Nobody can know exactly when West Kennet long barrow was built. According to English Heritage, who look after it, the low mound of stone and earth probably dates from around 3650 BC and was used as a tomb for around 40 individuals before being sealed up 1000 years later. It sits on a ridge of high ground not far from Avebury henge and Silbury Hill, part of a vast, rolling landscape of prairie-like fields and copses of trees moulded into humps by the wind across Salisbury Plain. Hungover a few weeks ago, I wandered up a groove worn into the grass on top of the ancient monument and lay down. The song of larks rolled through the blue overhead and I squinted against the sun to try and see them, but the glare was too much and I closed my eyes. Their melody tumbled on above me as the wind, strong yet warm on this high ridge, sent the grass rustling and gently lulled my frazzled mind. Those moments when you can feel sleep moving through your mind like a shallow tide whispering in over mudflats are some of the most psychedelic I know.
It was also the perfect mid-point to my weekend at Acid Horse, the festival that John and our pal Mark Pilkington run at a pub called The Barge, situated on the Kennet and Avon Canal in Wiltshire, a few miles from the long barrow, Avebury’s henge and Silbury Hill. The resonance of this astonishing landscape continues into The Barge, a Georgian building that must have a few rowdy stories to tell from its early life as a place in which people who worked the waters could wet the whistle. The ceiling of the pool room is painted with a cosmic mural of the local area in celebration of the crop circle scene that used to drink here. On the other side of the canal, however, displays at the crop circle museum insist that they couldn’t possibly have been made by human hands. Or feet. With boards. Which is how they were made.
Anyway, the snooze on the barrow was one of my favourite moments of the Acid Horse weekend, as much a part of the festival as Mohammad Syfkhan’s suited, relentless performance on the Friday night, Sophie Coletta’s stern techno summoning, or Kavus Torabi’s cosmic bliss. To my mind, time at festivals is best spent with one ear outside the music. The first music festival I ever went to was Reading in 1996. I was 18, and I did what 18-year-olds do – wander from band to band through the toxic smoke of litter bonfires. Even then, thrilled by seeing so many groups, I remember looking at the trains gliding past the site on the Great Western main line, and wishing I might be able to go somewhere else, just for a moment. I would have liked a walk along the nearby Thames, but we were hemmed in by a huge security fence, excursions forbidden. Since then, I realise if I look back at my decades of attending these events both as a punter and to work, what I remember most is the ephemera that surrounded the live sets, and how the two melded together.
I don’t really understand approaching music with a big list – I love railways, but it’s the aesthetics of infrastructure and technology within the experience of travel that fascinates me, and you’d never find me at the end of a platform ticking off locomotive numbers. The same applies to music. I would far rather spend my time exploring the culture of a town, city or countryside surrounding a festival site than face the endurance test of collecting bands while getting a headache from piss lager. It’s not that these experiences are better than the music, more that they can compliment it, giving a cultural, aesthetic or emotional hardcore on which to find my way deeper into the sound later on. It’s an approach that’s worked again and again. Wandering through a cemetery in the drenched calm following an epic summer thunderstorm and visiting various sites devoted to electrical pioneer Tesla was the perfect prelude to Kraftwerk at a festival in Zagreb. Watching the Arctic midnight sun dip towards the ocean over huge boulders cast way up onto the shore by winter gales gave a poignant context to Sea Power playing their Man Of Aran soundtrack at the fishing community of Traena in the far north of Norway. Avoiding the latest tedious Swedish equivalent to The Strokes or Norwegian Vines in favour of a trip with John to the Viking Ship Museum and Vigeland Sculpture Park outside Oslo was the perfect context in which to witness the first ever gig by Wardruna. Exploring ruined fortifications around Helsinki was an ideal amuse-bouche to encountering Mika Vainio late at night impersonating a disintegrating electrical substation in an old factory. Unprintable things that happen in Berlin set you up for the music later – or vice versa. And so on. It barely needs saying that just going for a walk and a sit down with open ears can tell you more about a place – and yourself – than dutifully watching a disparate bunch of hyped or nostalgia acts going through the motions.
I last went to Glastonbury in 2019 to do an event for my book Out Of The Woods. On the Thursday night, with the Pilton valley twinkling with tiny lights, it felt like perfection. Yet by the Saturday morning, after having to take huge detours in the infernal sun to avoid a massive crowd listening to the ear turd pour of The Wombats playing their Joy Division song, and having a nap disturbed by Idles chewing a ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirt and jabbering it out in craft beer spittle, I found myself wishing that the old railway line through the site had escaped Dr Beeching’s axe and might take me somewhere far more mind-expanding elsewhere.
At this year’s Acid Horse, the psychedelic doze on the ancient burial mound was the perfect sync with Kemper Norton‘s crunching together of roughneck dance music and Welsh hymns back at the barge later on. Last year, during a visit to the henge at Avebury, a group of woo-woo chancers pranced around playing bongos, apparently “opening a portal” between two of the sarsen stones. Each to their own, I suppose, but for me the only portal opened near the Vale of Pewsey that night was Tony Surgeon’s astonishing set in front of The Barge’s downstairs mural of glowing alien figures outside a distant house in the woods. Starting with Coil’s ‘Ostia’, he played one of the most extraordinary sets I’ve ever experienced, throbbing, cosmic, transportive, unreal – the only time I’ve experienced a DJ genuinely take us on a journey that ended up with a mangled edit of a Sylvester track. Walking to sleep later, I swear I saw gryphons on gateposts dissolving into columns of ash under a whirpool in the night sky.
