Because it's only a month before ticket sale day for Glasto 2016 and I'm halfway or so through writing my new Glasto book, I thought it might be worthwhile posting a bit of it on here, just in advance. This excerpt is unedited and a touch raw and maybe it won't even reach the final cut. But for now, here's the beginning of Chapter 4...
The Glasto line-up had just been announced...
Chapter
4
I switched my phone off that
morning in work.
It would have been too tempting to keep peeking at it, although
I was distracted so much that I did go on the earliest lunch possible.
As I
headed out down the lift and down the 13 floors to the outside world, I
wondered what exactly was I doing getting so excited about which bands were playing Glasto?
Why did it matter if some relatively obscure band from Salford were
playing?
A band from 1977 with a chequered history to say the least?
A band
that I loved and a band that I’d been into longer than I’d been married, had
kids, had a mortgage, longer than I’d been working for.
A band I’d been into for
nearly forty years.
A band that is a bit of a cult and undoubtedly an influence
to many other artists, but a band that’s far from being a household name. (In
our house they are of course, but that’s only because I’ve been going on and on
about them for the past quarter of a century.)
I’d bet that of all the people
I’ve ever worked with, only a handful of them have ever even heard of The Fall.
Even amongst my closest, non-work friends, who are into music as much as I am,
there’s not much, if any love for The Fall.
Bafflement, if anything.
I’ve even
given up trying to convince my best mate Andy, of the sheer majesty that The
Fall are in full flow. Thirty-odd years of pressing Fall mix tapes - and
latterly mix CDs - into his hands and exhorting him to “listen to this, it’s
really great” and failing, have made me give it up as a lost cause.
And I’m
running out of formats as well.
What made The Fall playing Glasto so
significant, so important that I was acting like some spotty, teenage fanboy? I
was 53 for goodness’ sake. I was now a grandfather. I should have been past all
that and have moved onto more age-appropriate activities, like gardening or
crown green bowling. I don’t even have a shed.
But I do have stacks and stacks
of Fall CDs. Studio albums.
Compilations. DVDs. Books.
And fuck loads of live CDRs.
Probably not even got time to listen to them all. However, it’s better than any old shed.
And fuck loads of live CDRs.
Probably not even got time to listen to them all. However, it’s better than any old shed.
I have to accept it.
The Fall
will always be there.
As I got out of the lift and into
the street, I took my phone out of my pocket. I’d be able to get a signal. I
switched it on and looked at the line-up again. Maybe I’d imagined that The
Fall were playing. Maybe it was all, in a soap opera sort of a way, “just a
dream.”
But no! They were there on that Glasto line up page.
The Fall.
At the same time I was looking at
the line up, my phone started buzzing and buzzing. Twitter notifications. Buzz
buzz buzz. It was like holding a fistful of bees.
My previous three books about Glasto are all available here-
either as Kindle e books or in paperback:
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