JUST ANOTHER SUNDAY

Getting healed in a field
With a hundred thousand people;
Phones in the air
And their backs to the speakers.
This generation
Loves its photo taken

And we’re standing at the back
Just like Stadtler and Waldorf
Secretly hoping
The whole thing is called off,
“This ain’t half bad,”
“No. It’s all awful.”

We must have prayed for rain
James says he’s never coming here again.

It’s just another Sunday
With Martin and James.

This is what we came here for.

Martin was the man of the match,
He covered every blade of the grass.
By the end of the weekend
He’d got pleurisy
And swapped his credit card
For a fiver and some e’s.

He must have played for rain.
James said he’s never coming here again.

It’s just another Sunday
With Martin and James
It’s just another Sunday
On an industrial estate

This is what we were training for.

It’s just another Sunday
With Martin and James.
It’s just another Sunday
With Thunder and Suede.

This is what we came here for
This is why we trained.

——————————————-

Sometimes flicking back through my photographs it looks like we’ve lived the last twenty years of our lives at a rock festival. And I guess to an extent we have. Every year I take the same pictures, in the same places of the same people having the same great times. The names might change now and then - new wives and girlfriends drop in and out of the frames, each festival’s best new mate gurns brightly for a bit then disappears and the bands in the background get worse and worse by the year - but the idea remains resolutely the same. There we all are, year-in-year-out, a little bit older, a little bit wider, sunburnt or soaking, having the time of our lives. Over and over and over again.

The first festival I went to with Nick Winter Olympics was in (whisper it) 1988. Monsters of Rock at Castle Donnington. Iron Maiden headlined above Kiss, David Lee Roth, Megadeth, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Helloween. We didn’t eat or drink anything all day, got pelted with bottles of piss and, tragically, two rock fans died. Without wishing to sound too flippant, It was still the greatest time we’d ever had.

Our second big outdoor show was The Stone Roses at Spike Island. There was an advert on TV recently for some dreadful Father’s day themed lad-rock cd that asked, “Does your Dad know about Spike Island?” (The same terrible advert promptly went on to ask, “Is your old man well into Weller? - Why not buy him Cigarettes and Alcohol this weekend.” (That would be a fairly reprehensible Father’s Day gift, no?)

My God, the advert made me feel a hundred years old. My Dad didn’t even know about Spike Island on the day it happened. After the whole deaths at Donnington thing it was decided that it might be a better idea for us to say that we were going to the park for a bit. Lie told and feeling pretty guilty, we drove up north and bought some Roses tickets off a football hooligan in a pub in Timperley. We didn’t eat or drink anything all day, the sound was shocking, we fell asleep in a service station on the way back and somebody rolled the car over in the car park. It was easily the best day that any of us had ever had. Again.

Additionally, it was something of a surprise (not least to old man Wagstaff) to find a centre page spread of us in the Sunday papers the next weekend, all tops off and weedy arms aloft beneath the headline ‘Summer of Love Acid Hell’ (or something).

Surprisingly, we were (just about) let out enough the next year to go to Reading 1990. It had the greatest bill I’ve ever seen: Pixies, Jane’s Addiction.. urm… The Cramps: Nick crashed his car into a field, James got arrested, we didn’t see a single band. It was (of course) easily the most amazing time we’d ever had…

You know, I hate to sound like James Murphy’s world-weary hipster from LCD’s ‘Losing my Edge’ (who am I kidding, I’d love to sound like that. Maybe then you’d buy our records). But the more I think about it, the more it seems that for most of the epoch-making rock performances in recent history, we were there.

Nirvana destroying their drum-kit and killing off heavy metal at half-past two in the afternoon at Reading 1991?  We were there. Pulp saving Glastonbury and drawing up plans for a bright new brilliant Britain in 1996? We were there. Radiohead making us forget about the floods and being better than all the other bands in 1997? We were there, we were there. (Actually if I’m being honest, I wasn’t exactly there. Instead, I was splonged off my gourd in the middle of the rave tent, desperately trying to stop telling my best straight edge friend that I was (a) utterly in love with her (b) ripped to the high tits on chemicals and Carling and (c) the gig pig, Giggle piggle, GIGGLE PIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE! Still, James saw Radiohead, though, and he said that they were good.

James said Jeff Buckley was good too. I’d not know, because he shamefully sent Nick and I out of his only UK festival appearance (Reading ninety four I think) for ‘not taking it seriously’. It’s a good thing he did too, because it was then that we met Martin - who was, at the time, colouring in a blank wristband that he’d got from somewhere in an attempt to trick security into letting him watch Cud (honestly, we weren’t only there for the good bits of rock history). Despite having a nervous look in his eye (and an arm covered in luminous pen) Marty waltzed straight into the arena. We were impressed (not by the band, they were terrible) and would soon learn that such festival heroics were commonplace when you roll with Bowman.

And that’s pretty much what Just Another Sunday is all about. We’ve had the best of times, we’ve heard of the worst of bands, and we should count ourselves very lucky to be friends with such spectacularly cool people.