It’s all about….Leeds

My (minor) contribution to the Leeds programme

So, for a Reading-raised man, by going to Leeds Festival I’m breaking some kind of unspoken commandment. It’s the one weekend of the year when Reading becomes more than the armpit of Berkshire, that ugly little concrete hole for people to thick to cut it in London, and too lazy to move all the way to Bristol.

But Music Towers has a history with Leeds Festival. Last year, Beef Warehouse (of which one half is MT bossman, David Harrison) were given their own stage – yes, a stage, not a booth, or a tent, or a spot inside one of the other tents once the night-time entertainment starts, but their own stage. And I got to write their blurb (uncredited, natch) for the official programme. Pow.

And this year it was even bigger. And on the Thursday night, the HypnoCops (aka myself and Ben Vidavski) had two-hour slot of rock’n’roll destruction that had the punters packed in tighter than a Swiss Banker. Of course, compared to Beef Warehouse (and guest-DJ, Session) we were a pair of just-push-play amateurs – but how many other people can claim to have played to – literally – thousands of people when they can still count the number of proper DJ slots on the fingers of one hand?

It wasn’t all fun’n’frolics during the weekend though – during Queens of the Stone Age, some thundercunt threw something sharp and metal that smashed into the back my skull. As I staggered towards the medical tent, clutching my coat to my head in an attempt to stem the bleeding, with festival goe’ers recoiling in horror, my main thought was “damn, lost a sweet spot for Rage Against The Machine”, rather than “oh shit, I’m bleeding like a motherbitch, is my brain about to fall out?” A decade of festivals, and they’d finally got me into the medical tent. I’m getting old.

Then of course there was the Wanker Corps, away from mummy and daddy for the weekend and looking for trouble on the Final Night. When they started pushing down the wooden telegraph poles holding the power cables, our security panicked that if they brought them down it would surge and destroy Beef Warehouse’s stage. So in a moment of mainly booze-induced bravado, I tore up the hill and challenged twenty drunk idiots to a fight.

No, I’m not entirely sure why either. Especially when it later transpired that we were on a separate breaker and the pole-toppling couldn’t affect us anyway.

Confronted by a lone, bearded, roaring nutjob, the gang of vandal-teens weren’t sure what to do. They could quite easily have battered the living shit out of me – but they were part-time scum, the kind that wouldn’t dare cause a fuss without the anonymity of festival to hide behind, and they were scared to act like a psycho-mob. For five minutes I held them up, till one of them tried to punch my kidneys, only with the punching power of a small child. I started laughing at him and a well-meaning giant of a man pulled me away as he said he thought that might set them off.

I walked down the hill and my balls felt as big as Bolivia. When I got back to the stage, a couple of Hell’s Angels (they had the jackets and looked like they fucked dogs for fun, which was enough to convince me they were legit) were hanging around in case of trouble. I silently wished they would climb up the hill and have a few words with the lads up there.

What, you want a review of some bands too? Okay, first part is up on Music Towers for you.