Oxegen Sunday

Several months back I heard a late night radio interview with The Sunday Independent’s Declan Lynch, who made the rather excellent point that rock events are one of the few remaining social gatherings where one can observe a bona fide feudal structure in operation. Having spent pretty much the entirety of my adolescence toughing it out with the punters out front, adulthood and a press pass (well, a humble, gold-coloured wristband at any rate) have afforded me the luxury of traversing the various spheres of contemporary Irish society.
Let’s start backstage with the beautiful people. On Saturday night, the A-List contingent (The Strokes, PJ Harvey et al) were keeping themselves to themselves, although such a low-key approach may well have played to their advantage, given Julian Casablancas and co.’s imperious set on the Main Stage.
The musical conscious of a generation, he and his skinny-hipped compadres are the guys soundtracking those moments when you’re tired and emotional, or pissed, happy and even more emotional, or simply undergoing one of those periods when life, as it is wont to do, has punched you square in the face. But I digress.
Where were we? Backstage. I’m thinking how best to describe the scenery and the atmosphere and the vibe, man, but I think Bret Easton Ellis (who was writing about a fashion show, but how and ever), perfectly encapsulated the heady mixture of badinage, booze and bullshit that permeates any such milieu with the following passage from Glamorama: “Backstage preshow is a blur of clothes racks and taped instruction sheets and PR handouts and flickering laptops with a lot of fierce airkissing and hundreds of cigarettes being lit and cute girls running around and basically nobody paying attention.”
Away from the glitterati and on the well-trodden track towards the dance arena to catch the Madchester Experience, it’s heartening to note that the ratio of vertical revellers in proportion to those recumbent on the ground is far greater than last night after The Strokes’ set, when one could scarcely negotiate a route away from the Main Stage without tripping over some worse for wear punter.
The set itself, though, is fantastic, and the crowd respond by partying like it’s 1989; grooving out to a superlative mix of hits from the era when The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays ruled the earth (or at least a significant part of greater Manchester). After the Experience depart, it’s a short trip outside for Michael Franti’s barnstorming performance on the Ticket stage.
Back in the day, Franti was the man who warned us that television was rapidly on its way to becoming an Orwellian Drug Of The Nation. Given that in these highly fraught times it’s all too easy to vegetate in front of what Sideshow Bob memorably described as “the chattering cyclops”, he may well have had a point. If it’s not gore and bush on late night TV3 it’s Gore and Bush (or worse still, John friggin’ Edwards) on late night Sky News. Had cameras been present during Franti’s incendiary take on ‘Rock The Nation’, an embryonic version of The Revolution would have been televised. And wasn’t that what these occasions were supposed to be for in the first place?
Then, it’s a blur. Slamming back a Bacardi in the dance tent, a bloke pesters me as to how I procured my wristband (I advise a career in the media; he assures me that he’s making more money in construction). Two incredibly pissed gentlemen I played Gaelic Football with in my younger years attempting - with endearing genuineness – to get me to “tog out” for a challenge match the following evening. I’m starting to feel a lot like Oedipa Mass in The Crying Of Lot 49: given the simple task of fulfilling her duties as “executrix” of her former lover’s estate, she eventually succumbs to drink, drugs and dementia. The rock festival experience in miniature, in other words.
Thank God, then, for the civilising influence of Ash, who tear through their repertoire of punk anthems and bittersweet ballads with such clarity and conviction that sanity is momentarily restored to proceedings. By now, however, the sky resembles a sink full of old washing up, and the combined rigours of drink, anxiety and over-work - not to mention the bitter disappointment over that horseshit for ice-cream, Darkness/Bowie switch - have turned my brain to such mush that I could probably secure a place on the GOP ticket myself. Oxegen 2004, to quote David Foster Wallace, has all the hallmarks of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
Still, at least the mighty Strokes did much to make some sense of out what it is to be dazed and confused in The Modern Age. And, in this foul year of our lord 2004, that’s no small achievement.

See The Message on page 9 for more Oxegen comment