Читать книгу Confessions of a Showbiz Reporter - Holly Forrest - Страница 11

A few weeks after joining the magazine, having made a considerable amount of coffee and run endless errands, I finally got to do what I had been hired to do in the first place: report from some of that summer’s music festivals. With a camera and notebook in hand, I set out to get a snapshot of the fashions and fads going on in remote fields that season, unaware that I was about to make a huge discovery about my career choice.

There are more festivals now than ever. Some are legendary, like Glastonbury and Reading; others are out of the way in small towns and normally feature a seventies dad rocker as a headline act. Every summer we have ample opportunities to pop on our jean shorts and cowboy hats, neck pints of warm cider and chill out in sunny fields for a weekend listening to bands we’ve never heard of. Sounds blissful, right?

Everyone knows that Glastonbury is amazing. Thousands of revellers gathered in a historic setting, all united by a shared love of music and partying. A loved-up crowd singing along to soaring anthems on a balmy midsummer night is a magical experience – at least, this is certainly what I had been told at school by my more adventurous mates, those girls whose parents weren’t quite as panicky as my own and who seemingly lived a much more exciting life than mine by being allowed to travel miles to gigs. When I first got the job at the magazine, knowing that I was heading for the festivals, I couldn’t wait to make up for lost time.

But this, it turned out, is not how it works for a showbiz reporter. It’s hard enough as a regular ticket holder to plough through the mud and crowds to get from the dance tent on one edge of the camp to the main stage at the other in time for the headline act. As a showbiz journalist, with recording equipment and a deadline, you can multiply that difficulty by ten.

When you work in an industry that is – for most people – a leisure pursuit, you learn something very quickly: what was once your hobby is now your bread and butter. What you once did to chill out is now your job. That’s not to say I don’t still enjoy listening to music, watching the TV or going to the cinema as a pastime; it is, however, difficult to switch off completely. Maybe I’ve met the actor up there on the cinema screen and, since they gave me really boring answers to my questions, I’m finding it difficult to imagine them as a charismatic action hero (I’m talking about you, Nic Cage). Or perhaps the love song that I’m listening to, all heartfelt and emotional, is hard to swallow since its singer sadly seemed little more than a hard-nosed businesswoman when I met her (and that’s you, Christina Aguilera).

It was during my outings to festivals that summer that I had my first taste of this. I was in work-mode, while seemingly everyone around me was soaking up the sun and smoking weed. I spent more time worrying about whether I’d get the interviews I needed than I did actually kicking back and enjoying the gigs.

The schedule of the festival season soon became engrained in my brain – and it still is. In recent years, the Isle of Wight festival, reborn after its legendary status in the 1970s, has been kicking things off in mid-June, but it’s still Glastonbury a week or so later that really marks the start of a long summer in wellington boots. Then there’s the riotous T in the Park in Kinross-shire, the arty Latitude in a Suffolk forest, the highly commercial V in both Chelmsford and south Staffordshire, the ear-splitting Reading and Leeds festivals, that take place over the same August Bank Holiday weekend as the rave-tastic Creamfields, and then it’s all wrapped up at the quirky, boutique Bestival, which takes place back on the Isle of Wight where things all began ten weeks earlier. Not to mention a huge number of smaller festivals around the country and a plethora of branded events in virtually every park in London.

Despite the fact that it’s never quite the same when you’re attending them ‘on the job’, some of my experiences at these events were nothing short of incredible; bands always seem to try that bit harder at festivals – with such a variety of people in the crowd, they need to.

But there’s one particular experience, a few years into my career, which will stay with me for ever. It was 2002; Rod Stewart was headlining Glastonbury on the Sunday and I’d spent most of the day on the phone trying to arrange an interview. Each time the answer from a record-company minion was the same: ‘Maybe. Ask me later and I’ll tell you where we are with things.’ I’d walked from stage to stage trying to track down Rod’s PR team, but to no avail. After a bit more searching and several more unsuccessful phone calls, the sun began to set over the Pilton hills.

With Rod presumably warming up for his set by gargling broken glass, the chances of meeting with my mum’s favourite were frankly looking slim. I’d rung up a huge mobile bill and stressed myself out for nothing. With a heavy heart – and a resolution to erase ‘Maggie May’ from my iPod – I hung up my microphone for the day and headed over to the legendary Healing Fields, which were seemingly at least a mile away from the razzmatazz of the main stage. Determined to forget about work, I sat back with a ‘special’ chocolate brownie purchased from a stall nearby run by someone who frankly looked like a witch (albeit a nice witch), and basked in the final glow of the sun. Seemingly from nowhere, a girl about my age came up to me and offered to tattoo my hand with henna (feeling spontaneous, I accepted, obviously). A few feet in front of us, a group of women, all dressed in long white flowing robes, gathered in a circle and started to sing some sort of ancient madrigal about flowers and honey. As the luscious chocolate started working its magic, this song began to sound like The Greatest Thing I’d Ever Heard. Quite suddenly – and for the first time – I felt what the real Glastonbury was all about. Far away from the feisty crowds and the fast food and Rod Stewart and – crucially – reporting, I was finally relaxing into the true, love-filled, ancient spirit of the festival.

Back in London the next day the tattoo looked awful, of course, and my boss was highly annoyed that I had no interview with Rod for her to run. But that one moment away from the madness, away from the pressure, away from the aching legs and missed deadlines of being a showbiz journalist at a festival, was definitely worth it.

Some other favourite festival moments? Coldplay’s first Glastonbury turn in 1999, when they were still just four nerdy university students who loved indie music, was a fabulous statement of intent. Jay-Z’s Glastonbury headlining nine years later was a much-needed injection of American swagger into the West Country cow fields. And while I might not have been old enough to see the legendary turn by Nirvana at Reading in 1992, every time I’ve seen former member Dave Grohl headline a festival with the Foo Fighters it’s been pure energy, passion and sweat. (Dave gives great interview.)

Of course, there are always musos who’ve been to a lot more festivals than I have, and each will relish describing to me – a mere reporter – a favourite that was supposedly ‘the greatest gig ever’ (‘What?! You didn’t see Amy Winehouse perform with a bunch of Indonesian nose flautists on the Save the Rainforest stage at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning back in 2007? And you call yourself a music fan?!’). Expert I may not be, but I still appreciate a good quality gig. I’m sure many of the bearded boys at Glastonbury were none too pleased when Beyoncé brought some pop bling to the farm in 2011 but personally, I couldn’t get enough, though. Showbiz for me has always had talent and glamour going hand-in-hand.

Maybe that’s another reason why working the festivals wasn’t exactly a career highlight: wading through a muddy field at midnight when you haven’t washed for 48 hours, you haven’t eaten anything except a dodgy burger from a food van and you’ve got a deadline looming, can never be described as glamorous. The backstage press area where reporters lurk might boast proper toilets (I certainly don’t care about the ‘festival’ experience when it comes to sanitation – I will defend my right to a toilet that actually flushes), but even home comforts can’t get you an interview with Rod Stewart any more easily.