones hits that weren’t on the night’s setlist, which seemed almost as good. Having met Lyndsey in the graveyard outside of her workplace, she dropped me back here to collect my car, and I rather hoped that the church, being in the middle of nowhere, would be spookily dark and mist filled, but it was disappointingly well lit, so the odds of meeting up with a ghost were greatly diminished. By 2.30, I was back home and in bed, which gave me a good four hours sleep before I needed to be up and on my way to the highest mountain in Wales.

---