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August is supposed to be the deep, lazy heart of the summer, but autumn’s come early and erased all notion of that.
I’ve just come back from the Green Man festival in Wales, where 20 000 people moved in a world of rain and cold wind for 4 days, cheering whenever the sun showed a pimple. But it was good, nonetheless. We played an acoustic set, Small Gods without drums or DJ… UnPlugged.
It’s something I’d been wanting to try for a while, wondering what happens when the words and melodies are left to stand on their own, without a groove to carry them. As a rapper I’m used to my verses riding beats, and I like that, but as a musician I want my songs to have the ability to strike people without necessarily making them want to dance… We took to Chai Wallah’s stage with flutters in our bellies; nerves which didn’t lift for the whole set, really, me feeling like I had to compensate for the lack of drums by being Extra Hyped, and the others feeling they had to work hard to hold the timing of things together without the guidance of the metrognome. But, bugger I sideways, the crowd Loved it. The big tent was rammed with ears and eyes, all listening and watching attentively to every thing we did… It seems that you really don’t need to deliver your ideas at a high volume with bang pow dynamics for people to take notice of them. If you’ve got something worth listening to, people will listen.
(The adverts disagree, and so do the presenters of Top Gear. Perhaps they’re concealing the fact they offer nothing of any value…)
It felt like further confirmation of something that I’ve been feeling recently: people are basically safe and intelligent about things if you give them the chance to be. If you offer a child responsibility for their own decision-making, they’ll probably take it, and eventually learn to make good decisions (something that Summerhill school is strong proof of ). If you give people the knowledge and space necessary to take control of their own situation, they will. If you give people an hour of intense music and words in a way that assumes they have the intelligence to deal with it raw, they will rise to that challenge. And on the flipside of that same coin, if you fear someone, they will act in a way that justifies that fear. Assume the child will act up, they probably will. Bombard a crowd with BigBeatsN’CleverRhymesN’RaRaRa, they will spill their cider on each other, and possibly fall over.
Anyways big up to the people of Green Man for that hour of intelligence, and big up Chai Wallah once more for providing the space for it to happen.
Next weekend, Shambala, Aeon. Two weeks after that, Bestival and the end of this yearly era of constant fields, constant moving. I’m looking forward to a lie-down.
Peace
Dizraeli