Midday Saturday on the Oxegen site, and the place has the look of a hi-tech carnival gone ramshackle with the damp. At fifteen minutes past the twelfth hour, the grey canopy overhead loosens its bowels and dumps the first of many, many showers onto the heads of the gathering and the gathered.
You can divide humanity into those who dress for the weather and those who don’t. There are people here in Meteor rain-slickers that say ‘We’ve Got You Covered’ and girls with bleached hair dressed for Tamangos in mini skirts and knee high white boots, picking their way through the puddles like delicate storks. There’s a six-foot jarhead lugging a giant inflatable replica of a pint of Guinness up the hill like a medieval penitent. A guy walks by in a flowing Halloween orange shirt wearing a fake Afro the size of a beach ball. There’s another guy in a multicoloured harlequin hat. Overhead, dark clouds frame the big wheel and rinky-dink music blares out from speakers mounted near the Superbowl dodgems and the Mega Drop Tower. The landscape is bordered with pizzerias and waffle stands and Nescafé coffee booths. Makeshift tattoo parlours advertise temporary inkings, body crystals, jewellery and tooth gems.
The rain stops.
And then the rain starts up again.
Now it’s 12.55pm and the DJ in the hospitality tent is playing the Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’, the sounds perfectly mirroring the weather. Tacked on the wall of the pressroom are printouts that proclaim the total weekend attendance figure is 60,000, including 47,500 campers. The view of the camping area from the steps of the pavilion resembles a watercolour portrait of a sodden canvas city.
Back out front, the hiperati have gathered to see a quirky, jerky set by The Chalets on the second stage. A couple of hundred yards across the tarmac, in the great cavernous barn of the dance arena, there’s maybe a couple of thousand people embroiled in various states of abandon, some sporadically twitching, some flailing about as though hyped up on cheap ecstasy, pin-holed eyes focused on the mandalas and splatter-patterns projected onto the big screens. They look like members of some crypto-Egyptologist cult awaiting the return of the mothership. Knots of 20-somethings drink from plastic tumblers and smoke cigarettes. The ban, it appears, has been temporarily suspended – no one gets cautioned for lighting up. The music hammers on, a manic tattoo over which floats Jim Morrison’s disembodied voice eulogising a bird of prey.
By now, it’s 2.20.
The rain stops.
And then the rain starts again.
The rain sends hundreds of people into the New Band Stage and the Green Room where Cathy Davey’s getting her festival blooding and Maria Doyle Kennedy rips the gizzard out of a new song called ‘Stuck’. Out in front of the main stage, as Scissor Sisters (pictured above, Photo: Roger Woolman) beseech the crowd to take their mama out all night, two young guys dressed in white runners, Wrangler shirts and blue jeans hold up an identically-clad third, the latter being possibly the most polluted human being on the face of the earth right now, his flushed and rubberised face so paralysed by the booze it resembles Smedley the muppet baby from the Andy Williams Show. His legs have completely given out, and his friends soon abandon all hope of ever getting him all the way up the hill, so they signal to a couple of crowd security stewards for help. The stewards call in a paramedic. The drunken guy is now lying flat out on the wet ground. As all this happens, Scissor Sisters are doing ‘Comfortably Numb’. By the time the song is over, the medic, through some miraculous Lazarus process, has managed to get the guy sitting up and talking, and within another minute he’s on his feet, tottering like a newborn giraffe.
And the rain stops.
And then the rain starts up again.
Now it’s 5.20 in the hotpress Signing tent, which is completely thronged on account of the presence of Franz Ferdinand, fresh from their main stage set. Hundreds of punters line up to get items signed: t-shirts, balloons, the issue of hotpress with the quartet on the cover. In the corner is a young man dressed as a giant white sperm. Somebody asks if he dresses this way for fun. The sperm shakes his head, says he works for Durex. The long spermy tail growing out of his head like willowy palsied limb keeps drooping over the heads of the kids at the signing table. One of the band members grabs it, stretches it and lets it snap back like a rubber band.
The rain stops.
And then it starts up again.
By now it’s seven in the evening, and PJ Harvey (pictured below, Photo: Roger Woolman) is doing her Dolly Dietrich bit for the rain-huddled masses, strutting around in killer purple heels and a banana-yellow thigh-length dress bearing the imprint of her own image from round about the time of the Peel Sessions album. Back in the press room, those who aren’t camping or billeted in Naas hustle for lifts back to the city, or root through their pockets and see if they can manage the Dublin Bus price and still get a couple of pints in.
The rain stops.
And then it starts up again.
Now it’s midnight, and the main field looks like a vast nocturnal lunar landscape crowded with stragglers all tired but still transfixed by what’s going on onstage. And what’s going on onstage is there’s a bunch of arachnid-legged musicians dressed in black, black, black, looming through the fake smoke and the blue and purple light show, and at their focal point is a cherubic middle aged man with a rat’s nest of black hair, white face, smeared lips and a plaintive bleat of a voice.
In other words, The Cure are doing ‘Lullaby’.
And the rain stops falling.
And it doesn’t start again.
And so endeth the first day.