‘I realise that the rest of my life,that can absorb such profound and disorientating pleasures in it, is going to be both wonderful and frightening’
It was the summer of 1984. I was 16. I wanted, or finally,to see the descend. I’d been fixated on the group since a 1981 Peel session suddenly flipped somehow from irritating me beyond reason to enthralling me beyond imagination. Provocative repetition. Monotonous drones. Withering sarcasm. I’m lucky I was struck by something so utterly superb when I was in my culturally vulnerable teenage state, otherwise you could be sitting here reading an article approximately Toto.
I saw an advert saying the descend were playing at a rock festival in Cornwall and persuaded my mum, and against her better judgment,to let me go, alone, and with a sleeping bag and a tent. The rolling grassland sloped down to a stage,shadowed by the ancestral domestic of Lord Eliot, unlikely benefactor of one of the last gasps of the real 60s counterculture. The Elephant Fayre.
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Source: theguardian.com