Jarvis, Stormzy and the TRNSMT festival that sparked a family row

Our boy was not, however, a master criminal. His lies were exposed when he found himself stranded at the park gates with no way to get home, and had to be rescued by a friend’s mother. As her car turned into our street, my husband – who had been trying to contact him for hours on his mobile – was standing on the pavement waiting for him.

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To say I was a wee bit angry would be like saying that Venus is a wee bit hot or Mauna Loa a wee bit fiery. I was incensed, incandescent, apoplectic.

To be fair, he took his punishment – a two-week grounding and a long list of household chores – like a man.

Later, he immortalised the whole affair in an English National Five personal essay, which glorified his own role, and ended with the profound reflection that, while he *sort of* regretted the upset he had caused, it was worth it to see Stormzy, and, come to think about it, he would do it all over again.

I didn’t mind. My ire had long ago subsided. And he’d clearly learned a valuable Nora Ephron lesson: that everything is copy, and we should be the heroes of our own lives.

Because, thankfully, this incident was a one-off and not the start of a “troubled adolescence”, it also provided us with a vignette that summed up his character perfectly; a carefully polished treasure to be passed around at family get-togethers, and produced, like baby pics, for the amusement of future girlfriends.

#Stormzygate may not have been a catalyst for soul-searching on our son’s behalf; but it was on mine. When I scrutinised my initial (over) reaction, I concluded it was born of envy.

Festival go-ers in Glasgow Green (Image: free)

For complicated reasons, I was an obedient teenager, never one to rock the boat. I would no sooner have lied to my mother and snuck off to see a band than I would have snuck a look at someone else’s exam paper. Which explains why – at almost exactly the same age, in almost exactly the same circumstances – I didn’t see Ultravox at the Apollo. Indeed, I never saw Ultravox or went to the Apollo, which closed down the following year.

None of this is very important. (Please pause to admire my willpower in resisting a “This Means Nothing to Me” joke). Despite my early obsession with soulful, trench-coated New Romantic types, I was not scarred by my failure to scream “I love you, Midge” from the famous bouncing balcony, or by my later failures to see other bands for other reasons, which included working long hours, my tendency to go with the flow socially and, eventually, children.

But #Stormzygate did fuel a fresh determination to do the things I hadn’t done: to listen to the music I had failed to hear; to see the bands I’d overlooked. And so the last few years (when Covid and finances have allowed) I have tried to reclaim a youth which was not mispent enough. Committing to this enterprise with a rigour once reserved for journalism, I have been to more gigs and festivals since 2018 than in all the rest of my life put together.

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The surprise dividend is the way music and gig-going has become a thread connecting my husband and me to all three of our sons. We have different musical tastes and different work schedules, so I can count on one hand the number of times the five of us have made it out to the same concert. But those have been the best of days, Hot Chip in the summer sun and Nile Rodgers in the lashing rain amongst the standouts. There is nothing, I think, to rival a shared thrill in a beat, a riff or a sing-along anthem.

When we aren’t all able to go together we go in smaller groups, or separately, swapping tales of our adventures on our return. Our eldest, who loves techno music, is off soon to the Stone Festival in the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex, a Unesco World Heritage Site in Essen in the Ruhr Valley. I have Googled the pictures of the Bauhaus-influenced pits and coking plants, so I will be able to imagine the sun setting behind the winding tower of Shaft 12, and be there in spirit if not in person.

One of the many bands I never saw in the 90s was Pulp, which is strange because, alongside REM (who I have seen multiple times) they felt like *my* band – the glorious soundtrack to a happy era. Different Class is one of my all-time favourite albums, played so often I can hear the opening bars of the next track in my head as the last one fades out: Mis-Shapes; Pencil Skirt; Common People and then I Spy – that perfect piece of seething pop savagery, with its “Take Your ‘Year in Provence’ and shove it up your arse” contempt for middle-class complacency.

Jarvis Cocker (Image: free)

When Pulp’s reunion was announced last year, I went through the same rollercoaster of emotions experienced by many.

“Yay, they’re playing Glasgow!”; “Boo, but only at TRNSMT”. It felt like such a strange fit – these kings of indie archness headlining a festival known for the young demographic of its audience, and associated – rightly or wrongly – with drunken bammery.

My husband and I ummed and aahed for a bit and then decided against it. Until I stumbled on footage of their warm-up concert at Bridlington Spa, which opened with Jarvis whisper-singing “I spy a boy, I spy a girl” from the wings, before bursting onstage, all limbs outthrust and uncontained disgust, to blast the line “Can't you see the giant that walks around you seeing through your petty lives? at the ecstatic fans.

“Young bams, bedamned,” we said, in unison, and snapped up two tickets for Friday.

So there we will be, four years on – with all the bucket-hatted kids – sneaking off to a festival our youngest has long since outgrown, and looks upon with a degree of condescension. When we told him what we’d done, he raised his eyebrows sardonically, in unwitting homage to Jarvis. These days, he prefers Reading or Creamfields.

Every time I think about standing in the crowd waiting for Pulp to appear, I feel as queasy with excitement as he must have felt at 15 screaming “HWFG” for Stormzy. “You might see things that shock you on Glasgow Green,” he warned me the other day. Don’t worry, son. We’ll Just Say No. I’ll keep my tap on. And we’ll text you a photograph of us waving our glow sticks, just so you know we’re still alive.