A Photographic Memory

This past week has been tinged with nostalgia (an insinuatingly pervasive condition), though I’m not sure it was that or fear-of-missing-out that induced me to tune in to Glastonbury on the TV. It certainly wasn’t the acts themselves, none of which is on my list of favourites, past or present. I sampled the Foo Fighters, but ten minutes of the singer’s unintelligible screaming was all I could endure. I tried again, with Ed Sheeran and, although he accomplished a lot more with a lot less, even his talent turned tedious after half an hour. Maybe you have to be there to get it. In any case, the music belongs to a younger generation – and one that likes to capture everything on phones.

Shunning the TV I went to a live gig more attuned to my vintage – the Steely Dan copy-band called Nearly Dan, which is pleasingly faithful to the original, especially when you close your eyes. The audience comprised enthusiastic, mature fans, most of whom were able to remain standing, at least until the interval. However, a younger chap immediately in front of me hoisted a phone above his head and proceeded to film the act. After a while, I objected that he was blocking my view and distracting me from the performance. He desisted without protest and, soon afterwards, slunk off elsewhere, but what had he hoped to gain by recording thus?

Now that everyone has a video recorder in their pocket, filming is no longer the exclusive realm of professionals: the next day, at the cinema, I watched a ‘film’ which, apart from one short sequence, was shot entirely on phones – and not very well, at that. It was Andrew Kotting’s Edith Walks, an unscripted, unstructured video-journal of him and a few friends walking, in fancy dress, from Waltham Abbey, where some of King Harold’s body-parts are said to be interred, to St. Leonard’s-on-Sea, where there is a statue of Harold dying in the embrace of his wife/lover, Edith Swan-Neck. I could have done that, I thought, (except that I didn’t) and if Kotting can persuade people to pay to see his videos in cinemas, as opposed to airing them on YouTube, perhaps there are commercial opportunities awaiting swathes of hibernating content embedded in billions of SD cards around the world. Maybe there will be a release soon of Nearly Dan Live: Uncut and Rudely Interrupted.

I tried once more with Glastonbury but the music interested me much less than the presence of contemporaries – celebrities such as John Snow and Jeremy Corbyn – men who might be expected not to share the musical taste of their children and grandchildren. But they may have attended for other reasons: Glastonbury is not an exclusively musical event whereas (cue nostalgia) Woodstock and the Isle of Wight most certainly were. It was at the end of August 1969 that I took the ferry from Portsmouth to join 150,000 other music fans on the IOW. A major draw, for me, was Bob Dylan who, until then, had been missing-rumoured-dead following a motorcycle accident. Fortunately, he re-surfaced and chose to play IOW rather than Woodstock. (I know all this now because of the internet: at the time I was clueless.) I remember seeing Jimi Hendrix and Emerson, Lake & Palmer as well but, thanks again to the internet, I know that they weren’t there until the following year – which is strange because I don’t recall going then.

My presence in 1969, however, is not in doubt. I was the only one of my crew who possessed a camera and, among the few shots I took (they were expensive, remember), there is one of the distant stage and, with the aid of a magnifying glass, you can make out 2^nd Isle of Wight Festival of Music 1969 written on the proscenium arch. I must have run out of film at the 1970 Festival.