From ‘You’re Doing It Wrong — My Life As A Failed International Rock Star (In The Best Band You’ve Never Heard)
“You’re playing T in the Park,” crackled the voice of our manager, Tam, his gruff, ridged tones barely breaking through on my ancient mobile phone. I physically had to extend the antenna on the little grey object to supply it with extra telephony power because it was essentially a small metal casing to house the game Snake.
“What?” I barked back, confounded and unsure of the world-changing news I’d just heard, but also because it truly was such a bad phone.
“T in the Park,” he confirmed, “You have to come home.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
When the phone had rung, it was a warm Saturday morning, and I was on holiday in the south of England during the few days I’d had off in 2007 as the bass player and singer of We Are The Physics, indie rock’s best band you’ve never heard of. T in the Park was undeniably the biggest music and arts festival in Scotland and it’d been a staple of our musical upbringing, whether we liked it or not. As a teenager, I’d spent multiple weekends at this temporary prison in the middle of a field that would play host to some of the best, and worst, bands of the moment, allowing them to play their daft songs in front of thousands of people who had paid hundreds of pounds to experience the genuine misery of being outdoors in Scotland. In fact, T in the Park was one of the first real ‘big gigs’ I ever attended, as a worryingly small 13-year-old in very blue Asda jeans, that came home caked in mud, beer, and other horrors indeterminable. It was a rite of passage.
While the UK still plays host to multiple big-name music festivals each year, there are essentially two types — multi-venue festivals, which take place in the city and incorporate tens to hundreds of acts across a couple of days, staggered over differing existing music venues; and then there are outdoor festivals, the biggies that occupy one adapted space, like Glastonbury. While outdoor festivals usually began as or had evolved into a showcase for live music, they eventually warped themselves into variety carnivals, for people with limited interest in the music that soundtracked them. People with the disposable income to spend on travelling to a piss-filled swamp just enough off the grid that they could exist in a debauched manner and their families would never find out, but not so far off the grid that they’d have to live solely off the nutrients of their own urine in a woodland cabin. Although, the latter does sound very much like the true Glastonbury experience.
In the mid to late 90s, and someway into the 00s, one festival in Scotland held the crown — T in the Park. Sponsored by Tennents Lager, the outdoor festival hosted several stages, some inside under the darkness of a tent, and some outside under the darkness of a Scottish sky, and would attract hundreds of thousands of revellers over the course of its annual weekend in July. It ran until 2016 when it finally closed its well-guarded doors, and morphed into a more city-centric festival called TRNSMT, a smaller and vowel-avoiding alternative that offered no on-site camping.
For a while though, T in the Park was an unmissable behemoth for live music, putting local and international acts side by side over a weekend, curated by trusted local promoters and bigger industry handshakes with booking agents. This ensured the big acts were genuinely big acts that you may not get a chance to see touring regular venues, and the upcoming bands playing the smaller stages were ones truly making waves on the live circuit. But, most importantly, the tickets used to be very cheap.
Being under 18 and hopelessly devoted to music being played in venues we couldn’t get into, there was no way for us to see some of those acts in the dingy, smoky holes they routinely frequented, so T in the Park was a conduit to that world. It was the only way to see those bands we’d read about in the NME, or seen briefly on The Chart Show, or never heard of at all, in one rainy cesspit.
The first time I went to T in the Park, it rewired my brain. I was already besotted with music, but live music at festivals is so different to live music in any other capacity. The acoustics of the open space allow the air around you to be filled with these unknown reverberating notes and sounds, the grass your feet are sinking into will be wobbling and wavy from a distant bass and there’s an impenetrable and ominous awe in the screeching churches of the stages, with lighting rigs and giant PA stacks looming over the audience like Jesus on the cross in a church. I would see bands and artists just emerge from the black curtains at the rear of the stage, and strut out through a smoky welcome to the eruption of cheers from an audience that had no start or end point — a festival is a unique sermon that feels like it exists only in that peculiar environment, not as contained or controlled as a gig inside a regular venue.
But, the older I got, the more I’d begun to feel extremely anxious around huge crowds, especially aggressively drunk ones, and the festival itself started to become increasingly populated by the same sort of people who’d try to beat me up on the bus to school. T in the Park felt less about music, and more about the relentless fun house of it all, punctuated by the big wheel way at the back of the site which stretched up into the sky and hoisted teens up the top to be sick over the side. Sometimes the queue for the ferris wheel would be longer than any of the tents, and I’d wonder why anyone would pay for a festival ticket and spend time on that metal monstrosity.
The last straw, however, was a particularly rainy Saturday in Balado that saw me accidentally lose the lens of my glasses while enthusiastically moshing to — get this — Stereophonics.
The bastard just popped right out of the frames while I was pogoing to their dulcet Welsh melodies and it flew through my flailing fingers into the pulsing, bleak mud bath my feet were already disappearing into. I didn’t have replacement glasses, with me or at home, so ended up having to spend a summer wearing prescription sunglasses. And it was a wet, dark summer in Glasgow, as usual.
“You know what they say about people who wear sunglasses indoors,” my brother said when I got up the next morning, “A somebody trying to be a nobody, or a nobody trying to be a somebody.”
But I was a somebody now, I was about to play T in the Park. I was about to emerge on one of those stages like the bands I’d seen as a kid.
My knee persistently rocked through excited nerves on the hastily organised train back to Scotland, “What stage are we on?” I asked Tam.
“You ready for this?” said Tam, and I could hear him pulling up saliva from his dry lips, “The Radio 1 stage.”
The second biggest stage! The only one completely outside apart from the Main Stage. The year before we’d played a ‘T In The Park’ alternative gig in Glasgow in a 60-capacity sweat-box to four people, two of whom were in one of the other bands. And suddenly, we were on the second biggest stage of the actual festival.
“How the fuck did you swing that?” I gargled.
“Never mind that,” said Tam, and I could hear him swipe away the question with his hand, “Point is, you’re on! But you’ll have to go on first.”
“Fine by me!” I shot back, excited, “What time’s that, about 12?”
“11:30am,” said Tam, with a little less wind behind his sails.
“Well, what time does it open?”
“11:30am.”
“11:30am on a Sunday morning?” I asked slowly, seeking clarity.
“It’s a great slot,” Tam said, unconvincingly.
“Will people know we’re on? Are we listed on the poster?”
After a pause meant to allow me time to forget what I’d just asked, Tam excitedly shouted, “You’re playing T in the Park!”
To be honest, it did make me forget.
When I eventually got home that Saturday night, shattered from long, panicked travel, I flipped on the TV and they were showing some highlights from that day of the festival. I watched as My Chemical Romance bounded around the stage we’d be playing the very next day. I watched the gentle wind hit the young gormless faces of The Kooks as they lorded it over a miles-long crowd, yelling things like ‘T in the Park, are you there?’ to which the crowd would acknowledge their existence like it was some philosophical posit, and retort with a collective ‘weorauigigrhgh’ or words to that effect. It was hard to tell, they were lost in the wind and distance between their outstretched arms, over the heads of the security, the press photographers, the TV camera crew, and pointlessly into the ears of the band, already deteriorating from years of standing in front of loud speakers without protection. I couldn’t wait to do it. I absolutely couldn’t wait. I thought of being 13 years old, and seeing those bands run on to the stage, gladiatorial and ego-fuelled, and I’d be one of them. I absolutely couldn’t wait.
Until I got a text around 2am from Chris, our guitarist.
“Michael Guitar’s in hospital,” it said.
The rest of my band had all gone out to celebrate the good news about playing T in the Park but, after travelling all day, I was too tired and wanted to be focused and ready like Ronan Keating would be in my shoes, so I’d stayed home. Turns out, the other three in my band had ended up at the Cathouse, Glasgow’s notorious, and arguably only, proper rock nightclub. As part of some ill-advised joyous frivolity, Chris had accidentally thrown Michael Guitar down the steep, metal stairs of the club, which ultimately resulted in him having to be dragged to hospital with his back completely seized up.
“You absolute fucking goons! You absolute fucking shitting goons!” I replied by text, then deleted it. “Oh no. Is he alright?” I wrote instead.
He was alright. Just in massive amounts of unbearable pain.
Fortunately, one thing our band had managed to foster was an unspoken sense of shame and guilt. Nobody wanted to be the one to let the others down, and it’s to Michael Guitar’s testament that he was there in the van the next morning as it pulled up outside my flat. Gary, our tour manager, sat behind the wheel sucking in the entirety of a giant spliff like a snake inhaling a straw. There was a sombre mood from us all, rather than nervous excitement. Chris and Michael Drum sat on opposite sides of the rear of the van, hoods up and mute, while Michael Guitar lay straight on the floor, clutching at his back and screaming in silence.
We saw the peaks of the tents break the sky as we drove closer to the festival site, and a deep, earthy bass from the massive PA speakers started tickling the soles of our feet as the sound bounced around the hills on the horizon and back into our bodies.
Whenever anyone asks about being in an internationally failed rock band, they usually wonder what it’s like backstage, and generally, backstage is the worst place you could ever imagine being. But, at these mainstream festivals, it’s every bit the carnival as the festival itself. T in the Park’s site was kind of circular, fencing in the stages and the crowd, but the backstage area sort of fluidly floated around the entire perimeter, and was separated into small villages and cul de sacs complete with cabins for bands, catering tents, and press areas. For every couple of cabins, there’d be a little garden path and fencing, and it was almost like moving into some sort of soap opera housing estate. Imagine Coronation Street, but Amy Winehouse lived there, right next to The White Stripes.
While wandering around, I came across a tent that had a pyramid of donuts in the corner, assembled in the way the ambassador would spoil you with his Ferrero Rocher. As a test of its majesty, I removed one donut from the middle to see if it would collapse like sugary Jenga, but it remained stubbornly erect. Throughout the course of the day, I’d watch people enter, then leave the tent with donuts in hand, but that tower never shifted. A festival worker would turn up, from somewhere, as if conjured, and replace the missing donuts to maintain the pyramid’s structural integrity. And, to me, this was the finest architectural accomplishment ever created.
Backstage at a mainstream festival was the only time I ever felt like I was in any way part of the glamorous world of the music industry that people imagine. You’re there, floating around with celebrities, real celebrities, and television presenters, and industry icons, and all the hangers-on who’ve crawled in with them. And, with rarely an exception, they were all enamoured with an indestructible pyramid of donuts. Apart from members of The Brian Jonestown Massacre, all of whom looked withered and grey at lunch, as if they’d just sat through a very harrowing documentary.
Once, we got ushered into a car with blues rock hero and alleged charlatan Seasick Steve. As the car shoogled and bumped through the muddy and broken makeshift paths towards our respective stages, our guitarist Chris turned to Steve and said, “I hope you’re not carsick as well, Steve.” Steve just stared at him, darkly bemused, and eerily silent. On another occasion, I stumbled past the unmistakable visage of Keith Flint from The Prodigy, all intense and spiky, who kindly nodded and said, “Best of luck, lads!” but all I could think to say back was, “Thanks, Keith Flint from the Prodigy” like I was writing a caption underneath his photo for the NME.
But one of the most peculiar things about backstage at T in the Park that really cemented the impression this was some sort of alternative universe rock village was its regular bus service. The backstage area had its own bus that was meant to ferry artists, or journalists, or stage managers between the wildly distant stages dotted around the festival’s hub. The bus circled the perimeter of the festival continuously throughout the day and anyone with a triple-A could jump on and off as required.
You could just sit there and whiz round the entire festival, peering inwards through the wire fences watching everything unfold inside like a human zoo. The bus would grumble round the site, and you’d bear witness to punters huddled at the outward reaches of the festival, against the fences, pissing, shitting, and shagging. I’ve seen true horror from that bus. People lined up, trousers round the ankles, a grim cavalcade of cocks, pissing in unison against the bending structural integrity of the prison walls. Exhausted, drunk husks, ghoulishly laying themselves to rest on the frame of the carnival, whiteying into the ether. Some of them would spot the buses and wave. So, let it be known, if you ever sneaked away from the festival hoopla to relieve yourself in a corner or against a fence instead of waiting in the stretching queues for the portaloos, chances are somebody from Kasabian was on that bus and they’ve seen your arse.
That first year we were invited to play, we were assigned a long portacabin we’d be sharing with an American band we loved called Interpol. The portacabins were split into two, and one half was assigned to them, with adjoining doors between them. We’d been called to the site so early for our stage time, there were very few, if any, other artists there. So we had the run of this portacabin to ourselves — peering into Interpol’s room, sitting in Interpol’s room, pretending to be Interpol in Interpol’s room. On the wall was a list of amenities members of Interpol were welcome to enjoy while they relaxed in the portacabin, which included free haircuts, massages, bespoke tailors, a pyramid of immortal donuts. You could get anything your dark, sugary heart desired.
While snooping around their cabin, I spotted that Interpol had their own toilet. The height of luxury. So I figured I’d repay T in the Park for all the years I’d had to do my business up against a fence while Kasabian watched me from a bus window.
“I’m absolutely going to shit in there,” I said, pointing at their private little room.
“Well, be careful,” warned Chris, “You don’t want to accidentally shit up the back of your shirt before you go on and have to play with shit on the back of your shirt.”
I never stopped to question why there was a chance I’d shit up the back of my shirt, but the thought lingered as I sat on Interpol’s private throne. It wouldn’t leave my brain. Imagine if I’d bounded on to that stage at T in the Park with a big load of shit up the back of my shirt? I couldn’t take it, so I reached round to make sure it wasn’t going to happen. In doing so, I accidentally knocked my ancient mobile phone out of my jacket pocket and heard a deep slosh as it dunked into the chemicals below me before hitting the throat of the lavatory with an unmistakable clunk.
“Shit!” I shat.
I spun round and peered down into the tiny hole and saw my phone blocking up the toilet with its extended antenna, covered in a bubbling, blue chemical liquid. I had no other option, I couldn’t have Interpol finding my phone down their bog, so I had to go in. I removed my jacket and dipped my hand tentatively into the blue water, fishing out the phone which was now an unusable sodden mess, as well as an interesting shade of dark blue. As I held it up like a fish I’d caught, I realised my hand and arm, almost up to the elbow, were also a deep navy. No matter how much I scrubbed, cleaned, or prayed, that blue wasn’t for fading. And then: a knock at the portacabin door. It was time to go on.
By this point, painkillers and adrenaline had meant Michael Guitar was vertical, but we had to support him so that his back didn’t give way and our lurching dash to the stage felt like we were dragging a corpse there. His stage costume at this point included a pair of cheap 3D glasses, because we were so very 80s new wave, but it seemed like we had maybe perched these on his face to disguise the fact he was dead, like Weekend at Bernie’s.
A security guard at the mouth of the stage eyed us suspiciously, then held up a a hand to halt us.
“Sorry, boys,” she said, her eyes peering into ours, “I need to see passes.”
The rest of the band opened their jackets to show their AAA passes which would allow us access to the stage. My jacket was draped over my hand like a waiter’s napkin to disguise the blueness of my arm caused by the toilet chemicals, so I had to pull it back to reveal my pass, as if uncovering a wound.
“You alright?” the security guard asked, nodding at my wrist, “You look like you’ve fisted a Smurf.”
Michael Guitar laughed, and at least then everyone knew he wasn’t dead.
She waved us on and added, “Don’t worry, I recognise you from the TV, I just have to be sure.”
That sort of charm couldn’t possibly work on us. We absolutely knew she didn’t recognise us. Because we were about to take the stage, unannounced, on a Sunday morning, at 11:30am, before any other band had gone on. Before any other band had arrived. Before the festival gates had even really opened.
Smoke started seeping between the various stacked flight cases lining the back of the stage, and under the black curtains we’d have to emerge through to go on. Sound engineers behind it tested the microphones, and we heard their numbered checks collide with the air around us. We could feel the low bass from the PA prowl around our legs, and it was almost time.
The stage manager adjusted her headset, then turned to us and gave us two thumbs up and a wide smile. The music from the stage settled to a chilling lull, and we walked forwards. On to the second largest stage of the biggest festival in Scotland.
I’ll never forget the way the sun decided to crack through a cloud and illuminate the stretching field I saw before me. I could see miles outwards, right back to the edge of the festival, to the camp site behind it, to the food stalls lit up in the distance, the glorious Scottish hills framing the horizon, and that big metal ferris wheel, primed, flashing and turning at 11:30am.
The one thing that was missing was a fucking audience.
For the miles that stretched beyond my eyes, I could see around 10 people. We didn’t walk out to a crowd of thousands cheering like we’d seen on TV. We walked out at 11:30am on a Sunday morning to an empty car park.
“T in the Park 2007!” I screamed, to fucking nobody.
Slowly, some bodies started to emerge from the rear of the festival, wondering why there was such a big noise already. Bleary-eyed zombies gradually closing in on the stage, some still wearing pyjamas, some getting around half way, then just plonking their tired, hungover frames down in the middle of the desolate, grey arena.
You know what? I didn’t give a fuck. I was playing T in the Park. I pranced around that huge stage, throwing shapes and leaping up on the monitors. I saw the camera operators screech around after us, crash zooming into our faces and swinging the equipment wildly in our direction. I did everything I wanted to do, I ran straight to the edge of the stage and held my bass guitar aloft to the cheer of 3 people. Smoke plumed from the sides of the stage, curling round my ankles. I could hear my voice leap from my throat all the way to the dead rat food stall at the rear of the arena, and back again. I’d never imagined I’d see T in the Park from this angle, as one of those people I’d watched and lost the lens of my glasses moshing to. I swung my limbs high into the air and stared upwards into the lofty rafters of the stage, my pointed finger and outstretched arm reaching for god, all fucking blue from that chemical toilet.
As we rushed through our 25 minute set, my eyes fell on that big wheel at the back of the festival, its hulking metal chassis slowly churning in the distance. In each of the carriages I could make out the shape of several bodies, clutching the bars, staring out over the carnival below. As I hit the last note of the set to four or five cheers from a tired, early morning audience, I used some brief, glancing maths to figure out that more people were on the ferris wheel than standing there watching us.
And that’s important to remember. It doesn’t matter how many people you play for, or how good your performance was at T in the Park. That big ferris wheel was constantly turning. Someone was always in that top carriage. Someone always decided they’d rather go on the big wheel than watch you play. That’s important to remember, I think.
Confusingly, we were invited back to T in the Park, and in subsequent years, we played much smaller stages, to much larger crowds, at much more reasonable hours. But the night before our triumphant return to T in the Park, I got a text from Chris, “Michael Drum’s in the hospital.”
Apparently the rest of the band, on the eve of our second performance, had been reminiscing about the time they accidentally threw Michael Guitar down some stairs in the Cathouse, and then in some sort of necessary re-enactment, accidentally threw Michael Drum down the same set of fucking stairs.
“You absolute fucking goons! You absolute fucking shitting goons!” I replied by text, then deleted it. “Oh no. Is he alright?” I wrote instead.
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