It’s coming to that season of the year when social media posts from me will be rarer than hen’s teeth (a blessing, some might say). My life as a stage manager at music festivals kicks into gear and I spend the next few months travelling from a field in one part of the country to another field somewhere else. I bask in the quiet before the punters arrive, herd musicians and touring crew when they turn up, revel in the music (mostly), and thoroughly enjoy playing my part in making everything run as smoothly as possible.
Back in the day, this job felt a little bit outlaw, a little bit carney, a little bit wild. Those days are largely gone – the large organisations which run most festivals are money-making corporations first and foremost, and H&S has (rightly) stamped its mark on live events in a way it didn’t thirty-odd years ago – but there’s still something about it which stirs the soul, which feels fundamentally different from a ‘normal’ job.
For me, the festival scene was always a refuge from the straight world. I never fully trusted that world, and I still don’t. I’d say I’ve good reason, too. At some point each summer, there’ll be a moment when the light’s just right, and the view is spectacular, and I quietly reflect on the brutalities which – over the course of my lifetime – the British state has meted out to people it deems enemies. The Battle of the Beanfield, the policing of the miners’ strike, Northern Ireland; how each of these was framed by the media at the time. And how it continues to this day. I look at how the atrocities in Palestine are reported, how our government is complicit in them, and how – in the serial correspondence between myself and my MP – a recognition of the humanity of the people of Gaza and the urgency of saving them is entirely absent.
And now, since I first posted this piece on Substack, I’m watching our government and our media brazenly start the process of manufacturing consent for a war with Iran which is neither necessary nor justified.
Jesus, I think to myself, it’s overwhelming.
And sometimes it is. Sometimes it feels as though we can do next to nothing about the grievous wrongs which are done in our name. Sometimes we need time off, or we’d go mad with the horror of it all. And then, sometimes, we come back and we do what we can. We support each other, we build bridges, we share our hopes, we put one foot in front of another and dare to dream a better world. Because the alternative is simply unthinkable.
That’s my take on it, anyway. But for the next few months I’ll be on a stage in a field somewhere, and posts from me will be rarer than hen’s teeth. Some might say that’s a blessing.
See you down the front.