Phoenix Festival

The third and final time I have witnessed Neil Young was at the Phoenix Festival on Friday 19th July 1996. It made history as the first ever 4-day festival in the UK. The festival site was located at the cavernous disused Long Marston airfield near Stratford Upon Avon. Gill and I obtained a day ticket and we grabbed some lodgings in Stratford.

It was a staggeringly hot day, one of those exceptionally sultry days that only occur in Britain every couple of years. Before we left the digs and due to the weather, I observed the most gigantic spider I have ever seen, resulting in the door being summarily shut on it and by our return it had thankfully departed….

There wasn’t much forward planning involved as Gill and I were wearing varying degrees of inappropriate footwear and for some inexplicable reason we decided to walk to the site.

Out of the town led onto a winding country road and you could hear the throb and the thrum of the music but after a sustained period of walking the sound didn’t appear to be getting any nearer. We passed a farm with an entrepreneurial punter selling freezing bottles of water from an outdoor fridge. Not long after that we managed to cadge a lift to the site from a kind punter in a passing motor.

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Phoenix Festival 1996 Flyer. Image Credit theprodigyontour.com

We landed late afternoon and first caught Nylon Bombers, an unspectacular Britpop band from Cheltenham who subsequently broke up later that year.

We caught some of the sets of Manic Street Preachers and Super Furry Animals on the main stage. We saw Dodgy whose upbeat track ‘Staying Out for the Summer’ could not have been more apposite!

I enjoyed a Foo Fighters set which was an early career performance from them, the highlight being ‘Monkey Wrench’.

The main support act was one of those artists who was a passing fad at that point in time. Alanis Morrisette went down well with a fair proportion of the audience, but I find it all a tad bland.

Neil Young was backed up by the ever-dependable Crazy Horse. It was by a long way my favourite performance as he was in crackling form and fabulously loud. He opened with a fine trifecta ‘Hey Hey My My (into the Black)’, ‘Down by the River’ and ‘Powderfinger’.

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Neil Young and Crazy Horse onstage at the Phoenix Festival. Image Credit JamBase.

He softened in the middle with a couple of ‘Harvest’ tracks, but it was mainly a guitar fest. The first encore included ‘Cortez the Killer’ and ‘Like a Hurricane’ and the second encore peaked with an outro of ‘Rocking in the Free World’. A superb set overall as he played a lot of my fave tracks. He came off stage after midnight.

John Peel tells the tale that he was the first person to bring Neil over to Britain in the early 70’s and they had kept in touch since. He was there that day and endeavouring to bypass the security staff to obtain permission from Mr Young to play live his set on Radio 1. He finally got the green light with 4 tracks remaining. Later I obtained a bootleg tape of the gig and the recording suddenly morphs from a raggedy sound accompanied by audience voices and footsteps crunching plastic beer glasses to a crystal-clear sound as it moved into the radio level recording.

We made our way to the 100-strength queue where the shuttle buses were due to depart from. After 30 minutes of complete inactivity it quickly become evident that no buses were on the horizon and there was no sign of any taxis either.

The only remaining option was to walk back. There were many stragglers tumbling down a dark windy country lane, all jumping out of the way as cars approached. At certain points, there was a small brook by the side of the road which a giggling drunken lad tumbled into.

After what felt like an age, we turned a bend and saw the water fridge from earlier and I was in full ‘Mr Motivator’ mode despite tears in corner of my eyes as I knew how far we still had to travel. Gill was literally hobbling behind me by this stage. We refer to it now as ‘The March’ and can laugh about it (just!).

The lights of the town finally appeared, and it was about 3.30am when we stumbled into an all-night garage for some much needed water and snacks!  

Reading Festival Day Trip

The Reading Festival, originally known as the National Jazz Festival started up in 1961 and then morphed into the more recognised rock festival in the mid 70’s. It linked up with Leeds Festival in 1999 to create a dual festival with a rotating bill at different sites over the same weekend.

My one attendance in 1995 was primarily because Neil Young was on the bill and thus, we obtained a Sunday day ticket.  There were five of us in attendance and the weekend started with me and Gill heading down to Nottingham on the Saturday evening.

My brother’s current beau Fiona had managed to purloin a transit van for the trip, and we had the wacky but novel idea of roping a settee into the back of the van. It felt like we were in the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine.

It was infinitely more comfortable than some PNE trips to the North East in the late 80’s when we travelled in a variety of rust buckets with no seats in the back over the windswept A66 and I will never forget the Reg Childs van where they probably paid us to hire it!

There is a pub on the A61, it is called the Busby Stoop (I was humming the intro to the House of the Rising Sun as I typed that, go on you know you want to!) The pub was located somewhere west of Thirsk. It was named after an old owner Thomas Busby who was hung opposite the pub for murder in 1702.

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The Busby Stoop Pub. Image Credit Ifantasma.it

It was very memorable for many reasons including the owners gracefully allowing us to have an afternoon lock in with the curtains closed prior to a Freight Rover semi-final evening game at Hartlepool and cooking us some pizzas on the way back after the game. The last I heard is that the Stoop closed into 2013 and was converted into an Indian restaurant called Jaipur Spice.     

From memory, the festival site was situated close to the town centre and we met up with Fiona’s brother James on arrival, who was living in Oxford at that point. The main stage bill had a heavy grunge reliance that day.

First on were Babes in Toyland followed by a mildly interesting set by Pavement though their sound was always a little off kilter and obtuse to me. We thoroughly enjoyed a Tourette littered set by White Zombie, a swampy heavy metal band from New York founded by Rob Zombie. They could almost have been a natural precursor to Slipknot.     

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White Zombie. Image Credit Loudwire

I took pleasure in catching about half of Buffalo Tom’s set. We wandered off to the Melody Maker stage and caught an impressive portion of a set by a very young Ash. The main support act was Soundgarden from Seattle who didn’t really float my boat.

It was getting rather cold by the time Neil Young hit the stage and continuing the grunge theme his backing band was Pearl Jam.  It was a decent set, but it wasn’t the same without the calibre of Crazy Horse supporting him. Highlights were ‘Mr Soul’ and ‘Hey Hey My My (Into the Black) and ‘Rocking in the Free World’ as his encore.

We headed back with my brother upfront in the van to stay awake with Fiona the driver. I recall a stop at a random service station for coffee refuelling and it seemed a long way back. The sofa seemed to understand that we had hit the outskirts of Nottingham and with a loud creak released itself from its moorings.

A late rising the following morning preceded a chilled day before a few pints in the local pub and the weekend was rounded off with some tucker and the latest episode of X-Files.