Cowgirls, Lucozade, Jack Kerouac and fire cider
Abundance: Tuesday 19 November 2024
I told my old man I was staying at a mate’s house, and my friend did likewise. We were off to a festival, our first, and no-one’s permission was going to get in the way.
My friend suggested we hitched. I accepted as casually as if I did it every weekend. Inside, I was alight. Hitching: at last, I felt like Kerouac.
We stood self-consciously by a petrol station. I had myself as a male Sissy Hankshaw, all enthusiastic thumbs, but when the time came we were both bereft of courage.
He raised a hopeful arm as if hailing a bus; a car exiting the forecourt wound down its window: ‘Alright Mark, you going somewhere?’ It was a friend’s older brother; he dropped us in the sunshine to sit with our newly courageous thumbs out on a roundabout by a swanky hotel we ordinarily had no business being anywhere near. Within a minute we were picked up.
‘Where are you heading?’
‘Elephant Fayre…it’s a festival just into Cornwall but anywhere nearer than here would be great.’
‘No way - I’m going to Elephant Fayre too, hop in.’
The bohemian life of a travelling beatnik was going pretty smoothly.
My hometown was a place of clans. Mohicaned punks, sharp-dressed scooterists, skinheads in their DMs, mods in fishtails, and futurists in pixie boots and Chinese slippers. The clans got on pretty well; we were all in the larger clan of being outside the ‘straights’ though still a tiny minority. The worse thing you might be called was a Saturday punk - someone who was straight all week and whose hair went up on a Friday night - but that was still better than being a straight. If you saw someone new who had the hair, clothes and the look, you tipped towards each other like ballbearings in a travel game and in no time, somehow, you’d be talking.
Elephant Fayre1, was different. The whole place was a clan. There were no straights. Everyone was striking in some way, the lines between the clans blurred: hippy-punks, biker-goths and all the shades and combinations between. Full as I may have been of the usual random anxiety, I felt a wave of belonging; that there were people living beyond the norm, that there was hope, that there was another way, a different life.
We sat around, ate, stayed in the tent when it rained, walked around when it shined. We drank; we smoked. The Cure were playing on the Saturday night. It was a close call between them, New Order, and The Bunnymen for my favourite band. Everyone likes The Cure now, but then2, hardly anyone did. Liking The Cure (and bands like them) in small town England was enough to get your head kicked in.
And so, it turned out, The Cure were real. I saw them. Proof. They were out in the world as well as in my bedroom. They were magnificent. And here they are an impossible 41 years later with a new album, a new album that is - in all improbability - better than the album they had just released when I first saw them3.
Why can I remember so much tiny detail from back then - I can recall friends' phone numbers, sing along with the radio to random songs I've barely heard since, remember the EXACT sound a friend made as a shoe slipped accidentally off a girl's foot, through the air and into his testicles while playing football with a Coke can at 4 in the morning at Exeter Bus Station having come back from London, seeing The Cure for a second time a year later - while I now find it impossible to remember simple details...someone's name, what I came into the room to do, the Latin name for a plant. Any plant.
Nothing really happened that weekend but by the time I was home, I was changed. I felt a step further from the old man and a step further from my surroundings. Seeing all those people had made me more certain of who I was, that it wasn’t just me looking for another way. This was proof that there were other ‘normal’ ways of living, though hopefully mine would remain without the grim waft of patchouli that hung over much of the festival’s postcode.
Fire cider
Recipe and more words below