Viva Brighton Issue #67 September 2018

COLUMN
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John Helmer
Good times
Illustration by Chris Riddell
“When was the last time you went to something
like this?” asks our son Freddy.
“A festival?” My wife has to think about it.
“Knebworth, 1979.”
“Wow.”
For me it’s a bit more recent; Hard Rock Calling
in Hyde Park 2012, featuring Iggy and the
Stooges, which I went to with Freddy. Like Kate I
tend to avoid outdoor gigs. The music I like best
comes out of dark, dingy clubs, and in my view
should stay there. Gigs outdoors just feel wrong.
I have a vivid memory from my own gigging
days of being chased around the stage by a wasp
when supporting the Gang of Four at a festival in
Amsterdam.
Outdoor gigs, besides, heap countless indignities
and discomforts on their punters. Not that we
can complain right now: we’re cool and chilled
under a tree eating tacos and drinking mojitos.
Meanwhile, from a birdcage on top of the cocktail
van, a shaven-headed glitter-goth fights gamely to
pitch his counter-tenor voice above some inexpert
hard rock from the BIMM-stage on one flank, and
Jess Glynn’s whingey pop on the other. Freddy’s
younger sister Poppy appears with her posse and
demands cash for ice-cream. I pass a note and the
teenagers instantly dematerialise. Finally, cocktails
drained, we amble down to the main stage.
Perhaps the reason I don’t like big gigs in
general is because I’ve always been wary of
pop’s mainstream (even when I was part of that
mainstream). Chic, however, tonight’s headliners,
were always the acceptable face of disco for
whingey indie types like me. And I’ll forgive
Nile Rodgers anything - including detailing his
commercial successes on the house-high video
screens like it was some corporate CEO’s end-ofyear
results deck. For he has given us some of the
best dance music known to humanity, and here
he is now playing it live for me - here, in Preston
Park, where on normal days I would be walking a
dog, or riding a bicycle.
After an hour of disco fun I take a break to visit
the portaloos and on returning can’t find the
others. I wander, mildly panic-stricken, among
crowds of strangers as Nile Rodgers tells the story
of his recent brush with The Big C: “…And now
I’m here with you today, completely cancer-free!”
Huge cheers. Then Freddy spots me and I am
shepherded back to the fold. “I thought I’d lost
you,” I say to Kate. She gives me a look.
Two years ago we were just over the road from this
spot in the NHS Park Centre, learning a game of
rock, paper, scissors,
whose new labels
were surgery,
chemo, and
radiotherapy.
But now we’re
here together,
and also
cancer-free.
Then Nile
scrubs out the
familiar riff of
a song played
at pretty much
every wedding
disco ever, and
we are all for the
moment (quite
literally in the case
of Kate, Freddy
and me) family.
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