"When I first went to ATP it was like I'd found my musical home"

I'll admit I was putting off diving into Daniel Dylan Wray's latest oral history piece for Vice for two reasons. First, being reminded of how incredible the ATP weekenders were by Stuart Braithwaite's recent Wrong Speed Record Chat proved to be a bittersweet experience. Second, I feared the article might dwell too long on the festival's messy demise, undeservedly dragging the ATP name through the mud.

While it does address the overreaching and fall from grace, those interviewed generally agree that Barry Hogan and his team were not calculating fraudsters but bungling amateurs with impeccable music taste who had their hearts in the right place but just got in over their heads. As Stewart Lee puts it, "No master criminal thinks: 'I'll make a million pounds by putting on the Threnody Ensemble at Pontins and not pay them'".

In any case, the focus of the article largely lies elsewhere: more on the craziness that routinely took place offstage than on what happened on it. There are some hilarious anecdotes about chalet parties that make my own pale in comparison, juicy gossip about the worst-behaved bands (The Fall being the only ones to be given a free pass, naturally), reflections on the way the festival refreshingly dispensed with any real divide between artists and fans (which, for me, meant witnessing Tricky's pre-gig tai chi session and watching Godspeed You! Black Emperor with John Peel) and comments on the unlikely settings in which these countercultural events were held. Here's Stewart Lee again: "I was talking to a bloke from the band US Maple at Camber Sands, and he wasn't aware of what Pontins was and assumed it was an internment centre for young offenders. I had to explain that it was a British working-class holiday destination. He was really freaked out by that."

So, yes, reading and reminiscing is again bittersweet - but hell, it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. In the words of Steve Albini (not a man regularly associated with effusive expressions of delight), "the experiences I had at ATP were incredibly joyous human ones, and I wouldn't trade those for anything". Partly, perhaps, because of all the money he won during his infamous chalet poker sessions...