This is a love letter, of sorts.
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| crowd shot. |
Not too long ago in real terms but what now seems like the distant
past my friends and I would have sworn that we would live in our home
town of Leeds forever. Things haven't turned out that way. Some of my
closest friends have spread out around the country and around the
world as jobs, family, girlfriends or boredom have taken us away from
what we once thought we would always call home. After everyone
finished their university years and returned to Leeds it seemed like
an old gang had got back together and that it would never split
again. Proximity and history had brought us back together but then
life happened again. People grew up, got married, found proper jobs,
had kids and people started moving away from Leeds once more. The sight
and the memories of my home town will always bring me comfort, make
me feel strangely safe and fill me with happiness but it is the
people I shared those memories that matter most. It's my friends who
made the memories, my friends that made Leeds such a brilliant city
to grow up in and live in thereafter and it's those friends from
which new memories are being forged with still, just not as regularly
as before.
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| a bloody big periscope. |
As friends have spread throughout the world it's become much harder
to see each other. I can't just get on a flight to Australia or
Ecuador, I can't get on a train up to Leeds every weekend (even if I
wanted to), I can't organise myself well enough to sort out a weekend
anywhere else. It's said it's easier to stay in touch with people
nowadays with the advent of social media and mobile technology but I
never receive a ten page letter from a friend or relative like my mum
used to or on take part in a two hour conversation on the phone like
she still does so, yeah, it's easier to stay in touch but it's harder
to actually find anything real out. So the time I do get to spend
with friends nowadays is paramount and cherished.
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| main stage. |
And so I met the news that Michael confirmed he'd be getting the
train down to London from Rotherham for the weekend of Lewisham
People's Day with great excitement. Michael is a friend of mine and
Robins (a fellow Leeds expat living in London) from our school days.
Michael and I used to eat kebabs and drink cans in his car in a
dogging car park whilst discussing (and crying over) various
unsuccessful love affairs and listening to emo music. We called this
our weekly Dashboard Confessional. We were fucking funny. You can't
do stuff like that with just anyone (and look back and laugh at
yourselves years later) Michael was always going to be a friend for
life, no matter how far away we lived from one another or
lazy/unorganised I became/continued to be.
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| variety show. |
Anyway, he came down to Lewisham People's Day two years ago and he's
now decided to make it an annual outing. Lewisham People's Day is
paid for by Lewisham council so it has bigger clout and backing than
most of the free festivals you find round London. It's great that the
council are still managing to do this with all the cut backs being
forced upon them and you can tell it makes a difference to the
community of Lewisham of which between 20 to 30 thousand turned up on
the day. It brings the various disparate arts, school and music
groups as well as the various communities, religions, etc. from
around Lewisham together so you get a great mix of people as well as
a great mix of things going on over the five stages and many stalls
and tents.
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| another crowd shot. |
The festival is cut up into four main areas and includes an indie
tent (bands include the confused but fun The Floodliners, a band with
a 70 year old guitarist and another band with a 17 year old boy
dressed as Slash), a main stage (rap groups, dance troupes, soul
groups), a Lewisham hub stage (where you get local school groups and
orchestras from the area) an acoustic bandstand stage (stuff like a capella choirs, acoustic troubadours and reggae artists) and the big
top tent (acts include a variety show, some bingo and some band that
had a worldwide number one many years ago).
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| The Floodliners |
There were a couple of big food areas this year; one was the new breed
on trendy home made street food selling things like home made sausage
rolls, chorizo, loads of vegetarian bumf, cakes, bread and what not
and then more 'traditional' Lewisham food; jerk chicken. You'll have
to queue a while for the jerk chicken. However many pieces of chuck
they chuck on the barbecue they always struggle to keep up with the
demand. There's aloso a plant and herb stall which I always get far too excited about. There's loads of things for kids to do from face painting, to
the craft market to creating a skateboard design to entering the
'minilympics.'
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| jerk; the food of Lewisham. |
And if you want to eat a load of food, drink a load of beer (warning
there are no real ale or real cider tents here; the beer vans only
sell nondescript cooking lager and pish cider. Bring your own until
they learn) and then make yourself sick there's a multitude of scary
looking fairground rides to turn your stomach over. There are also a
lot of fairground games that are nearly impossible to win and almost
nearly as impossible to not have a go (when you've been drinking
pints of gin).
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| losing. |
Before we went this year I wasn't sure if you were allowed to take
cans in which led to us decanting a litre of gin into plastic tonic
bottles so we could consume this in a field on one of the hottest
days of the year. Great idea. For the record you can take cans in;
the only rule regarding booze is no glass bottles. That and not being
a twat. And maybe having a good time. You do have to go through an
airport security type entrance where you you will get a metal
detector scanned around your body when you arrive so don't go
strapping a hip flask to your body; you can take it in anyway.
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| a rare sight; a bandstand being used for what it was built for. |
Anyway after a pint of cooking lager and a pint of gin we sat down in
the Big Top tent to watch Ida Barr bingo. Ida Barr is a man dressed
as a granny who sings hip hop songs and plays bingo with the
audience. It may not sound funny but it bloody well is after a pint
of gin and when your friend fucks up, thinks he's won the bingo, but
is then lambasted by a hip hop granny on stage in front of a packed
tent who accuses him of cheating. I think Michael was drinking faster
than I was and didn't realise that Ms Barr had purposefully neglected
to tell the crowd the full extent of the rules; I’m sure it's a
normal part of the routine and (un)fortunately Michael was suckered
in with the hope of winning a tea pot shaped like a British phone
box.
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| Michael getting bummed on stage by a hip hop granny. Not literally. |
We walked around the festival site for the next few hours alternating
our pints of gin with pints of crap lager watching various acts,
eating different food stuff and catching up with each others lives in
the sun. It was almost perfect. And then it was perfect; Musical
Youth came on in the Big Top. Musical Youth!! Those who wrote and
performed the reggae classic Pass the Dutchie. These were heady
times. It turns out they didn't really write anything else, not
anything anyone would have heard of anyway so they (or the two
remaining members of the original group and a load of session
musicians/ mates) played a set of (other peoples) reggae hits. They
then did a ten minute rendition of Pass The Dutchie. I never thought
I had wanted to hear a ten minute rendition of Pass The Dutchie, or
indeed see Musical Youth live, I'd go as far as saying the thought
had never crossed my mind, but in that moment, in that tent, with two
of my favourite friends everything made sense. And then Michael
dropped his pint on the floor covering my legs in cheap lager and
everything was normal again. We were sixteen again in a park in
Leeds. Nothings changed except almost everything. And if that doesn't
make sense to you I pity you a tad.
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| Passing The Dutchie to the left hand side about 100 times. |
So yeah as Joey Cape of LagWagon once sang: To all my friends; I
remember every drunken night at the old dive. And something that he
didn't; so do I, but let's keep on creating new memories. You still
mean the same to me wherever we all live at the moment and wherever
we all may end up in the future.
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| 'erbs. |
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