Nothing to do with your Vorsprung durch Technik

As I mentioned before, I’m not really in the festival-going demographic any more, so when Glastonbury rolled around this weekend I settled down in my comfy chair to watch it on the TV.

It’s getting on for a decade since I last attended the festival in person, and, fun though it was, I can’t say that I miss the authentic outdoor experience all that much. It’s not that I have any bad memories of Glasto – every time I went the weather was pretty good, and I was never ripped off or anything – but latterly it began to feel like a lot of hard work, trudging around huge fields packed with alarmingly young-looking people, all for the sake of a distant glimpse of an indifferent performance by a band I was only half-interested in to start with.

I can count the festival performances that I remember with real excitement on one hand – Nirvana at Reading, the Pixies at T in the Park and the Flaming Lips at Glastonbury. There were plenty of other festivals that were fun at the time, but stick in my mind for reasons other than the music, like the people I was with, or the drugs we were taking.

So having my friends round to get stoned in the comfort of my own house is how I get the festival vibe these days. The BBC coverage of Glasto was pretty good, and when it got dull we could always put on a record. Watching Blur play their greatest hits on Sunday night was pleasantly nostalgic, a trip back to the great summer of ’95. I was never hugely into Britpop, to be honest. I did buy all the albums – Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Suede and the rest, even Sleeper, god help me – but I was more of an American alt-rock fan at the time. (I was deeply in love with Tanya Donelly for a greater part of the ’90’s). Parklife has aged pretty well though, and we all got up to dance around when Phil Daniels came on to do the title track. Know what I mean?