Brighten My Northern Sky

Saturday
The crowd call your name, they love you all the same

Stansted Airport has its own ring of steely-armed policemen patrolling outside and within waiting to shoot anyone who looks a bit Brazillian. Still, Fosca fear no terrorists, we travelled on 11^th October 01 and we travel again on 7/7/7, despite this being the number of Allah or Muhammed (PBUH) or something. Thursday, David and I went out with Heike and her American friend who, unlike Bruce Willis, was happy to travel from the US to Terrorised London. But he is from San Francisco, which I imagine to be one big long Stoke Newington Church Street. With trams. We took him past the Haymarket. I can’t believe that anyone actually managed to park in Central London at all (no doubt the car was driven in after 7.30 p.m. to avoid the congestion charge) – maybe the fellow had more of a grudge against car clampers than the customers of Tiger Tiger.

Anyway, we arrive despite the best efforts of our Eagle Cabs taxi driver who hadn't written down our addresses, and get through the checks with no problems apart from Ryan Air charging Tom £38 to check in his pedals. Kate’s keyboard, for which we have an extra seat, is even allowed on board. I discover that whilst you can’t take 100 mls of tap water through security, you can take an empty bottle and fill it up at the water fountain. Hurrah for the War On Terror. On board the aircraft, I ask the cabin boy where the toilet is – “It’ll cost you £10 to use it,” he replies, smirkingly. To be honest, I’m surprised that Ryan Air haven’t installed a € slot on the door.

It’s only when we arrive in Göteburg that we find out that they have fucked us up after all. The £38 was actually a charge for them to lose the bag of pedals. Having waited so long at the conveyor belt and then arguing with the unsympathetic staff, we have missed the airbus and the next one isn’t for 4 hours, necessitating 2 taxis, rather more expensive than the money we’ve been given for the bus. Ryan Air strikes again.

Arrive at Nils Erikson train/bus station and spend 2 hours in Nils Coffee House watching the Swedes go by, eating cashewnötter and Plopp and admiring the pine fixtures and the fonts on the platform doors which look like the warehouse aisles in Ikea: I expect to see a Billy bookcase or a Tvätt storage system rather than a bus to Stockholm or Lund. Real trees planted in the station mean real sparrows twittering around looking for crumbs.

I have put lots of Swedish music on my (Dave’s) MP3 player but it’s Nick Drake who seems apt as we travel through the flat green landscape of fields, fjörds and small bright houses. We stop at Åmål, where the film Show Me Love was based. “Fucking Åmål,” I exclaim, forgetting that I’m using my Out Loud voice. It doesn’t look that bad. Maybe Lukas Moodysson’s next film could be Shitey Swindon, or Rotten Reading.

Finally arrive at Säffle, pronounced Seffluh (and not Safful as I told everyone who asked where we were going), and are picked up Frederich who takes us to our stripped-down apartment. There is a coffee machine but no coffee, a shower but no towels and strange stains on the bed. I hope St Christopher weren’t staying here last night. We arrive at the Festival a mere 13 hours after we set off. Rather than a farmers field, it is in a sports venue: camping area and stage on the running track, backstage is the indoor football pitch. Fosca recline, supine on the Astroturf.

We have our own picnic area, an artistes' toilet (the changing rooms) a tray of kung, some out of date wine and a food voucher. The only vegetarian thing is pasta which the women in the catering caravan argue over before adding some salad, nuts, dressing and throwing in a cheese roll for good measure, or perhaps apology. We sit and drink and are approached by Kasper the friendly Norwegian, accompanied by a trampy-looking drunk with stains and dribble down his front. Gradually, we realise that this is Dan Treacy. He sits down and proceeds to drink our Kung, opening one can, discarding it after a sip and then opening another, like a cut-price Judy Garland. I hide the tray of beer under a picnic table. Another drunk man draws near and says he wants to put out a Fosca record. He has the opening line of “No-one buys CDs anymore and no-one buys Fosca CDs”. A TVPs fan comes up to Dan T and tells him that he changed her life. He says something slightly mean to her and then asks if he can borrow her Parka. No, she replies. I was a mod before you was a mod, he tells her. Honestly it’s as if Stephen Pastel started pissing in front of you.

I wander around for a bit, spotting familiar faces amongst the drunken ones including Erika who co-sponsored our last Swedish jaunt. Swedish festival garb is skinny jeans and rubber boots, apart from one group in white shorts and Panama hats. A boy in red Wellingtons waltzes to Kinky Boots. Boys with perfect cheekbones hug each other and dance around to Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before, a song released before they were born. People shout: "Are you having a laff” at one other (I’m convinced that Swedish is actually the Swede’s second language). David bumps into Ara from America and Sarah, one of the girls who ran the Strange Fruit Club. We are moved up to the headline act as the organisers are worried about Dan T, but then bumped down again as Dan T objects. Watch Kissing Mirrors whose flautist/singer soundchecks with It’s a Fine Day by Jane and Barton. Apparently she once interviewed us but no-one, including her, can remember. I watch swallows and swifts swoop in the light night air and spot Jens Lekman at the back of the audience. A girl walks by in a Sunnydale t-shirt and another Swede resembles Spike. The star of the video for Confused and Proud jigs along to the band in pink leggings and a yellow umbrella. There is a party going on in the toilet block with Happy Mondays on the stereo and Dan T holding court. Backstage, Dickon jogs a circuit of the track with Prefab Sprout’s Cars and Girls as his motivational music. The next song is a horrendous mash-up of Uptown Girl and Loveshack.

I want some crisps but the only thing I’m allowed with my meal ticket is sausage and mash – or just mash in my case. Or just Smash in this case. There are also free refills of coffee which is fortunate as I was ready for bed about 3 hours ago and there are still 2 bands to go before us. Watch Cats on Fire who are the only none English/Swedish band: they are Finndie Pop and sound like Mousefolk vs Brighter. They are all very pretty: Morrissey would kill to have the lead boy in his backing band. "Whitest festival ever," he announces, not in a National Front Disco way.

Sweden is England through the looking glass, the weather is similar but the air is clean. The people look English but are taller and more beautiful. The food is as badly prepared as in England but with weird accoutrements. The written language is full of umlauts but, with our shared Viking/Germanic history, it sounds almost the same. The youth culture is comparable, but the people are slightly crazed. It’s not like going to France where all is strange; here everything is familiar but rather off kilter.

After about 157 hours of the last two bands, being accosted by drunk and/or crazy people, being munched on by midges and mosquitoes, trying to stay drunk yet awake on a mixture of wine & coca-cola, and failing to pluck up the courage to speak to Jens L, we finally take to the stage and it all goes well but that’s not hard when people are dancing like mad and shouting that they love you. Above the heads of the audience, beyond the last row, past the soundman in his makeshift sound tent of the back of a car and an umbrella, beyond the tents and the fir tree plantation is the motorway. Blue lights flicker. Being in the moment is difficult; I’m always thinking about what’s gone before or what’s to come, but somehow floating out of the moment makes it all the more real, thinking about the moment makes me realise that I’m in it. Ah, it’s all worth it, it’s always worth it.

I have had a lot of wine. And vodka. And coca-cola and coffee. And Smash.

if you have ever wanted to see Dickon playing air guitar or bonding with a girls' world head on a stick then this is the time.

[Error: close lj-embed tag without open tag]

Part 2

Alternatively if you want to hear me speak Swedish, then this is the short clip for you:

 

We’ve been up for 22 hours and we still have to see the TVPs murder their old hits. Backstage, in the flickering dark, I watch David trying to step over the football, Ronaldo C-style, and kick the ball into the goal from the halfway line. I start to find the Astroturf a comfortable sleeping ground but Johann turns up and makes us an offer we can't refuse - to be taken back to the apartment. As we trudge across the sodden field, I espy Mr Lekman, a romantic ghostly figure standing solitary on the sidelines, and I bound over to blurble at him. It was a good show, he says, and I'm surprised to find that this angelic-voiced man, whose face is replicated on the ceilings of churches in Italy, is also friendly and kind - everything you want from an indie-pop hero. Or just pop-hero in alternate universe Sweden where sensitive pale young men can become popstars.

Back at the flat I have had so much caffeine that I can’t sleep and don’t dream, just see horrible tableaux that I have to wake myself up from.

Sunday

Wake me without warning, it’s a jingle jangle morning

The train in the rain takes us, and the festival goers, back to Gothenburg. Again, the trains are like in England, but the legroom is larger and the food is edible. Eat a kanelbulle and a varm chokolad which I attempt to order in Swedish, but the woman only understands when I ask in English. At the station, we bump into Mr Lovejoy who comes to sit with us in our coffee shop where we overstay the 45 minute limit once more. At the airport Dickon looks at the moose-related souvenirs and the moose meat and I try to fall asleep on the chairs. No, they haven’t found Tom’s pedals.

Touch down at Stansted and walk through the miles of badly carpeted corridors and enter into many queues. No, they still haven’t found Tom’s pedals. The trains are all delayed and are only running to Tottenham Hale. And are still exorbitantly priced. Nearing London, they decide they are stopping at Seven Sisters rather than Tottenham so David and I get off, only to find out a) the tube and b) the local train service to Stoke N aren’t running. We end up getting a bus – we can travel half away across Sweden with no problems but getting 30 miles to our house is a ridiculous palaver.

 

Brighten My Northern Sky

Saturday
The crowd call your name, they love you all the same

Stansted Airport has its own ring of steely-armed policemen patrolling outside and within waiting to shoot anyone who looks a bit Brazillian. Still, Fosca fear no terrorists, we travelled on 11^th October 01 and we travel again on 7/7/7, despite this being the number of Allah or Muhammed (PBUH) or something. Thursday, David and I went out with Heike and her American friend who, unlike Bruce Willis, was happy to travel from the US to Terrorised London. But he is from San Francisco, which I imagine to be one big long Stoke Newington Church Street. With trams. We took him past the Haymarket. I can’t believe that anyone actually managed to park in Central London at all (no doubt the car was driven in after 7.30 p.m. to avoid the congestion charge) – maybe the fellow had more of a grudge against car clampers than the customers of Tiger Tiger.

Anyway, we arrive despite the best efforts of our Eagle Cabs taxi driver who hadn't written down our addresses, and get through the checks with no problems apart from Ryan Air charging Tom £38 to check in his pedals. Kate’s keyboard, for which we have an extra seat, is even allowed on board. I discover that whilst you can’t take 100 mls of tap water through security, you can take an empty bottle and fill it up at the water fountain. Hurrah for the War On Terror. On board the aircraft, I ask the cabin boy where the toilet is – “It’ll cost you £10 to use it,” he replies, smirkingly. To be honest, I’m surprised that Ryan Air haven’t installed a € slot on the door.

It’s only when we arrive in Göteburg that we find out that they have fucked us up after all. The £38 was actually a charge for them to lose the bag of pedals. Having waited so long at the conveyor belt and then arguing with the unsympathetic staff, we have missed the airbus and the next one isn’t for 4 hours, necessitating 2 taxis, rather more expensive than the money we’ve been given for the bus. Ryan Air strikes again.

Arrive at Nils Erikson train/bus station and spend 2 hours in Nils Coffee House watching the Swedes go by, eating cashewnötter and Plopp and admiring the pine fixtures and the fonts on the platform doors which look like the warehouse aisles in Ikea: I expect to see a Billy bookcase or a Tvätt storage system rather than a bus to Stockholm or Lund. Real trees planted in the station mean real sparrows twittering around looking for crumbs.

I have put lots of Swedish music on my (Dave’s) MP3 player but it’s Nick Drake who seems apt as we travel through the flat green landscape of fields, fjörds and small bright houses. We stop at Åmål, where the film Show Me Love was based. “Fucking Åmål,” I exclaim, forgetting that I’m using my Out Loud voice. It doesn’t look that bad. Maybe Lukas Moodysson’s next film could be Shitey Swindon, or Rotten Reading.

Finally arrive at Säffle, pronounced Seffluh (and not Safful as I told everyone who asked where we were going), and are picked up Frederich who takes us to our stripped-down apartment. There is a coffee machine but no coffee, a shower but no towels and strange stains on the bed. I hope St Christopher weren’t staying here last night. We arrive at the Festival a mere 13 hours after we set off. Rather than a farmers field, it is in a sports venue: camping area and stage on the running track, backstage is the indoor football pitch. Fosca recline, supine on the Astroturf.

We have our own picnic area, an artistes' toilet (the changing rooms) a tray of kung, some out of date wine and a food voucher. The only vegetarian thing is pasta which the women in the catering caravan argue over before adding some salad, nuts, dressing and throwing in a cheese roll for good measure, or perhaps apology. We sit and drink and are approached by Kasper the friendly Norwegian, accompanied by a trampy-looking drunk with stains and dribble down his front. Gradually, we realise that this is Dan Treacy. He sits down and proceeds to drink our Kung, opening one can, discarding it after a sip and then opening another, like a cut-price Judy Garland. I hide the tray of beer under a picnic table. Another drunk man draws near and says he wants to put out a Fosca record. He has the opening line of “No-one buys CDs anymore and no-one buys Fosca CDs”. A TVPs fan comes up to Dan T and tells him that he changed her life. He says something slightly mean to her and then asks if he can borrow her Parka. No, she replies. I was a mod before you was a mod, he tells her. Honestly it’s as if Stephen Pastel started pissing in front of you.

I wander around for a bit, spotting familiar faces amongst the drunken ones including Erika who co-sponsored our last Swedish jaunt. Swedish festival garb is skinny jeans and rubber boots, apart from one group in white shorts and Panama hats. A boy in red Wellingtons waltzes to Kinky Boots. Boys with perfect cheekbones hug each other and dance around to Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before, a song released before they were born. People shout: "Are you having a laff” at one other (I’m convinced that Swedish is actually the Swede’s second language). David bumps into Ara from America and Sarah, one of the girls who ran the Strange Fruit Club. We are moved up to the headline act as the organisers are worried about Dan T, but then bumped down again as Dan T objects. Watch Kissing Mirrors whose flautist/singer soundchecks with It’s a Fine Day by Jane and Barton. Apparently she once interviewed us but no-one, including her, can remember. I watch swallows and swifts swoop in the light night air and spot Jens Lekman at the back of the audience. A girl walks by in a Sunnydale t-shirt and another Swede resembles Spike. The star of the video for Confused and Proud jigs along to the band in pink leggings and a yellow umbrella. There is a party going on in the toilet block with Happy Mondays on the stereo and Dan T holding court. Backstage, Dickon jogs a circuit of the track with Prefab Sprout’s Cars and Girls as his motivational music. The next song is a horrendous mash-up of Uptown Girl and Loveshack.

I want some crisps but the only thing I’m allowed with my meal ticket is sausage and mash – or just mash in my case. Or just Smash in this case. There are also free refills of coffee which is fortunate as I was ready for bed about 3 hours ago and there are still 2 bands to go before us. Watch Cats on Fire who are the only none English/Swedish band: they are Finndie Pop and sound like Mousefolk vs Brighter. They are all very pretty: Morrissey would kill to have the lead boy in his backing band. "Whitest festival ever," he announces, not in a National Front Disco way.

Sweden is England through the looking glass, the weather is similar but the air is clean. The people look English but are taller and more beautiful. The food is as badly prepared as in England but with weird accoutrements. The written language is full of umlauts but, with our shared Viking/Germanic history, it sounds almost the same. The youth culture is comparable, but the people are slightly crazed. It’s not like going to France where all is strange; here everything is familiar but rather off kilter.

After about 157 hours of the last two bands, being accosted by drunk and/or crazy people, being munched on by midges and mosquitoes, trying to stay drunk yet awake on a mixture of wine & coca-cola, and failing to pluck up the courage to speak to Jens L, we finally take to the stage and it all goes well but that’s not hard when people are dancing like mad and shouting that they love you. Above the heads of the audience, beyond the last row, past the soundman in his makeshift sound tent of the back of a car and an umbrella, beyond the tents and the fir tree plantation is the motorway. Blue lights flicker. Being in the moment is difficult; I’m always thinking about what’s gone before or what’s to come, but somehow floating out of the moment makes it all the more real, thinking about the moment makes me realise that I’m in it. Ah, it’s all worth it, it’s always worth it.

I have had a lot of wine. And vodka. And coca-cola and coffee. And Smash.

if you have ever wanted to see Dickon playing air guitar or bonding with a girls' world head on a stick then this is the time.

[Error: close lj-embed tag without open tag]

Part 2

Alternatively if you want to hear me speak Swedish, then this is the short clip for you:

 

We’ve been up for 22 hours and we still have to see the TVPs murder their old hits. Backstage, in the flickering dark, I watch David trying to step over the football, Ronaldo C-style, and kick the ball into the goal from the halfway line. I start to find the Astroturf a comfortable sleeping ground but Johann turns up and makes us an offer we can't refuse - to be taken back to the apartment. As we trudge across the sodden field, I espy Mr Lekman, a romantic ghostly figure standing solitary on the sidelines, and I bound over to blurble at him. It was a good show, he says, and I'm surprised to find that this angelic-voiced man, whose face is replicated on the ceilings of churches in Italy, is also friendly and kind - everything you want from an indie-pop hero. Or just pop-hero in alternate universe Sweden where sensitive pale young men can become popstars.

Back at the flat I have had so much caffeine that I can’t sleep and don’t dream, just see horrible tableaux that I have to wake myself up from.

Sunday

Wake me without warning, it’s a jingle jangle morning

The train in the rain takes us, and the festival goers, back to Gothenburg. Again, the trains are like in England, but the legroom is larger and the food is edible. Eat a kanelbulle and a varm chokolad which I attempt to order in Swedish, but the woman only understands when I ask in English. At the station, we bump into Mr Lovejoy who comes to sit with us in our coffee shop where we overstay the 45 minute limit once more. At the airport Dickon looks at the moose-related souvenirs and the moose meat and I try to fall asleep on the chairs. No, they haven’t found Tom’s pedals.

Touch down at Stansted and walk through the miles of badly carpeted corridors and enter into many queues. No, they still haven’t found Tom’s pedals. The trains are all delayed and are only running to Tottenham Hale. And are still exorbitantly priced. Nearing London, they decide they are stopping at Seven Sisters rather than Tottenham so David and I get off, only to find out a) the tube and b) the local train service to Stoke N aren’t running. We end up getting a bus – we can travel half away across Sweden with no problems but getting 30 miles to our house is a ridiculous palaver.