As thousands of exhausted, drunk, and slightly whiffy people slowly walked away from the finale of the weekend, to the exit gates, and past the After Shock tent’s afterparty, where the Kaiser Chief’s song was keeping people dancing, the chorus was taken up. Mindful of the violence that had marred a previous Carling Leeds festival, I hoped that this was not to prove prescient.
As Grumpy and I sat at our tent, swigging some whisky and discussing highlights of the weekend, I was also deciding what to write on my blog. A definitive list of what you need at a festival. A guide to festival etiquette. A small gripe at the fact that teenaged boys used the fence alongside our tents as a toilet, with the inevitable splashback causing Grumpy and myself some consternation.
Back in London now, I read today in the press that festival organisers have mentioned ’some violence’ at the festival, with a small number of arrests. This is an account of what I observed on Sunday night, from our hilltop tent with a view of three of the camp sites.
There was less noise than on the previous three nights. Fewer parties, no one starting a verbal Mexican wave of the word ‘bollocks’ through the many campsites, no gangs of youth stumbling over guy ropes ordering people out of their tents on a random whim. Grumpy, not surprisingly, enjoyed Pixies the most, and professed a desire to marry Kim Deal. I was most surprised by The Foo Fighters – I had expected them to be good, but I had not expected to be jumping up and down to their music for an hour and a half at the end of a long weekend during which discomfort due to my recent back problems had dominated. Even the two thrown pints of beer which managed to find me as their target during the Monkey Wrench encore didn’t knock the stoicism with which I had greeted the rest of the weekends’ missiles – a full can of beer on the head during The Killers, a trainer on my shoulder during Pixies, and various liquid showers, although these final two did give me a few seconds of anger and upset and caused me to turn round to glare ferociously at the very drunk man behind me, whose response was ‘I don’t think I did that, but I am sorry if I did’.
Back to Grumpy and I on the hill. While we were passing the bottle back and forth, a loud bang made us start, and I saw a column of flame lick up into the sky. This was followed by a loud cheer which was echoed around the sites. Within minutes, there were at least twenty fires within our vista, each of them occasionally flaring up as people evidently threw deodorants, lighters, or, in the case of the larger bangs and higher flames, gas canisters on them. Directly in front of us, in a line of trees which stretched back on the opposite hill, a fire was kept going for the duration. To the right, in the ‘red’ campsite, a tree was set alight.
Right in front of us was a line of tents which housed a group of teenagers, mainly boys. They had caused much world-weary exclamations from Grumpy and I all weekend by their insistence on pissing on the fence in front of which we had pitched our two tents. One of them had done so just a couple of metres away from us on the Saturday as we ate lunch. On the Friday night, more worryingly, I had emerged in the middle of the night to walk the half a mile or so to the nearest toilet, to find someone lurking. He moved on to the next tent when he saw me, and proceeded to crouch down.
I was concerned that these youths would see the shenanigans opposite and decide to emulate it, and sure enough, within half an hour, they carried a suitcase from their encampment 20 metres down the hill to where someone had a fire going, and put it on. The suitcase had been a centrepiece of their rubbish all weekend – mainly discarded cans, but also the odd bit of rotting meat, unread newspapers and the like. The suitcase burnt for a short while before a loud explosion and corresponding burst of flame confirmed my suspicion that they had concealed within it some alcohol or deodorant. One of those standing round the fire had a hoodie on, which caught alight. The fire was quickly doused, and I was confident that they would not continue messing around after their scare.
The two of us decided to go to bed, and had a couple of hours of sleep – I was remarkably able to sleep through the bangs, until an explosion ten times louder than anything I had heard so far woke me. As I lay there, I became aware that there was a chanting, shouting crowd not far away. I left the tent to see what was happening, and there, some 150 metres from our tent at the bottom of the hill, saw a mob moving backwards and forwards, nearby catering vans on fire, lampposts pulled down.
I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night – falling in and out of a fitful sleep. As I became aware of it becoming light, the noise was still continuing. I got up at 7am to go to the toilet, and spoke to a security guard on the way. He confirmed that the crowd has pulled a lamp post down and used it as a battering ram to gain entry to the Carling beer tent, and a cider tent just next to it. The cider tent was being manned by three girls who were trapped in there until a team of security guards managed to get them out. The mob had stolen beer and cider. Apparently most of them were young teenagers, boys and girls. 90 had been arrested, although it had taken all night to quieten down due to the potential danger of the fires. On the nearby remains of the main fire I saw metal cider barrels – the explosion of one of which had undoubtedly caused the loudest explosion the night before.
I walked over the where the cider tent had been. The woman who had served me the previous afternoon, and had kindly recommended I try the dry cider before buying a pint, was standing, a steady flow of tears running down her face. I said that I was sorry about what had happened, that I had heard they had been attacked. She looked at me and pointed: ‘that’s what is left of us’, she said, indicating three sides of what used to be the back of her tent. It was now three poles, bent out of shape, with a piece of white canvas the size of a flag flapping from one of the sides. She turned to her colleagues and explained that she had been up the hill where security were searching people believed to have been involved, and that a young group of them had been complaining, asking “what about our rights?”. Security had apparently responded that they hadn’t had any concern for the rights of the vendors the night before. At this, she became distraught, and I left the three women to comfort each other. Nearby a van had its windows shattered. Everywhere were signs of destruction.
As I made it back up the hill to start packing one of our tents away, leaving Grumpy sleeping, the youths in front of me were getting ready to leave. As I pulled out my tent poles, folded away my ground sheets, pulled up my tent pegs, they picked up a few beers, took a last nonchalant piss against the fence right next to me, and left – their five tents intact and standing, clearly not worth the effort of packing them up again.
Half an hour later, as I had packed everything but the tent in which and the airbed on which Grumpy was still sleeping, there was a loud retort of something hitting the fence behind us. The fence was about twelve foot tall and made of sheet metal. I looked around the tent, to see a group of slightly older lads, maybe in their early twenties, playing out their version of packing up. This involved taking bits of camping equipment and assorted miscellanea and throwing it at or over the fence. So went a handful of tent pegs, a camping pot, someone’s trainer, and in what was evidently some sort of finale, a cd player, which on showing a remarkable tenacity in its unbreaking nature, was hurled again and again until its entrails were finally exposed and mangled. Nearby one of the two girls in this group stood, eating cold spaghetti hoops out of a can, and laughing, as they pulled the canvas of one of the tents to pieces and threw it so it lay draped over the fence.
The last person we talked to was an avid festival goer of around my age, who came to pack up one of the tents left in front of us, abandoned with such contempt for possessions and the environment. He had had his tent stolen this year at T in the Park, (while he was sitting outside it: he was, apparently, battered at the time) and was delighted to be able to loot such a good tent, and conscience-free into the bargain. Grumpy found a new pair of Wellingtons which we appropriated, I trawled the debris to find a tent pole the same length as one of mine which had broken.
We left fairly shortly after that – wondering across the fields which were strewn with rubbish and with tents either abandoned or mauled or burnt, and pocked with the residual charcoal of numerous fires. I couldn’t help wondering just what these children thought they were railing against. As I had watched on Sunday night the clashes with the riot police, I thought of the people in Zimbabwe who clash with police defending their rights and their lives, and wondered how well these disaffected youth would cope with the reality of a situation like that. I thought of the waste of property destroyed – of the parents who had paid (a substantial amount of money) for their children to go to the festival, only to have it treated with such contempt. Of the fact that doubtless the fields will be cleared up by bulldozer, and the debris shunted off to a landfill to spend hundreds of years decaying.
Before Sunday night I was all set to write a light hearted piece detailing how a perfect festival kit included not just wet wipes for every part of the anatomy and Wellington boots, but a trolley to wheel your possessions from car park to campsite, and, if possible, a butler to do the wheeling and some sort of self erecting tent and mobile toilet. I was going to bemoan tall people who mosh with their elbows sticking out thus catching shorter people on the head on their way down, and people who try and get up front to see their favourite band, at the beginning of the preceding act, and then stand around indifferently while people ten years older try and dance to Queens of the Stone Age in a sea of ennui. But my niggles are gone now, leaving this curmudgeon in full rant mode.
The press, as I mentioned, seem to be playing this down. Mean Fiddler have obviously PR’ed it very quickly – they would undoubtedly lose their license if a repeat of the riots of two years ago were found out to have happened. But so they should. If it continues, the festival will have, I fear, a tradition of mindless violence, and every act of selfish indifference that I witnessed this weekend, from having a dump outside someone else’s tent, through throwing a can of beer into a crowd of thousands, to deliberately destroying property and inflicting violence on people, is proof of that.