V Festival - Hylands Park, Chelmsford - 18&19/8/07
4/5
By: Christiana Spens
It started like this. Sometime Basement Club starlets Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong were playing the Virgin Sessions stage in the afternoon on Saturday, after Bella and I had arrived, pitched our tent (all by ourselves this time), bought our cider, and frolicked through the hay grass and mud finding our way to the music and glory. We went and watched and danced at the front, trying to make eye contact with the drummer. I'd met the guitarist once before, when he was wearing plaid trousers, and the whole thing was subsequently blissful, just as it was this time, with the different trousers. A bunch of inebriated fourteen year olds behind us did some weird dance, which seemed appropriate in the shady tent, far cooler than the sunny mass outside.
Joe Lean's set had jinged, janged, jonged. After, we found them and had fun taking Polaroid photographs together. More fun even than watching Kanye West, which had its charms, but was pretty tiresome after a while when you realise he's just playing other people's songs and rapping some faint bravado over the top. We left, without trying to find him to take Polaroids with.
Babyshambles, however, played a mesmerizing and touching set which held the crowd in adoration, singing for a friendly grunger with rose petals scattered and sun beaming down on the scrum below. The sweat of strangers, the songs of innocence and of experience... Amorous and glamorous, down and out and dirty, with French girls and flags in the background, Peter has not been on better form since the good old days.
Such was our desire to get a little closer, and without the elite passes required, we pretended we were people other than we were and found an opening in the fence, sneaked through into another backstage area, then another, eluding all who should have stopped me running over the silver and grass... I met Peter Doherty after his set, and talked for a moment amid the movement and flashes. He had a Union Jack draped over his left shoulder, and beautiful eyes. He seemed very together actually, with composure mixed with perpetual rebellious sublimity.
No one else in music today has the nonchalant poise of the man. He has the eyes of a poet, and no one else I saw at V or any other festival this year had that. There are poseurs all over the place, but no other eyes as charming or as sad, as carefree or impassioned. I've seen that sort of expression only a few times in my life. Usually you see it in people who are much older and world-weary: Artists my mother used to interview (I'd sit in sometimes when I was younger and my mother was researching art books - they'd talk about Paris and paint and pot) - pictures of Fitzgerald - the occasional lost boy on a bus round Camden - My father looking into the melancholic distance in Scotland. It's rare to see that gaze in a festival.
Of course sometimes that expression is mistaken for something drug-induced - something else... Something low... But those judgments are made by people blinded by the flash, their own flash. The truth is that the boy has eyes that can see clearly, no matter the rose tinted trips and the clouds of dope. They are eyes that mirror the things on which his gaze falls. Which makes them sad eyes, and happy eyes, mocking and careless, passionate and romantic, asleep and a-stoned. Which makes him an artist.
"I sneaked all the way backstage just to see you," I told him toward the end of our conversation.
"To see me?" he smiled back, his eyes glittering, his voice soft and tired and beautiful.
"Yeah,"
"Thank you," he smiled with mocking eloquence.
I felt forlorn a little, standing round the trailers of the other bands, not wanting to see anyone else particularly, 'What Katy Did' playing softly in my head.
Bella then pretended to be the Bobby Gillespie's wife and spun a whole story about babies and late nights and love. She was actually pretending to be pregnant, and after much discussion with some official, decided on "Gigi Gillespie if it's a girl."
For her faux husband's band, Primal Scream, we managed to get on to the stage, stood with Jarvis Cocker on the sidelines watching their set, a triumph of and colour, the mass of euphoric crowds below cast in pink light. We danced, trying to avoid the red wine Jarvis was swigging.
We ran to another stage (ran all the way, which was a long way) to see Bright Eyes, only to find, collapsed on something metal backstage, that he hadn't shown up. Rodrigo Y Gabriella were playing, being brilliant again, before chats with The Thrills, in fine form, about literature and Dublin, Joyce and cigarettes, love and war, paris and Manhattan.
We were about to leave for our campsite, those Thrills were about to leave for Stafford, and were moving outside, when a huge Transformers robot appeared. It was very surreal: it started robot-singing to the small group of Thrills, a guitar-playing fragment of Jet and Hugh from The Kooks (who were having much fun as their anthemic singalongapop found a perfect home amidst the V audience as we strolled through their set between Primal Scream and the absent Conor Oberst) and some others, picking out individuals and singing the appropriately mocking or cute songs. The Transformer turned and serenaded me with "Lady in Red" because I was wearing a red dress....
When we were walking back to camp, though, I was mildly disillusioned to see a man taking off the amazingly convincing robot costume.
In the morning it was raining which was sad, but I'd been to 3 (and a half) festivals in the past month or so and seen no rain so I couldn't really complain. Men from Brixton gave me sausages, and we talked about The Cure. I was away for some time. The rain laid off for the time we stayed watching the Goo Goo Dolls, who had assembled a huge crowd of fans for so early in the morning. Both the ground beneath us, and the band we were watching, got dry pretty fast.
We were both really tired from our thrilling previous day so weren't going anywhere particularly fast. We went to see Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who shone from afar and wore a great sparkling blue dress, in which she did some cute moves. Her sound was soothing for my hangover.
The sound 
The Cribs made wasn't. But that didn't matter. They possess a fun, raucous energy to be reckoned with, playing the crowds with chutzpah - so much more wide awake than I was.
We gave KT Tunstall a listen. She went to my school in Scotland, so I feel a loyalty. Girl nailed it. 
A relaxing soundtrack, cute melodies and the kind of music that doesn't impose too much, she brought a sort of sunshine to otherwise grey Sunday skies.
It was becoming clear, despite the presence of big guns like Kasabian (perhaps the quintessential V band for 2007), that Saturday was the better of the two days. Saturday was magical - I was so mesmerized by all that had happened, all we had heard, that the mud couldn't dampen my spirit.
It was a perfect end to V actually. It was still raining, and felt like November rather than August, the wind was blustering, but I felt content that we had been to a brilliant festival, perhaps the most fun festival in a Summer of Love I shall never forget, hypnotized by the languorous charm of Pete Doherty, the free-spirited Thrills, the magnificent Primal Scream in particular. I'm still in that cloud as I write this, sad the tour busses left on Saturday night, sort of wishing I'd just gone to Stafford with them.
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