Credit: Andy Hughes/NME
Our columnist Mark Beaumont, up to his neck in mud and long past remembering his A-Level results, is ready to go full VR on August’s big bank holiday bash…
We’re already living in a quasi-virtual world. Politics, news, Twitter bots, car accident cold callers, Tinder profiles, Michael Jackson songs; so much in the modern world is fake that I for one am looking forward to going full San Junipero. At least in a virtual world you know for sure that nothing is real. Last week I slipped on my own personal Playstation VR headset for the first time and found myself stalking round the gunmetal hallways of The Persistence’s procedurally-generated space station stealthing space zombies, mildly terrified by finding myself inside fucking Dead Space but otherwise surprisingly zen. There are no Trump Tweets in here, no Corbyn slurs or Bastille singles. Thameslink cannot rile me here, nor Pete Doherty’s breakfast revile me. Brexit, climate change, terrorism and James Corden are things that happen in another world I know nothing of. It’s like being Hayley Hughes.
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It would also solve the ongoing stand-off between the new pop generation and the Oasis diehards of 2000. Without getting into the knotty details of whether the music was better then (having been to both, it clearly was, and 2000 was a shit year), I’d want to take a virtual trip further back, to ’97 or ’98, in the hope that I’d find a separate secret map called The Ramada. That was the name of the hotel where all the bands, and NME staff, would stay in the days before everyone had to run off to Leeds the next day.
For three nights a year, this was the music industry’s very own Sodom And Gomorrah, a fuzzy swirl of indie rock freaks, frightened staff and horrified double-booked wedding parties. Here, in my experience, you couldn’t quietly hum a tune in a corner without Chris McCormack from Three Colours Red knee-sliding across the bar to turn it into a rousing sing-along, and you had to keep your wits about you, lest you be press-ganged onto a tourbus by Ash as a last-minute tour mascot.
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Source: Nme