jamiehas @ wordpress

It’s getting late in the afternoon, and I’m wondering if Summersonic might end up a washout. It’s been fantastic, almost surreal, to be at a music festival in Japan – another dose of the familiar given a weird, Kirin-and-Engrish spin – but the bands have been tanking all day. The Polyphonic Spree were great fun, but the rainbows and sunshine didn’t quite penetrate the fug of my hangover. Bright Eyes turned up, did the tortured artiste/repellent prick thing, and phoned in an end-to-end performance of his last album, which I have been unable to love. The Fratellis were depressingly ordinary, their songs lost in the giant desert arena of the main stage. Things don’t look great.

Then something strange happens. After all this indifference, the Manics come out on the main stage, and blow my tiny, sweating, sunburned little mind. I didn’t expect it. I must have seen them as often as any other band I’ve ever really loved, often enough now that I’m expecting just to sit through the set, reminisce a little, bitch about how terrible the new stuff is, clap politely and go.

But two seconds in – “Hello Osaka! You! Love! Us!” and I’m snatched up in a surge of joy, excitement, happiness, I’m singing/shouting along, I’m delighted that all the Japanese and the American guy with me – jesus, who’d ever have thought I’d see an American singing these songs – are doing the same, I’m lit up with longforgotten rocknroll excitement.

This band was not the first I ever loved, but it was the first I ever really crushed on, in love with the anger, desire, pain, idolatry, androgyny, furious-sort-of-perhaps-intellectualism, unashamed rock and roll heroism bundled into their records. And I’m flying on these things. These songs are from a time when coursing hormones and desperate desires amplified the fury with which music spoke to me one hundredfold; these songs have no connection to the current sadnesses of my short adult life. This is amazing. And James falls on his arse, in the middle of Motown Junk, not missing a single note.

Afterward, other things happen – Casabian are pointless and Offspring are old and fat and sluggish and depressing, and I have another difficult goodbye to get through, and we sprint after taxis home but never quite make it, eventually walking the four kilometers back to the station, sore and complaining after the day’s legwork. There’s one day left in this place for me.