An Irishman's Diary

I'm sorry I missed the Electric Picnic. It seems to have been the music festival of the summer. But I would have been particularly interested in seeing The Rapture, a US band which - according to this paper's review of the event - delivered a show-stopping performance of something called "dirty rock".

Excuse me if I'm sceptical. Whatever about The Rapture, it seems to me that rock has never been less dirty, in any sense, than it is now. The same review noted the "overwhelming sense of positivity" at the festival, giving examples. "People apologise for bumping into you," commented our impressed critic. "Strangers offer you hand-wipes in the toilet queues".

The wipes were hardly necessary, since the event organisers had minimised any risk of dirty hands. There were cabins for hire by those who didn't like tents and a special camper-van park for people with their own wheel-based accommodation. Naturally, the site had a dedicated powder room to cater for emergencies such as tear-streaked mascara. And even the artistic element of the festival was clean and eco-friendly with, according to reports, one arts group creating "a juice blender from scrap metal".

All this is wonderful. But by way of providing the smoothie generation with some historic context by which to measure rock-dirt standards, let me mention in passing that today - September 6th - marks the 36th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's final concert.

It took place in Germany at the fondly-named "love and peace festival". Unfortunately, as the BBC archive report delicately puts it, the festival was "not an entire success". In fact, "a torrential downpour meant Hendrix postponed his performance by a day and the audience was disrupted by fighting and gunfire between rival German motorcycle gangs, who eventually burned the stage to the ground". The audience was - perhaps understandably - bad-tempered by the time Hendrix appeared and his performance was booed. The band's tour was promptly abandoned when the bass player fell ill due to "stress and exhaustion". And as for Hendrix himself, all his subsequent performances would be accompanied by those critically-acclaimed backing singers, the choirs of angels.

Of course that's an extreme example and we don't have to go so far for a reminder of how things used to be. One of the other big music events of last weekend was indoors: the "Legends of Irish Folk" concert at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, involving Ronnie Drew, Liam Clancy, Finbar Furey and Johnny McEvoy.

These men have played a fair few outdoor gigs in their time. But even allowing for the fact that none of them was ever categorised as "rock" - and I'm not for a moment suggesting they were "dirty" either - they'd look out of place at the modern open-air gig, which is typically held on the lawn of a Georgian mansion, with champagne tents and sushi and intimidatingly high housekeeping standards.

My mind goes back to last year's Planxty reunion concerts when - on the night I was there - a fly buzzed around the stage persistently, to the amusement of both musicians and audience. It was no reflection on the band's personal hygiene: most likely the insect was a reincarnated 1970s roadie. But in the pristine, smoke-free environment of Vicar Street, it was a poignant reminder of how much had changed since the band's heyday.

I missed the Stradbally event because of a prior appointment at another campsite - one of those family holiday places of which France is full. Ours was Dutch-run and it had certain superficial similarities to the site of the Electric Picnic. There were cabins for hire if you didn't like tents; there was a special camper-van section; and the owners offered an eco-friendly environment in which conscientious tourists could park their truck-sized SUVs.

But in some respects my holiday camp experience seems to have been edgier than the Electric Picnic. For one thing, nobody offered me a hand-wipe the entire time I was there. Then there was the "entertainment". Unlike the multiple-stage format now de rigueur at music festivals, there was only one stage on our site. I dropped by one night during what appeared to be a Dutch-dominated karaoke session, and was sufficiently traumatised that thereafter I felt it necessary to keep as much of the campsite between me and the stage as possible.

Worse than this was the no-shorts rule at the swimming pool, which forced even middle-aged men into skimpy Speedos, resulting in some appalling scenes. And then of course, there were the bored teenagers, who are to holiday camps what Hell's Angels used to be to outdoor music festivals. Mostly they kept to themselves, engaging in such typical teenage pursuits as trying to look old enough to get a drink. But in the late evenings they would gravitate towards the playground, resulting in gradual acceleration of the moving parts of every play apparatus that moved, and eventually forcing the smaller kids to flee in terror.

It's not easy being a teenager, of course. Looking at their sullen, rebellious faces, I had to remind myself that they would not always be like this. Soon their hormones would settle down, the kids would develop rounded personalities, and before anyone even noticed, they would be attending nice, respectable rock concerts, where people are never rude to each other and everyone has clean hands.