Given all of those who have died in the last few days, it might seem perverse to be mourning the closure of a tatty holiday park in East Sussex - but Pontins Camber Sands holds special memories. It was, after all, the site of Belle And Sebastian's Bowlie Weekender in 1999 - the event that inspired ATP to start putting on festivals.
I went to the first there, in April 2000, curated by Mogwai, and have (I'm sure) rambled on about it on here numerous times: the carnage of an early Trail Of Dead set; first encounters with Sigur Ros and Shellac; standing next to John Peel as Godspeed You! Black Emperor stunned the audience into silence; Sonic Youth's legendarily polarising headline set (meriting a mention in Thurston Moore's Sonic Life); and attempting to distract Stuart Braithwaite while he was playing goalie in an inter-band five-a-side game.
Yes, the TV aerial in our chalet was broken; yes, the handrail in the bathroom came off the wall with the merest of nudges; yes, there was a procession of ants filing across the living room floor. But it felt like a different kind of festival - certainly much less physically and psychologically taxing than the summertime canvas-and-trenchfoot mudbaths that my chaletmates and I were used to.
By the time I went to another ATP weekender, for the Breeders' bash in May 2009, they'd relocated to Butlins in Minehead - but the December 2012 event curated by house band Shellac was back on the Sussex coast, the festival's spiritual home.
It was Luke Turner of the Quietus who alerted me to the news via a Twitter post. If it hadn't been for the 2004 weekender there, he's said, he and John Doran would never have become such good friends, bonding over Throbbing Gristle and copious quantities of hallucinogenics - so we've also got to thank the place for the existence of the best music and culture site around.
No comments:
Post a Comment