Coming home

Uncivilisation festival this year was held in the countryside just outside of Petersfield in Hampshire. Taking the train down from London with my band mates, gave me a sense of nostalgia for where I grew up. This was the same route I would take to visit Portsmouth, when I still had family living there. From the station, the band and I bundled into a taxi and sped off to the festival site to make our soundcheck.

As we passed through the fields and woods of the Meon Valley, I let out a "well I'll be damned" grunt to myself. It was really quite pretty round these parts, and it brought back all the memories of the walks my parents used to take me on. I hated being taken along on the walking group we were a part of. All I wanted to do at ten years of age was to play on my GameBoy or watch television all day long.

The greatest pleasure I could take whilst on those walks was to find a walking stick, then promptly try to trip up my poor mother with it. That memory still makes me chuckle even now. To think though, that I had no interest in any of the natural world as a kid. I would stretch out in meadows as we had lunch somewhere, like some impish druid, mud splattered, grass stains up my trousers, a streak of dirt across my forehead. But I was not revelling in it like I would now. Now I would be like some overzealous student of DH Lawrence, thrusting my hands into the slime of the earth with purpose, to gain pagan credentials, or some such nonsense. As a kid, I was just making the best out of a bad situation. I guess that's just what kids do.

As we pulled in to The Sustainability Centre, the sun was low, and the site was calm except for the Feral Choir singing their lungs out somewhere off in the woods. I was very excited to be there. Having followed the Dark Mountain from its beginning, it had been a firm friend to me in my own personal journey, influencing and reaffirming over these few years. I had written a number of protest songs, which was my own way of contributing to a counter narrative. These included "If This Is Civilisation", "Give Me Detumescence", and my most recent "Infinite Squalor" that was to be debuted at this festival.

Primed with a healthy dose of sloe vodka and some local ale, we got to it, rattling them off to what was essentially a crowd of anarchists. I've no idea how we went down, it was just a pleasure to be there and a part of it all. There was a firm feeling of jubilation around the campfires that night, as if we were all there for a debriefing on a very important mission.

Saturday morning, that debriefing began, with talks on collapse, talks on the relevance of the Luddites today, a lesson on how to make alcohol from just about anything, entitled “Prison Booze”, and much more. However, much of that was eclipsed for me by a deeply humbling moment during the talk on the Luddites.

An old man that was sat at the side of the room got up and told the whole room: that he had been in the war, had read the American newspapers, which had excited him, had inspired him to follow the dream that they preached. Said "I worked for an American company for 40 years. I'm retired now, been so for 15 years. I just want to say, that it really hurts. To know that you've wasted your life for nothing."

He sat back down, without a hint of emotion on his face, just matter of fact. I was completely floored, my eyes were streaming, and I couldn't hear anybody else for the rest of the session. For someone nearing the end of their life to make an admission like that, let alone in front of a few hundred people, takes a humility rarely seen. What made it worse was that he was inconsolable, because he was probably right. There was nothing anyone could say to him to make him see it in a different light, and to attempt to do so would be to try to get him to believe in a lie. Utterly heart wrenching.

Arranging the evening Power Down in the woodland hut with that great harbinger looming over me was no easy feat. We laid out the candles, I made the relevant introductions, and promptly sat down on a pew. I paid barely any attention to what was going on in front of me, apologies to my friends that performed that evening. All I could think about was the old man’s words going over and over in my head, “It really hurts”.

Thankfully, I was soon awoken from the broody spell, and post Power Down we were all ushered back to the centre of the festival. Darkness had fallen and everyone was converging around a camp fire at the edge of the woods waiting for something to happen. Soon enough a small group of individuals became distinct from the crowd, wearing robes and with faces painted. This was all part of a performance piece called Liminal.

We were asked not to bother with taking photographs, to switch off our telephones, and to “watch out for the stag”. The group then disappeared into the woods and they beckoned us to follow. A flute began playing at the head of the party, and in single file this crowd of hundreds entered the motley English taiga in complete silence.

We encountered illuminated black and white artworks depicting historic scenes. They almost resembled cave paintings, albeit suspended in mid air amongst low branches. A faun like character, I’m guessing the “stag”, was huffing away somewhere out of sight and charged at the line of pilgrims from time to time. A naked man was lying at the base of a tree in the foetal position cradling a large pelvic bone in his arms.

We eventually stopped in a clearing in the woods where the flautist was still playing accompanied occasionally by a lady singing beautifully with no words. We waited there for all the other pilgrims to arrive in the clearing, to find a space for themselves. Of course, everyone’s interpretation is subjective, but to me it appeared that once the crowd was settled into the clearing, that we began to reflect, en masse. It was an undefined period of reverence, an appreciation of our immediate surroundings and the moment. A few candles dotted around lit up the canopy above us, just enough to give contrast to the clear starry night behind it. I for one was besotted.

I forget how we disbanded, but soon found myself around the campfire singing Dylan and Bowie songs. Naturally. The campfire being the most purest of democracies, no intimidation present, just about everyone offered a song, a poem, or a fragment of something. It didn’t seem to matter what, just that it was a little piece of themselves, almost as a sacrifice. It was a welcome equalisation of the distress from earlier in the day, and with a full heart and a big smile I laid my bones down to sleep.

This was the emotional terrain of the uncivilised weekend for me. Old questions answered, new ones quickly sprung up in their place. And with Portsmouth, the place where I was born and raised, looming on the horizon, visible from the festival site, there was a sense for me of coming home. Coming home to something familiar, but not actually experienced. Something burning in the bones, something inexplicable through science and reason. Perhaps a figment of my imagination, but I don’t see why that should matter in the slightest. What is becoming increasingly clear, thanks to the weekend at Uncivilisation and the Dark Mountain Project in general, is that there is a way through the tough times ahead. That navigation, I think it will be more meaningful than if none were needed. Rather collapse and all that entails, than the promise of infinity.