The Domestic Terrorist - Reading 2003

METALLICA. READING. 2003.

To me, Reading is the rock festival of the summer. There’s others – sure. Glastonbury, if you like the abandoned, fucked up hippy vibe. T in The Park, if you’re a boozer patriot. The V Festival, if you’re feeling somewhat middle class and don’t want to think for yourself. But Reading… Reading is the rock festival. The full, hairy bollocks, screaming edge widdly-do rawk festival of the summer. Reading is about staying up all night drinking cheap cider, throwing your hair all over the place playing air guitar, looking ridiculous, and knowing that looking ridiculous is both cool and crap at the same time. And that Real Men Play On Ten. Hail!

Sunday is traditionally metal day at Reading. A day when the country’s best festival, and my personal favourite, becomes a teeming hive of black t-shirts, big, bad hair, and badass screaming. The day when everything gets a bit unhinged, a bit frayed at the edges, and it shows.

What’s not to love on a day when the sun shines and dark black souls of our tortured inner children come to play?

Today belongs to our inner child. The hurting, the angry, the primal, almost unfocused, inarticulate permanent adolescent. That’s too many adjectives for one comfortable sentence I suspect. The one that knows only rage, fury, anger, jealousy. Today then, belongs to Metallica. There are other bands playing, but you know, who cares about them? Just sit through them, live through this, and your reward will come in Rock Heaven.

PRML SCRM go down faster than a sinking ship. Faced by 40,000 bored punters sat down, dripfed warm, expensive beer in paper cups, the Scream’s unique brand of dark paranoia evaporates in daylight and apathy in the UK. Only two months ago they were headlining Glastonbury at midnight, and now – this. A scruffy, tired looking band with at least two superfluous guitarists, and a propensity to ignore their strengths in favour of a dull, swampy roaring noise somewhere in the distance. See, when the Primals are on form, mining the dark vein of disco and garage rock : “Miss Lucifer”, “Swastika Eyes”, “Burning Wheel” – they’re easily the best hybrid of The Stooges and the Donna Summer that all the imagination in the world could produce. Sadly, they perform a set with the dynamics of a flid (that is, an odd mix of fast disco-rock one, slow dirgey one, another midpaced dirge from the new underselling album, etc. etc. repeated until I certainly feel more than mathematically-correct 57 minutes older), to an apathetic crowd who can’t decide if they want to sit around and get stoned or sit around and get drunk or sit around and get stoned and drunk at the same time.

The problem with the Scream is that they seem to be – exclusively – the bad trip, the yang to last nights yin, the hangover, the lonely, paranoid stoner sat on his own moaning about aliens, JFK, and anything else weird he can think of. Things are hardly impoved by Bobby Gillespie’s cheerful announcement that we’re all “fucking slaves waiting for Metallica”. Something tells me that the other day at Leeds didn’t necessarily go so well either. Come On, Let’s Go. Let Go.

In fact, given my encyclopaedic knowledge of The Scream, I can conclusively prove that this is the worst Primal Scream gig ever of the six or so I’ve seen. Even worse than their shambles of a show in Wolverhampton where they played with a hastily-programmed drum machine to counter for their own drummer leaving that very morning. The Scream in daylight suck. Apathetically going through the motions and playing a set of obscure album tracks and moderate indie hits to a crowd of polite metalheads is no way to live the rock n roll dream.

And talking of the rock n roll dream, next come the godawful SUM41, the type of uninspired Offspring copyists I would desperately wish are just a dream : at least I could awake to a reality that might be better. Picture five identikits dumb Yank RAWK punks who’ve never even heard of The Clash or The Ramones, or, if they have, abandoned anything scary like intelligence or ideas, in favour of braindead dunderhead mybabyleftmemyjobsucksfuckyou adolescent posturing. This is really stupid, dumb, retarded rock. Just dumb fucking rednecks with cartoon posturing, stupid haircuts, and the depth of a puddle. They’re shit, and they’re not even smart enough to know it. In ten years time all their fans will have had a) sex and b) jobs and SUM 41 (and maybe their fans, who knows, or cares about pondlife?) will be serving you burgers or working in call centres. And that’s a very light punishment for the pain they’re inflicting upon the innocent.

Straddling the gap between SUM 41 and the rather more-challenging SYSTEM OF A DOWN comes, at the other end of the field, in a sweaty, hot, condensation-dripping-from-the-ceiling, the temple of worship for the godlike genius that is HAR MAR SUPERSTAR. Trust us. If we tell you what HAR MAR SUPERSTAR is like, it’ll just sound wrong. Possible, improbable, but definitely wrong. Like Al Pacino playing James Bond. It shouldn’t work. But it does.

So picture the scene. A twenty something, overweight New York disco nerd with a Ron Jeremy ‘tache, rapping over sleazy fake Seventies porno soundtrack, dressed in a crushed red velvet boxing robe, surrounded by a tribe of strippers. Sounds awful. Sounds like a washed up lounge singer, living out his last fading days for pin money in the depths of a dying Vegas casino off the Strip.

But it’s glorious. It’s music with humour. Not comedy music, but music with comedy. Aware of the absurd, aware of the ridiculous, and revelling within it. Finding beauty in the mundane. And its funky. Funky as fuck. Great big swathes of syndrums, sequenced bass, and dirty, filthy beats. With cheesy keyboards. And lyrics that make the dirty fuck fantasies of every self-posturing, self-important, vapid rapper seem like nursery rhymes written by Dick Bruna.

This is genius. Fabulous, filthy, porno disco funk with sung by a guy wearing nothing but a thong, with 300 people on stage with him – including Jack Osbourne and most of Primal Scream dancing hand in hand - and doing the type of stuff Prince used to do, back in the Jurassic period, when Prince was good. It makes you want to have silly, filthy sex with someone you shouldn’t. And isn’t that what the best music in the world does?

And isn’t this so much better than the neurotic, navel-gazing, loathing of SYSTEM OF A DOWN? To wander out of the sweaty, cramped tent into the cold, cooling night, to be exposed to the unrelenting screaming of SYSTEM’s stuttering, furious metal, just shows us that music should not just be vital, or important, or about the human condition. It should also be enjoyable.

Under the curtain of night, 50,000 souls descend to worship at the temple of those dark lords METALLICA. This is Stadium Metal. This is the music of every angry inner child, every permanent adolescent, every furious temper, every rage against the injustice and inequality of the world, as voiced – as only it can – by cosseted, cocooned millionaire druggies who own their own plane. I give, you take, this life that I forsake, etc.etc.

So take these anthems of loathing – of the self, and of everything else – and wrap them up in big rock gestures. Give me fuel, give me fire, give me 50 foot flames leaping out from the drum riser, give me flashpots, explosions, singalong choruses, 50,000 voices replicating every last guitar lick with their offkey voices, give me a handful of crazies in the pit, exorcising themselves of their inner demons. Give me flags from all countries, converging on these isles, this cold field where we are united by our solitude, and give me something more than all this. Show me rock legends, mining their past, performing only three songs from their past twelve years, and some seventeen from the first six years. It’s like seeing The Rolling Stones – but four as fast, four times as heavy, four times as vital. It’s not some crap stadium jukebox cabaret, despite their undoubtedly nostalgic selection of songs and their dogged insistence on playing juvenilia such as “Seek And Destroy” and “No Remorse.”

Some people need this in their lives. A sound that recognises their pain and tells us, that despite how we feel, that when you feel alone, you’re not alone. There is comfort in being sad. Community in the anger.

So sure, you get dunderheads in their fifties, in their denim jackets and faded, old t-shirts. Their hair combed over, the thinning strands disappearing from the centre like polar icecaps, migrating to distant places. You get dunderheads in their teens, and their preteens, wearing their newly-purchased event shirts, going to see Metallica with Daddy. My dad was never as cool as this – though, I’d like to point out – the idea of going to a gig with my Dad is really, erm, somewhat frightening. If my Dad liked it I couldn’t, by definition, also like it. One must have something to rebel against. Even rebellion is some form of conformity. Everyone does it.

And so here we are. A big, rock band, who have no right to be this good – nudging as they are their forties – who still play their hearts out. Seriously, you cannot play music like this, if you didn’t believe in it. It’s physically, mentally demanding. And dark. Too dark to coast your way through as if you were the fucking Stones or someone.

And, despite the tight, military accuracy of delivery and the united, brotherly vibe that the band give – this fiercely loyal machine of musical soldiers battling against their own demons, and seemingly everyone else’s – the fact that they play only two songs from their most recent album, the challenging, raw St.Anger, gives the set an oddly nostalgic feel. And makes one feel, almost, that they lack the courage of their convictions, which, given the sheer, absolute purity of vision of the St.Anger record, makes me think that the Metallica live prospect these days is all about the glories of the past, and not about the present.

So sure, Metallica rock like bastards. If you like them the only way to truly realise the potential of Metallica is to see them live. It’s their home. Their environment. The one place that they achieve all the things they promise.

If that’s what you want.

After a final, disturbingly extended, “Enter Sandman”, the black night falls on Reading. The field empties of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the stage glows like an empty, hollow halo, in the naked spotlights, a mass of land ravaged by men. This is the land we give our children to inherit : a land of rubbish, a land where there is no tomorrow, only today, a land where the selfish prosper, the selfless suffer, and the meek inherit shit.

A land then, that Metallica fought against, and out of. Survival. The denial of feeling to prevent feeling. The raw wound of a world that is neither cruel nor uncruel, but merely unfeeling. And the roar we held with Metallica is that of a primal cry of those who fight against the cruelty of the world.

As night turns into morning turn into day, and as exhaustion turns into insomnia turns into the place beyond sleep, the huddled many amass on the camp site. The fire crackers. The fires. The torn down lighting, the fire engines, the riot squads and policemen. The first train – no longer the usual 3am service to London Waterloo – but the 5.54am via Clapham Junction. A dull, tired commuter train with naked, harsh light of cheap striplighting. The dull, exhausted slouch of festivalgoers trying to get offsite in the small hours.

This is England. A land built on tick, on half-rate, cut-price coupons, of make-do, of mend, of second-hand, hand-me-downs, poor, cruel service, of ignorant masses ignored and kept uninformed, of service with a sneer, of overpriced shit in the shops nobody wants, and a land where we’re shamed into feeling privileged to pay a fortune for fuckall. It’s no life for a man to live.

And in a cruel world, only the cruel, or the kind, survive. We try, we fail, but isn’t the fact that we try and we fail better than not trying, better than not failing, better than a life unlived? That’s the thing that makes man better the beats ; awareness, curiousity, the desire to see what’s beyond the next mountain, the next day, into the next life, the future, the world we can make. That’s where we go from here. To the future. To the human race. To justice for all.

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