I remember I went to Glastonbury, but that’s all!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

After reading Denise McNamara’s excellent piece in the Tribune’s The Look magazine recently about her experience of the Electric Picnic, my mind wandered, stumbling around distant memories of festivals like a drunk in a field.

All these years later I can still remember a moment at Reading Festival in 1978 when I briefly experienced ecstasy. That’s the feeling, not the drug, folks. 1978, remember?

Off my tiny teenage mind on a cocktail of gordknowswot, I returned from the stage area to the campsite, abandoned to squelching my way across fields of muck and detritus, and then I saw a vision.

Like a medieval army resting up for the night, the fields in front of me were filled with tents, flags and fires. Even from a distance I felt I could feel the spirit of bonhomie and comradeship coming from the camp.

Where was my tent? Who cared. I stumbled from fireplace to fireplace, naive and safe, having a ball. It must have had a profound effect upon me, because I’m feeling it right now.  

It’s a cocktail of freedom, trust in your fellow man, a lack of care and a host of kinship.

Equally, I remember the discovery of Drambuie that night, and the subsequent wasting of hundreds of drinks, spoiled by failed attempts to look cool. Del Boy’s drinks didn’t come from thin air. A pint of Directors with a drop of Drambuie: very sophisticated to an insecure 18-years-old Adley.

Life was confusing back then. Not enough to be half-man, half-boy, I was also half a Public School boy maybe on his way to Oxbridge, half a warehouse-working dart-throwing biker boy from the other side of the hill, and just to make things particularly challenging, half a hitch-hiking low-life, hoping to be a hobo.

To mirror all these halves the world of music had been rendered in two. I saw Led Zeppelin in 1973 and Deep Purple and Frank Zappa and Humble Pie and will spare you all the gigs, because gradually many of the bands became boring. Guitar solos went on for ages, and don’t even talk about the drum solos that had thrilled me as a 14-years-old, slightly drunk on cans of brown ale and Long Life.

So when Punk arrived I was right in there, thank you very much. Down the Marquee on Wardour Street, armed with the cut-out advert from each week’s NME, with which you got in for free, Monday-Thursday. At last, here were bands you didn’t sit down to. You weren’t half a mile away from them. Suddenly, anything could happen.

Yes, I loved punk, because I was 16 in 1976 and felt I had no future. I pogoed to The Clash, The Pistols, The Anything that you wanted to call your band, and a special mention goes to the Ramones.

Nothing could ever compare to a Ramones gig. I went to six or seven, memorably one in which I lost a single shoe after 10 minutes. The morning after a Ramones gig my black leather biker jacket could be snapped like Jacob’s cream cracker. Rigid in dried sweat salt, it had to be soaked in a bath and then hung to slowly dry before it would bend once more.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.