Let me make myself clear from the start. This post is definitely not for the squeamish so be warned. Don’t read it unless you really want to. I’ll understand. Something for you to think about though! If you need a strong cast of mind and even stronger stomach to write about the subject, try to imagine what it must be like to experience it. But then countless millions of music lovers have! In fact it’s true to say that given the huge number of people who attend pop festivals every year, far more British citizens are acquainted with the inside of a stinking portaloo than the name of their equally odious Member of Parliament.
Okay, if you’ve got this far let me draw a picture for you. Imagine a rock festival with a hundred thousand revellers. Now think of the food that they’re eating. Tens of thousands of paper plates dolloped up with chili-con-carne ladled out of a gigantic drum like container onto a baked potato and topped with a spoonful of cream that hasn’t seen the inside of a fridge in memory. You’re feeling famished so you want something hot and spicy straight out of Mexico. Yum Yum! Alternatively it could be noodles with an oily stir fry or greasy chips or any other culinary treat mass produced for endless cider-heads that don’t care too much what they shove down their gobs as long as it’s filling.
That’s the food side of things. Get the picture? Now for the toilets. Portaloos. Rows of them often with multiple compartments. Six, ten or twelve. Each with a lock on the door so you think it’s all very private! Joke, joke! Go in the one at the end and you can hear the seriously vile character of what may be going on eight doors away let alone the horror of the one next to you, but get into one in the middle and you’ve got it in stereo! And for the love of God I’m not just talking about smell, of which hydrogen sulphide is only the basics. Oh no, I’m talking sound here! A whole symphony of effluent in its various forms hitting metal accompanied by the rich vibrant wind section of the London Philharmonic. And there you are, sitting and shitting and taking it in. Aren’t you the lucky one. You’re part of it all! And remember, these toilets are not always emptied on an everyday basis. If the organisers are doing things on the cheap or something goes wrong it may happen on alternate days or even not at all. Just consider what that creates!
So, take into account all the food, then consider that festival goers are not necessarily the world’s most hygienic people. Use a portaloo at night and you could easily park your posterior on something you didn’t expect. Use it by day and you’ll need to gird your loins to combat the stink. Do whatever you’ve got to now that the spicy whatever it is that you’ve guzzled has taken hold of your guts. You’ve got no choice anymore. It’s either you and your underwear or the horror of having picked the worst cubicle!
The portaloo panic at pop festivals usually strikes around midnight. Eat at eight so its four hours’ grace. Unless you went ‘organic’ that is and the green save the planet people who sold you that delicious looking vegetable dish forgot to mention where their fertiliser came from, in which case the problem’s more immediate. Generally speaking however, the queues for the loos build up around midnight and run on till two in the morning. The music’s stopped. The stages are empty. Crowds dispersed back to their tents and darkness all around because the people running the show are invariably too mean to have lighting. And then you see them! Like Aliens they come at night! Mostly! Hundreds and hundreds of solitary desperate looking figures clutching bog rolls. They’ve staggered out of their tents hoping above hope they can hold it in and now they’re trying to remember the way to the toilets. Many are carrying torches so innumerable beams of light penetrate the gloomy and often freezing night air. All thoughts of the stink ahead are banished in the serious need to get there and I’m talking pooing not pissing. As far as the latter’s concerned just about anywhere will do. I’ve seen countless desperados getting rid of their rough cider behind food stalls though the ladies are often a bit more discrete. Just a tad!
Twelve at night till two in the morning… Those magical hours! Queues at the cabins and up it piles. The cess-tanks below un-emptied from yesterday and already full. All that half cooked, part digested chillied up mincemeat pouring out of thirty thousand bum holes and you’ve got what passes for a very realistic aspect of our British way of life. The British at their best you might say. Well, it’s only sauce for the goose! What with politicians shitting all over the electorate and the bankers shitting on just about everyone, the festival habit is very much a part of it all.
I remember one of my own experiences only too well. Vile isn’t the word. It was a Steam Festival and there were no traders’ toilets i.e. toilets that only the traders could use not the hoi polio punters. They’re supposed to be cleaner because fewer people use them but that’s only a myth anyway. Traders at festivals invariably eat the same offerings as everyone else and are often too much in a hurry to be fastidious. Speaking for ourselves we often prefer to go hungry. It tends to sharpen you up but this time I succumbed to temptation.
It was a good looking burger frying with onions that did me in. I crawled out of our camper van around three a.m. after eating something that smelled good but turned out to be hatefully disagreeable and staggered up a slope and half way round a field to a row of Dr Who lookalike cabins. And there ahead of me were hundreds of other people waiting.
Definitely an oh-my-god situation. The smell hit me thirty yards off. I retched but somehow had to control it. I bit into one of my fingers but that didn’t help. What did was holding a finger each side of my nose and squeezing hard as I could. I’d reached the end of the queue and had to wait. Soon came the sounds, even with the main outside door closed you could hear that uncontrolled rush. I just couldn’t bear it. When I took my fingers away from my nose to block up my ears I felt gassed. Then everyone looking at everyone else in the dark. Their deepest innermost thoughts their own yet still everyone else’s! The plain bloody horror of it all. Standing there waiting your turn to do the same thing. Make the same noises. And everyone looking at you when you came out. Oh the shame of it all! Well at least the panic was over. I returned to the camper van and crawled into bed feeling all sticky and thinking only of our shower at home.
But that’s me. Maybe it’s not like that for most. Maybe festival goers in general love the disgusting food, the stink of the portaloos and the sounds their guts make. Maybe it’s all very normal for them. What they think of as the festival experience. Something that goes with the mud, the dirt, the filth and the squalor. All of which are complemented by festival food. That’s it really. Apart from the bands and the music that’s what pop festivals are all about… mud, filth, questionable food, ghastly toilets, drugs and stalls selling an endless variety of tat. And yet the worst parts of this are somehow elevated into virtues. Taken together they become the festival spirit. Things that make a festival a great experience! As individual characteristics they can be criticised, even condemned, but collectively they are romanticized into its essence. Its sights, sounds and smells! You forget the single awfulness of a thing like a grown woman pissing near her tent and think of it as a totality. In that way it becomes majestic! A fond memory you have six weeks after it’s over. You forget how horrid it was treading on fresh human poo and think about the cool people you met! You minimise the individual awful experiences and transmute them into a rosy construction.
Pop festival toilets and the experience of using them are things you have to turn into something else because they’re disgusting and you need to do away with the disgust. Rid yourself of it because you don’t want that memory. In short you fantasize it. Much the same way as the present Coalition Government of political jack the lads fantasize that robbing disabled people of their benefits, charging our youth who want to study at university extortionate fees, attacking the standard of living of elderly people and increasing child poverty is really for their own good and in some way helps them. Having said this however even such vile double-think pales into insignificance when set against the anal dance of the current leadership of the Labour Party that has now given itself over to the belief that the best way of opposing all the things they supposedly hate is to support those who perpetrate such moral injustices. The key word here, of course is supposedly.
Indeed, to step into any political debate about who should pay for the economic crises caused by a handful of arse holes is much the same as stepping into a filthy portaloo at a pop festival. And true there might be a difference but I’ll leave it to you to decide what it is.
