Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Five fantastic festivals that made us what we are
Happier times at Electric Picnic.
We took our freedoms for granted: The freedom to queue for food in a field. The freedom to complain about the traffic, the toilets or the beer. The freedom to constantly miss the only bands worth seeing. The freedom to misspell commonplace words like 'witness'.
These freedoms were hard-won. I should know, I was a freedom fighter.
I remember the struggle well. Lads beating a steady rhythm on the bonnet of my car and pointing at me excitedly as they said variations on “Howya Tom!” or “Look! It’s Tom Dunne.” Not that unusual an occurrence when you are one of the headline acts and you are driving through the festival town on the actual day of the festival.
I was not unhappy with this situation. I had a girl with me and I was eager to impress upon her the ‘in a band’ scenario. The chanting was literally music to my ears. Sadly, she was possibly the wrong girl for all this. Dublin 4 born and bred she might have been more at home in a Ross O’Carroll Kelly article.
It’s likely she had only ever seen people like these if the TV had been switched accidentally to Up For The Match while her da was looking for the rugby. Getting her into a Renault 5 had been an achievement. She’d only come to Thurles because she thought it was near Terenure.
It was boiling hot so I opened the car door. Outside the carnage, or what we’d now call ‘day drinking’, was in full swing. In the absence of ‘designated seating’, people sat on cars, phone boxes, kerbs and each other. In the absence of Insta, people had to just eat their food and wear the face off each other.
My friend was getting angsty. Beside us, a lad had laid out four slices of fresh bread on the path and was attempting to butter them. The butter was rock hard and the bread kept breaking. He was flummoxed.
My friend asked, “Is he all roight in the head?” “Yes,” I thought, “more than you will ever know.” When the traffic cleared we parked backstage. No tickets, no passes, no plan. These are my abiding memories of Feile ’90. They are enshrined in my heart forever. It remains my favourite ever festival. Line up, facilities and location are one thing, your friends and the craic, are other things entirely.
And so, with all due respect to the historians, these are, in my opinion, the festivals that made us who we are today.
I wasn’t at this but that was almost as the point. You saw the reviews, you heard the Christy song and you knew, deep down in your core, you’d missed something major! It was FOMO before FOMO was invented.
The key here was ‘camping'. That idea made your head spin: Music, girls, tents and no parents. It was dizzying.
The real reason our forebears went into the GPO.
For some a footnote in history, for others the Neanderthal man of festivals, the crucial missing link. An experimentation in venues, line ups and, crucially, the misspelling of simple words to suggest corporate sponsorship.
The daddy of them all. The multiple stages, the entertainments, the camping. Oxegen, continued the misspelling tradition and was the festival at which festivals in Ireland – and the new independent radio sector- grew up. It brought more bands to Ireland in one weekend that had graced our shores during some of the lean years of the 1970s.
The iPad of festivals, the one we didn’t know we wanted until we saw it. It didn’t do anything new, it just did it all better: less crowds, better foods, genius curation. Now we look back and think how did we live without it?
I’ve necessarily missed out a few. Who remembers Liss Ard, the tiny festival that first developed the idea of ‘music in a stunning location’, now copied the country over? And All Together Now, a rekindling of what first made the Picnic so great.
At this point there is almost a festival type for everyone. Indie bands, surfers, literature fans, oldies, metalheads and all points in between.
But when they return, remember it wasn’t always like this. Some of us had to get in the Renault 5 and make it happen, stopping off only at Foxrock for ice, a picnic basket and nice glasses.
