2006年Fight Club采访Tim和Nicky Wire：音乐节合作让人痛苦？

Fight Club Interview with Tim and Nicky Wire

ARE ROCK FESTIVALS CORPORATE HELLHOLES?

NO- Says Tim Rice-Oxley of Keane

“My first experience of a festival was in the New Bands tend at Reading in 2003, before Keane signed a record deal. We’d never played to more than 150 people before. Suddenly we had a couple of thousand watching us. It felt like a peak, the culmination of all our dreams.

Since then, we’ve played loads of festivals and some of those have been our best-ever performances. Like when we played Glastonbury just after our first album came out. Nothing can prepare you for walking out to 30,000 people. Moments like that are almost supernatural in their intensity. As a band member, one of the great things about festivals is that you’re not playing to your own partisan crowd, so you never know whether you’re going to get bottled off or whether it’s going to be the best night of your life. When you’re on tour playing your own gigs, you can get a bit complacent about being adored all the time. So it’s good to have an unknown quantity thrown in.

When it’s great, there’s nothing like it. You’re playing under a beautiful sunset, you’ve won the crowd over, you capture a moment and it’s an amazing, almost spiritual thing. You can only get that at a festival.

The crowd are there to have the time of their lives. It’s people joining together without cynical motives, revelling inthe freedom to roll around in the mud out of crazy joy and exuberance, smoke weed with strangers and listen to 20 different bands in a day. If the reason a band plays gigs is to upstage other bands and get on the cover of magazines then they might find the innocence and equality of the festival scene somewhat alien.

So they slag off the crowd and then sulk about it on the tour bus. What’s the point? If you’re a b ig band like the Manics, you probably fly first-class, stay at a lovely hotel, eat great food andwatch great bands from the side of the stage. Then you get to play to thousands and get paid handsomely for it. Also, you can enjoy the company of other bands. For most bands, the bonhomie is not fake. The bands that refuse to hang out with other bands are, without fail, the ones that are total arseholes, or just not very good. I’d prefer to look at a festival as an excuse to get lost in music and have a great party.”

Phew.

Nicky Wire of the Manics said “YES – all that fake bonhomie.. how amazing the vibe is…No it isn’t, it’s horrible!”