MY T in the Park experience morphed over the years from being desperate to go but not being allowed, to being desperate not to go and praying not to be forced.
When I say “forced”, I mean “asked by my boss”. I’m unnervingly compliant.
I’d kidded myself that my rising ennui was a result of increasing age and the resultant decrease in the value of novelty but really... it just wasn’t what it had been.
And had been, that’s not too far from has been - a dreadful descriptor for anything relating to a performance-based pastime.
Now, of course, Scotland’s festival is a temporary has been. There will be no T time in 2017.
The statement from DF Concerts reads like a Dear John letter, only it’s not you, it’s not me - it’s them. “T in the Park has been at the heart of Scotland’s music scene - with you by our side. But for now, sadly, we need to take a break.”
The them: the site move from Balado to Strathallan, the ospreys, planning conditions and interfering Scottish Government ministers.
One year I was hospitalised with amnesia a couple of weeks before T and was still quite unwell as I packed off to cover the festival. My mum texted me her concern. “Try not to stand too near the front.”
Latterly, I think proximity to the apron would have been the least of her concerns. T’s reputation as a “nedfest” is a snobbish exaggeration but there were certainly scenes aping Trainspotting outtakes and these were not only occasional.
While the majority were in fine good humour, there often felt an aggressive undertone waiting to swell. Never was there an upright surface that had not been utilised as a urinal. A swathe of drunks would just as well dance to the music oozing from the dodgems as that from the Main Stage.
It would be easy to point to the anti-social behaviour, although crime figures remain relatively steady across the years; it would be easy to point to the travel nightmare that was 2015. This year, of course, there were three drug-related deaths.
Truth is, it’s a milestone event in the Scottish music calendar. One that brings millions to the local economy.
It would be easy to be sentimental about Ts gone past. To be misty-eyed about seminal performances and random meetings with hero performers. (Beyonce. Mr E from The Eels). It would be easy to talk about that time I sang in the Arches Community Choir and a stage invader got a little fresh and smacked one of the choir members on the bum.
Or when I when I played keyboards in the Sunday Herald Band, overcoming nerve-induced catatonia to do so.
When it’s right, it’s so brilliantly right. Even the mud, like a spurned lover, clinging to your ankles.
Last year, I reviewed T in the Park from the perspective of the nesting ospreys. They greatly liked the seafood stall, the didn’t mind Hector Bizerk. They concluded a successful follow up should have, “fewer humans, more fish.” They’re right in that the festival is in radical need of change.
Too many burdens in too short a time caused T to lose its way. At some point it stopped attracting names that excited people. Its audience stopped being diverse.
I won’t miss T in the Park in 2017. We need a break. It needs to find itself again. And I hope it does, if for nothing other than I can’t imagine a Scottish teenagehood without it.
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