Maybe I’m just better off not being cool
I‘The Electric Picnic was actually an oasis of calm after the kids’ party’
WENT to the Electric Picnic for the first time on Sunday. Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t slum it. A bunch of us chipped in for a driver to bring us down and collect us and I was home tucked up in bed by 1am. Indeed, to add to the bourgeois nature of my festival experience, before I headed down, I supervised a child’s birthday party in a soft play centre that was hell on earth. The Electric Picnic was actually an oasis of calm after the kids’ party.
The reason I went this year, having managed to miss it for so many years, was mainly because I have this sentimental connection to the melancholy disco music of a band called New Order. I will always make an effort to see them when they are around and I’ll even travel to England to see them the odd time. New Order attract a diehard type of fan and it is nice to be among other fans. Even if, in England, my fellow devotees can tend to be ageing football hooligans. But still, we have a tacit understanding of each other, a shared history with this band. In a sense, I am among my own at a New Order concert. I won’t bore you with my thoughts on the gig. I have many and they are deeply involved. It rained heavily, but I enjoyed it.
More importantly, I realised something about myself down there. I wouldn’t say I stuck out like a sore thumb. There were many like me: grown wet adults who’d had a few pints, wandering around amiably, seeing what the kids are up to. And the kids were generally very nice. But as I walked around, I realise something. I am not cool. And I’ve never been cool.
Mainly, I think I’ve never been cool because I do not have a cool temperament. I am a fairly hotblooded, emotional, enthusiastic person. My friends used to refer to me as the giant baby, such was my childlike enthusiasm for things when I was younger — and my sensitive nature. And to be cool is not just about having a beard or wearing a hat or smoking a joint or whatever. It is about being cool literally, laid back and detached and relaxed.
I am not those things. I am too involved and too tense. It would be fair to say that many of the things I would have done and been interested in throughout my life would have been things that suggested I was cool. But I still wasn’t cool. I like music and I like a lot of alternative music. But I can still see the beauty in a fat Justin Timberlake bassline.
I was fed a diet of alternative literature by my older brothers from an early age. And I like to think I still seek out new things and contrary things. I have gone through phases of wearing ridiculous clothes, even though body shape and budget have prevented me from dressing too trendily. But I was never cool.
But down there at the Electric Picnic, as I looked around at cool people, something struck me. Maybe I am better off having never been cool, because cool is quite conventional. Cool has more rules than being uncool.
And conventionally cool people are too worried about what other people think of them to be really cool. And there is nothing more uncool than middle-aged people trying to be cool. But we do these days. It used to be that you could vaguely forget about being cool as you got older and we were all just ourselves. But now the tyranny of cool never goes away. And all these grown-up people are trying desperately to show they are different by all looking vaguely the same, expressing their individuality through the medium of hats and beards.
But how free are they really in their hearts? How radical are they really in their thoughts? How open-minded are they really in their outlook? And is that not what we should really be striving for? And I watched New Order, who have always somehow managed to be the epitome of uncool cool, who brought techno home to Manchester before anyone dreamt of acid house, who married the exuberance of disco to the melancholy of indie, who avoided doing interviews, who didn’t do encores, who casually released hit singles that never appeared on albums, who used conceptual art and design on their sleeves, who never, ever played the game, but just did what felt right to them, inventing the future in the process. And they came out on Sunday night in a rainy field, now well into their fifties, and just hunkered down and played the most majestic pop music you’ve ever heard. And that, really, was my lesson in cool from the Electric Picnic.