Festival Faux Pas #2
Over 30 years of festivals, I’ve occasionally found myself in situations that were awkward, embarrassing, and entirely of my own making. This is 'The Day I Told Flavor Flav His Clock Was Wrong.'
📍 Location: Homelands, Dolleagles, New Cummock, Scotland
📅 When: Summer 2000
🎤 Artist: Flavor Flav, Public Enemy
🤕 Injuries: Pride
💥 Cause: Bumpkin Land
✅ Outcome: Preventable
It’s not every day you get to work with genuine music legends. The trick is to keep your cool, stay professional... and don’t be a dick.
It’s Homelands Scotland, 2000.
Public Enemy are about to walk on stage.
Flavor Flav strolls over in his trademark sunglasses, baseball cap, enough chains to sink a ferry... and, of course, that enormous clock.
I grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. Back then, “getting down” meant nodding your head slightly more enthusiastically rather than just tapping your foot.
Fish and chips on Friday, Sunday lunch at one o’clock, and if your food contained anything more adventurous than Worcestershire Sauce, someone probably thought you were “a bit continental.”
True story, I didn’t taste garlic until I was 16, and that was in Pizza Hut.
Flav smiled, recognised me from the Homelands England show the weekend before and held out his fist and said:
“Yeah, boyeee!”
Without thinking, I reached out...
...and shook it.
Firmly, like I’d just met the new regional Sales manager.
Everyone burst out laughing.
Flav, to his eternal credit, realised I wasn’t taking the piss.
He assumed correctly that I simply had absolutely no idea what I was doing and attempted to show me the Public Enemy handshake.
Panicking slightly, and having completely misunderstood fist bumps, I decided the obvious way to recover was to criticise the giant clock swinging around his neck.
“Your clock’s wrong,” I said.
“You’ll need to use the stage clock...
...and my Casio G-Shock.”
He looked down at his clock.
Looked at me, looked at my shitty wristwatch, then looked back at his clock.
It was the look you’d give someone who’d just explained clocks to Flavor Flav, and shaken his fist.
Twenty-five years later, I still cringe thinking about it, although I haven’t seen him since. I’d like to think that’s entirely unrelated.
They did finish on time though, which, if you’ve read any of The Stage Clock, you’ll know is all I really cared about.
I guess it just turns out we were both obsessed with time, we just wore very different clocks, in very different ways.
Mine just happened to be more punctual.
Yeah Boyeee!
The second festival I ever worked on, as a volunteer from university, in the Artist Liaison team, I picked up a stomach flu from the campsite on the Wednesday getting settled in. I was buzzing to be there, so I continued suffering through with my upset tummy and looked after jobs that I could which needed attention outside of DR's. I was asked to run an errand over to the Festival Production camp, where a lovely lady introduced me to 'Robbie' as he was there. I said 'Nice to meet you Robbie, what do you do here?'. He said 'I'm the promoter'. Rob da Bank. 🤦🏻♀️ At least I continued doing the show for another 9 years, managing those DR's and Riders!
Oh bless you - this is so the sort of situation I can imagine getting into and so my second hand anxiety on your behalf is real. I very recently encouragingly told members of The Last Dinner Party to “keep going!” and walked away feeling about 100 years old and a right turnip. Happens to the best of us.