Claire Black: 'I have been to more T in the Parks than I can remember, but that's beer group pressure for you'

Published on Thursday 24 June 2010 13:37

SO VUVUZELAS have been banned from T in the Park. That's one less reason to avoid it, I suppose. Although last year I would've loved a large plastic horn to drown out Brandon Flowers' whining. Is it enough to make me go next weekend? I'm not knocking Scotland's premier music festival; I have a more general music festival malaise. I know people say they have a brilliant time; I'm just not sure that I'm one of them.

On the one hand I don't want to miss a moment of pop prowess, (but, on the other, I don't really want to get doused in some unidentified liquid from a pint pot lobbed 20ft above my head. Proper festival-goers don't worry about trifles such as this, they revel in the mayhem. They don't think: "Live is good, but I'd be just as happy listening to the CD while floating in a bubble bath." Unfortunately I do. I may have been to more T in the Parks than I can remember, but that's beer group pressure for you and maybe it's time for me to grow up.

If I do go, I know I'll spend my time in a frenzy of running between stages, queuing for toilets and avoiding eye contact with the hordes of blootered folk who decide not to bother sleeping for the entire festival. I also know that I will remain resolutely sober no matter how much I drink because I am constantly worrying about what I'm missing as I queue for said toilets and what I'm going to find when I get inside them.

A few years ago a friend tried to talk me into going to Glastonbury. "It's amazing," she said. "The last time I went, we climbed under the fence to get in, we lost our tent the first night and at one point, while I was perched at the top of a hill having a pee, I slid down to the bottom into a river of…"

Well, you get it. It didn't tempt me. I've never been to "Glasto" and I never will. But still, when I see it on the telly I feel tempted. As I lie on my sofa, remote control in hand, toilet but ten steps away, I forget all the horrors from my own festival past and remember only the highs (like the pasty boy in a Bruno mankini weaving his way to the dance tent at 11am).

I once worked behind a bar at T in the Park. It was a year when it rained for the entire festival. The bar was opposite the main stage, but just too far away to hear anything. We did ten-hour shifts to the soundtrack of beating rain, pouring 12 pints at a time (it was a machine, you just pushed a button) in order to satisfy cold, wet, miserable people who swore blind they were having a ball. The highlight was a boy in a trilby who, confronted by our dour faces, moonwalked in the mud to entertain us. It was a moment of genuine kindness. I'm sure it's what made me go back the next year.

Really, I want to be like him. Or like those people that you see on the telly, perched on top of their friends' shoulders, belting out the songs as they sway. Alas, I fear I am destined to be the one standing at the back, worrying about the young man who looks like he might be about to swallow his tongue and whether the St John's Ambulance people are coping.

Maybe I'd be better off at Glyndebourne…

Last week Claire... cheered on hearing that a rugby club has been fined 40,000 for failing to stop their fans from chanting homophobic abuse at openly gay former Wales internationalist Gareth Thomas