Rock on the Hill

The stars shook in a midnight-blue sky, the last bastions of a universe still warm with the blood of creativity and all the words not yet said. If there is ever a monument that our ilk does not tear down with our hands, then it will soon turn into the dust made from our bodies. Meta-space meat to be. Made of stardust and covered in glitter. But, back to the stars, the ones leaking upon an inky canvas of sky-vellum and slowly, one by one, fading into oblivion. But how they shone bright.  

Rock on the Hill, much like the stars, will one day fade. For now however, and for a long time to come, it will be able to stake a claim as Durham’s biggest and best independently run festival so far. 

On Friday night, you could hear the joy of the Angel’s crowd in the shortness of their breath, in the chanting symposiums harking back to the death of the rockstar, anthems for anemoia. The patron saint of the anti-establishment, Arthur Rimbaud himself, darted between the long hair and sang along to the chandelier-sparkling hymns for the disenfranchised. As the bodies writhed in united repulsion of whence they came, souls ventured in their true form to see the stars as they are for the first time. Durham was washed away in a river of music, the ebbs and flows of which bought unadulterated, alternative music for perhaps the first time. The driftwood was claimed and brought to a stage; There, an altar was built and the maelstrom of humanity moshed names into it. Void State, The Blacklist, Mirror Image and Elvet. Four-letter words and constellations were draped across their bodies and the ceilings, plastered by the ongoing crush of humanity. Glued into place, the music had nowhere to look but the Heavens, the great starry vortex where chaos rules over us all. 

As the voices of Angels quieted, a Call to the Faithful had begun across town. The floor of Fabio’s shook to its first ever mosh pit. Whirring in a furious excess of energy, bass unplugged and accepting that the only good system is a sound system, the nightclub melted and shook the graves of the longdistance dead. In her place instead was a sacrosanct tribute to the sacred memories of the DIY ethos and passion of Punk and art. And all the while the Canary Records flag flew, held by duct tape, the voices of the prophets and the prayers of men across long distant oceans. Call to the Faithful rocked the hilly city, stoning the unbelievers with rock and punk distilled from the essence of riot and discontent. Lord Emu, a collage of glam and grit, reeled the crowd on four pink strings and soaring guitar-skateboards. Elvet became the anti-sandpaper as the prince of precision divided his time between the riverside and mirror world. Caravaggio melded the crowd with time travellers and agony’s ecstasy was forged onto the visage of the gutterpoets. 

The final night belonged at three in the morning, in a raindrop thudding against the face of a window in late 1960s Montreal, played in the minor key. Inky pens scratched the heartbreak of existence, the sad eyes of Oscar Wilde’s dog, onto the full moon hovering on the top shelf of a disused garage, next to the empty tube of glue and the partnerless glove. The poets assembled and spoke of the pavements on which they laid their heads to look up to the stars better. Bethany, Eden, Izzy and the cathedral’s grizzled poet laureate, Asa, drew their words in every shade of magenta along a drizzle-filled skyline. Mushroom dreams grew from a garden just around the corner, sending Moonstags trampling across the crops of Organic Lemon Sugar. At the same moment, Orchard Thieves were interrupted by the saddest prophets that ever leaked from Surrey’s and Yorkshire’s puddles. And there they dripped from the ceiling, their condensed forms a tribute to every poem never written and the library of unfinished existence that the cemetery gates enclose. 

Rock on the Hill ended as the universe had begun, somewhere between rock’n’roll and Jesus Christ doing the dishes (humming a soft tune from an old folk-punk band that he had once known under his breath, sometimes stopping and trying to remember if the words playing on his mind were from an old Van Morrison song or perhaps a Walt Whitman that had been read to him as a small boy). Hallowed charities were lifted upon the shoulders of music and poetry paraded for the great festival of art. 

Rock on the Hill has built itself an enduring legacy, totally separate from the university, who it sees as being an anti-art establishment, one where tradition and convention trump creativity and artistic freedom. 

Rock on the Hill had three simple objectives at its creation: firstly, to have fun, secondly to support a charity, thirdly, that the music being played would be at least alright. It seems to have succeeded. All for the price of a ferret and a time traveller or two. 

Still the stars shone.