Festival fashion

Upstairs Clare and I are still feeling slightly over-excited after our night with Michael Bublé. The Canadian crooner has been whiling away the hours before the birth of his first baby with a ten-day tour at The O2 in London. The guys at the online ticket agency Viagogo decided the Candis blog needed a night out and invited us along.

And what a marvellous night for a moondance it was – the boy Bublé is quite the showman and from his opening number managed to charm every single one of the 20,000 of us who packed into The O2 last Wednesday evening. As demographics go we were probably one of the best-behaved crowds to have graced The O2. By the end of the evening not only were the crowd taking photos of each other with Michael Bublé but swapping phone numbers so they could send shots to each other as they left for home.

We were probably only slightly younger than the Glastonbury crowd that spilled over the fields of Michael Eavis’s farm to catch a glimpse of The Rolling Stones, but probably even more civilised. I felt a pang of misplaced nostalgia for the festival-going girl I never was watching Mick and the boys take over Glastonbury. I only went to Glastonbury once – at the tail end of the ravey 90s and though I can’t remember a single band, I do remember never wanting to leave.

I never went again – mainly because I drew the line at camping with babies and no running water. As roughing it in a field went I was an inbetweener – too young for Greenham Common and too old for Glastonbury. I was stuck in the middle of two camping generations like some musically marooned 50s teenager who was too young for Elvis and too old for The Stones (what am I saying, you’re never too old for The Rolling Stones, obviously). But despite Bruce Forsyth’s reassuring words from the Avalon Stage last weekend that The Rolling Stones (combined age 277) are still “just kids”, I do think I might be pushing it a bit for festival life.

Absolutely not, explained Steve Roest, Viagogo’s official spokesperson who plied us with Pinot, chicken wings and gossip at Alphabet City before Mr Bublé took to the stage.

Glasto is all very well, he said, but that just signals the start of the festival season for us grown-ups. “There are so many alternative festivals to go to in Europe this summer, and they’re all in such really lovely places,” he said, reeling off a list that included the Bilbao BBK Live on the slopes of Mount Cobetas and the Montreux Jazz Festival near Lake Geneva, both later this month, the Stockholm Music and Arts Festival in August and the Barcelona Jazz Festival which runs from Halloween till early December (find out more at viagogo.co.uk).

He’s got me thinking – I’m already leafing through my weekends in November and surfing for cheap flights to Barcelona. The only thing I need worry about is what does a girl of my vintage wear camping? I’m hankering after some denim dungarees, but they say that if you were young enough to wear them first time round you are far too old to wear them again. I can see how that would work for some of the weirder retro looks – puffball skirts for instance or crinolines, but dungarees?

I tried the idea out on Upstairs Clare, who was still humming, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life daduh, daduh, daduh” and swaying like a Virgin stewardess, which she most definitely IS NOT.

“Watcha think?” I asked, clicking through a page of OshKosh B’gosh dungarees online. I thought they might give me some much-needed retro chick chic, à la Felicity Kendall in The Good Life.

“So who let Grandpa Walton loose on eBay?” she asked.

Goodnight everyone.

Posted by Amanda Blinkhorn