My youngest son is going to Lowlands. “Nice,” I said. “Put on some hiking boots, because it’s bound to get muddy.” I’ve never been to Lowlands, but decades of reporting has stuck with me that it always rains there and that Jimi Hendrix never showed up, even when he was alive.
“Mountain shoes?!” my son shouted mockingly. ‘And an umbrella’, I said, but he was already out on the street to buy peanut butter (‘with two jars of peanut butter to Lowlands’). And those eternally fresh white buns. And garbage bags, paracetamol, earplugs and baby wipes. And liters of vodka. And plastic bottles, to put that vodka in.
Lowlands, it turned out, is a kind of Donbas. (Vietnam, for older readers. The Battle of the Somme, for even older readers.) A survival of the fittest, but without mountain boots because the fittest wear sick pattas, a vintage blouse from the 90s, a yellow fisherman’s hat and possibly a garbage bag, but certainly no hiking boots. Fuck the mud.
You should, my son told me, come very early to fight for a good spot in front of your tent, where the chance is as small as possible that he will be trampled by over-excited fans of The Arctic Monkeys. There are long queues for the showers (hence the baby wipes), the food is priceless (hence the peanut butter), the drinks too (hence the vodka) You have to wear earplugs because otherwise you can’t sleep because of the noise people make on a strong mixture of coke, ecstasy and Jägermeister (what has become of incense, body painting and liquid slides?).
That’s quite a bit, for a kid who usually sleeps in until two in the afternoon, takes a long bath, and has breakfast with ice-cooled soft drinks and fresh bacon fillet americain from the bio butcher. He would bring a box of hard-boiled eggs, because they are very nutritious, he had heard. “Will that last for three days?” I wondered aloud. ‘You can also just stay home and have fun putting on a record by The Arctic Monkeys…’ but my son waved me off like a fly and counted his bottle caps.
It is, he said, forbidden to visit the concerts with a closed bottle. You can also only buy drinks without caps on site. Why? Because otherwise people will throw full bottles and injure each other. (A charming festival tradition, started at an Iggy Pop concert.)
Bringing your own caps was therefore the motto, because with an open bottle it doesn’t dance so well, in the mosh pit. ‘Smart!’ I said. “But don’t throw that bottle, eh?”
And we hadn’t even talked about drugs yet.