Returning to the Electric Picnic on Friday after an absence of a decade, I eased myself back in via one of the site’s more civilised suburbs, Mindfield, where the emphasis is on cerebral stimulation.
Confirming that the world had changed since the last time I was there, one of the keynote debates was about AI, with journalist Catherine Sanz, PR guru Paul Hayes, and others exchanging their visions of the technology’s near-future.
The insights were genuinely educational although, as is often the problem with education, I felt less sure of everything afterwards, and am still in two minds whether to relax or panic.
Out in the main arena, meanwhile, the picnic was obviously much bigger than it used to be, the 75,000 crowd slightly oppressive at times. But some things hadn’t changed. With 27 stages and a cacophony of competing noise and spectacle, the EP remains a festival of distraction, where it’s hard to concentrate on anything.
Innocence and mischief – Desmond O’Neill on the humorist and social commentator Erich Kästner
Rhyme and reason — Alison Healy on Longfellow’s Wreck of the Hesperus
Poet of the Troubles – Oliver O’Hanlon on Padraic Fiacc
Hitler’s Irish volunteers – John Mulqueen on two Irish POWs who volunteered for the Waffen-SS
The only act I committed to for a full set – partly because I had heard of her before, which was not something I could say about most of the line-up – was Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Her audience must have been 80 per cent female. And if not murder on the dancefloor, it was borderline manslaughter. But it was strangely enjoyable when you got into it, so I didn’t press charges.
***
To be at one music festival the weekend before a 7.30am Monday medical appointment might be considered unfortunate. Two seemed like carelessness. Yet there I was on Saturday night in Slane, talked by another friend into an attending an event called Groovefest.
Slane’s better-known musical happenings tend to be on the left bank of the river Boyne, at the castle. This one was on the right, in Rock Farm. And it was tiny in comparison to the castle extravaganzas, with barely 100 in attendance.
Many seemed to be recovering ravers, for whom it was still 1995. But in some ways, they made even Mindfield look uncivilised. Before the music started, there was a cocktail hour followed by dinner. Eco-friendliness was general. So was democracy. Even the washing-up was organised by committee.
It’s true that the music, which I’m probably wrong in calling “techno”, made me nostalgic for Murder on the Dancefloor and other songs with words. Even so, one thing led to another. Before I knew it, I was watching the sunrise over the Boyne Valley.
It was too late to go to bed then. Besides which, there was a walking tour of Slane scheduled for early Sunday afternoon, although that proved somewhat shorter than planned.
It started at the old Protestant church, designed by Francis Johnston (better known for the GPO), then proceeded the 100 metres or so to the “Four Sisters”: the near-identical houses that command the village crossroads.
From there, as our guide Ben said, we would “ideally” have travelled up the road to the Francis Ledwidge cottage and museum. But that was deemed too far after a hard night. We went to the pub instead.
***
By poignant coincidence, Sunday was the eve of Ledwidge’s birthday. He was born on August 19th, 1887, and died 29 summers later in Belgium, killed instantly by a German shell during the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917.
One of his last poems, Home, was an affectionate remembrance of Slane: “A burst of sudden wings at dawn/Faint voices in a dreamy noon/Evenings of mist and murmurings/And nights with rainbows of the moon/And through these things a wood-way dim/And waters dim and slow sheep seen/On uphill paths that wind away/Through summer sounds and harvest green.”
At the time of his death, Ledwidge had been helping build a road, at a much-bombarded place nicknamed “Hell’s Corner”. He had just stopped for tea when a shell dropped beside him. During a tour of the first World War battlefields a few years back, I stood at the spot and spared him a thought.
***
Despite attending two music festivals, the loudest thing I experienced all weekend was my Monday morning MRI, for which I arrived bleary-eyed at 7.26am.
The nurses give you earphones before sliding you into the tunnel of sound. But you’re still exposed to an appalling racket of electromagnetic beeps and bangs and buzzers, repeated with manic urgency in bursts of up to several minutes.
It’s an incidental result of the Lorenz forces that scan patients’ bodies by modifying the precessional frequency of their hydrogen atoms, apparently. I believe techno music does something similar.
Mind you, MRI noise comes with lyrics. Or so your brain thinks, thanks to a phenomenon called pareidolia. This causes the random noises to resolve themselves into apparent words so that you begin to hear, for example, sounds like “mad”, or “man”, or even “mad man”, over and over. Or may that’s just me.
Like many Electric Picnic events, the MRI’s set lasted about 45 minutes. But noisy as it was, after the weekend in question, it gradually took on the qualities of a lullaby.
By the time the nurses came to slide me out again, I was nearly asleep.