Fiesta de Mi Padre

Jon Platt, making up his rassoodocks with what to do with the morning.

If you were to take a cursory glance at my family unit, you might conclude that my dad is cooler than me. People have been saying as much for years. The first time anyone did was at a Damien Marley gig at Leeds University student union that I accompanied him to when I was twelve years old. At the end of the set the girl standing next to us inclined her dreadlocks towards me and yelled ‘Your dad is the coolest man alive!’ in my ear. I wanted to correct her – clearly she had no idea that he had printed maps of three alternate routes to the venue and a diagram of the parking situation folded up in his jacket pocket – but perhaps as a consequence of having spent two hours in a poorly ventilated room with a crowd of aspiring Rastafarians I was finding it strangely difficult to give a flying fuck about anything at all.

That I’m reluctant to agree with this assessment isn’t a result of believing I’m cooler than my Dad – since I once spent a good three months trying to bring back double denim I think it’d be a bit rich of me to assume I was cooler than pretty much anybody. It’s just that I don’t think ‘cool’ is a word you can use to describe him. He doesn’t fit on the scale of ‘cool’. He can’t be assessed by the standards of ‘cool’. It’d be like trying to measure a quantum singularity with a plastic ruler.

If my dad can be considered cool, it’s because, over the course of his adult life (and much like myself over the course of the Damien Marley concert) he’s gradually stopped giving a shit about anything. If you were to judge him based on photographs from his early adulthood in the late seventies and early eighties, you’d probably think of him as just another dignified, earnest ad man; dressed voguishly yet soberly in black turtlenecks and high-waisted trousers. Yet as the years have gone by and any pretence at conformity has drained away, he’s incorporated increasingly eccentric items into his wardrobe; to the extent that a tartan-pastel flat-cap and a Hawaiian shirt patterned with pictures of farting dogs are today firm staples of his repertoire.

It’s the same story with his music taste. Having grown up listening to prog rock bands like Yes and Jethro Tull, he sought to redeem himself throughout the eighties and nineties by jumping on the ‘Madchester’ bandwagon and becoming a devotee of New Order and the Stone Roses. By the noughties, however, he’d stopped seeking any kind of uniformity and instead started following anyone that took his fancy. Nelly, the Black Eyed Peas, Goldfrapp, La Roux, Amy Winehouse, MIA – all of them found a home on CD shelves in our kitchen. This cosmopolitanism is something I’ve learned to emulate, and though I'm not sure I’ll ever understand his affection for Fergie, nor he mine for Blind Lemon Jefferson, I like to think the ‘Home Sharing’ function on iTunes has benefited us both.

Last weekend I went with him and my little brother to Latitude Festival in Suffolk. It was my Dad’s third festival, and my third time going with him. The first time I was told this was happening (my mother booked him a ticket for his birthday, again to Latitude, after I’d already told her I was going myself) I threw a mild paddy. ‘How can I go to a festival?’ I protested. ‘He hates camping. And getting wet. And shitting into a hole with bits of pissy tissue dangling from the edges. There’s no way he’ll have a good time.’

But as it turns out, my dad was made for festivals. He has a belter. You see, he’s prodigious organiser, and as I discover to my detriment every year, festivals were designed for organised people. He spends several months beforehand gathering every possible bit of camping equipment he might need into a pile in the living room and calling me up every other night to ask if I’ve done the same. Once there, he buys a programme and spends each morning writing an exhaustive list of all the things he wants to see, then sticks to it religiously. He leaves the camp-site at ten am and returns at midnight having seen twenty bands, three comedy acts and a recital of anonymous poems composed during the 1984 miner’s strike (they have things like this at Latitude). Meanwhile, I spend virtually the entire festival curled up on the floor of my tent; hungover, soaking wet, and trying to muster up the courage to go for a shit. Though that didn't happen this year because he bought us all passes to the luxury toilets. The fucking hero.

As a consequence, I can’t really imagine going to a festival without my dad. Sure, it can be mildly embarrassing when he whips out his white man’s overbite in the middle of a set, but I feel like he’s earned the right (actually, given the number of years he’s been rocking the expression I’m not sure he didn’t invent it). That might be the crux of the difference between us. When I first started going to festivals, it was because I thought it would make people think I was cool. When he first started going, it was because he was cool enough not to care.

In tribute to this, I can offer you all an exclusive chance to experience a festival with my dad, since he’ll be going to the one they have up in Edinburgh every August to see a play I’m putting on (on from the 11th to the 23rd). I can't promise that you’ll see his white man’s overbite, but I can promise the chance to see three short plays about sperm – and who could refuse that?