The Riverside Festival -Saturday 2nd August 2008 (pic copyright Dom Henry)

My foot still smarts from the Riverside Festival. It smarts because I kicked the huge artillery gun the army people were using to entice ‘good with his hands’ types to sign up for a life of demeaning obedience, homoerotic bullying and state-sanctioned killing. I kicked it partly due to the four cans of fizzy foreign beer (lahgur, laaga?) coursing around my system, but chiefly due to the tit-shaking explosion of abhorrence I experienced on seeing a giant steel phallus-of-death sitting in a field at an otherwise perfectly decent, family-oriented festival. It just seemed so…egregious, especially with young kiddiewinks buzzing about the place, gurgling with the carefree laughter of youth as they bopped people with those punchable balloons on elastic.

That’s the thing about the Riverside Festival, it encapsulates everything that is both howlingly wrong and throbbingly right about this bally silly brouhaha we call Britain. It’s gaudy and naff, and yet cultured and communal. The council might not get everything right but for the Riverside Festival I, for one, salute them. You can take your bin collection gripes, your wonky pavement groans and your soaring council tax bill grumbles and pop them discreetly up your council-bashing arse. The Riverside festival is as high- or lowbrow as you want it to be – it’s all things to all men, it’s a savvy hooker who knows how to cater for the multifarious kinks and proclivities of us, her adoring punters.

For the discerning visitor (to qualify, your kitchen radio must be permanently tuned to Radio 4) she offers home-cooked curry and falafel, top-notch live music from across the globe, a craft tent where you can buy enough hand-made fudge to induce diabetes in an elephant, and the usual sundry hippy nonsense, such as hemp top hats and hand drums carved from the actual biblical Tree of Knowledge by telepathic yogis (those last two are very slightly made-up, I was too drunk too focus on the stalls as I left).

For the less discerning visitor (to qualify, your blacked-out Fiesta must rumble with sub-woofer overload at traffic lights) she offers suppurating turds of fat-weeping meat, plastic things that flash and glow, outsized candy dummies on a ribbon and giant stuffed toys hanging by their necks, which gives the impression of an horrific mass lynching at Disney Land.

But perhaps that’s exactly the point, maybe the egalitarian glory of the Riverside Festival is that it unites Nottingham in an ultimately very human love of revelry, indulgence, community and fun. It throws the middle-aged mead-quaffing world music fan together with the fairground riding yoofs, flings the Alley Café frequenting arty types together with the haircuts of Oceana, provides a space for the rude bwoys and gals of The Meadows to rub shoulders with the polite ladies and gents of The Park.

And it works: the Riverside Festival is truly an all-encompassing, all-embracing alfresco church of fun. But just one questions remains: exactly how many dads, as they’re walking to the Victoria Embankment with their family, sing “gonna lay down my heavy burden, down by the riverside”? and think it’s the funniest thing ever. I bet at least fifty.

 

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