Fat Festival

Fat chance for the (Heineken) Fat Fest
How Thailand fears Rocknroll – but the kids are allright!

Published as cover story in Farang Magazine

Altamont Speedway. 1969. The summer of love reverberates round the dying days of the swinging 60s and the Rolling Stones are doing a free show for their fans. Because they didn’t make it to Woodstock. The Hell’s Angels are hired in for security. Bad move. The several 100.000 fans all drop bad acid, the atmosphere tilts from hippy love into RocknRoll hell and a guy is stabbed to death in front of the stage while the Stones hack through ‘Sympathy for the devil’. Bummer. Festival gone wrong. The end of the 1960s and all that.

Phitsanulok Race Course, Bangkok, November 2004. The summer of love is but a faint memory. Iraq has replaced Vietnam and consumerism has replaced the counter culture. Some Americans are still stupid loud brutes who export some of the best and worst culture our planet has to offer. Most of the worst has reached Thailand. But here’s the good news. The Heineken Fat Fest is billed as the greatest free rock festival Thailand has ever seen. It is great, it is free but it ain’t the 60s. No one drops acid and not a whiff of a joint can be detected in the crowd of several 100.000 fans. Welcome to the free world.

The cops are checking all punters for guns and the entry onto the racecourse is excruciatingly slow. There are not nearly enough police to regulate the crowds. Out on Phitsanulok Road a couple of thousand teenagers are kicking their flip-flops, drinking beer, immobilizing the traffic. The tiers of the racecourse loom out of the darkness like some creepy prison block, white concrete, covered by ants. Several stages pour a cacophony of sound across the entire area – the PAs are powerful and the stages are too close together. The first impression of the festival is utter chaos.

The fourth Fat Festival, organized by Fat Radio, features a two-day program crammed with 140 bands, tents, stalls, movies and according to the festival organizers, about 100.000 teenagers. Or, according to a local newspaper, 400.000 teenagers. There’s a lot of people out there.
But you can’t always believe what the papers say, especially not when it comes to the Heineken Fat Fest. Either way, this is a great, almost historical occasion in Thailand – the country’s best pop cultural talent served on a plate and an entire generation of adolescents has turned up to take a peak.
The variety of musical consumables is so overwhelming that much of the audience just drifts from stage to stage, nursing drinks and looking good. Heineken are present with banners and logos but beer sales are low-key. Throughout the festival I don’t see any of the hordes of coma-surfers, fuck-ups and inebriated corpses that usually litter any respectable rock festival in the West. No one here is out for the substance self kill. No one is throwing cans of piss at the bands. No one’s having sex in the toilets, shooting up behind the bins and Thai girls don’t flash their breasts for the main act.

Nonsense T-shirts and wild colored contact lenses flash through the crowd. The average age seems to be about 19 and the kids are post-everything – post-metal, post-goth, post-punk, post-modern. Dolled up punks make the most spectacular audience members. Safety-pins and Warhol queens, tartan pants and big boots. Punk’s not dead. The atmosphere is carefree, funfair like. Independent record company stalls are besieged by swarms of teenagers, clutching, blagging or buying posters, badges and CDs. Small time record execs with funny colored lap-tops, most in their early 20s, complement each other on artwork, acts, stall presentation –it’s a thriving cottage industry, bordering on originality. The kids have stopped watching TV and are getting their act together.

A huge crowd surges around all sides of the hip-hop stage, deep in the bowls of the racecourse buildings. From one of the tiers above it looks like Arafat’s funeral. But there is no shooting and no fighting and all the dancing and bopping and pushing to the sounds of Thailand’s premier hip hop outfit ‘Titanium’ is a positive surge of energy. Watch out, thousands are having fun.

For me, the musical highlight on the first day is ‘Daytripper’, Thailand’s first Independent alternative rock band. Front man Ooh is all pockmarked, good-looking corpse cool – the nasty offspring of Paul Weller - and the crowd of about 10.000 in front of the main stage is up on their feet after a few bars. ‘Daytripper’ used to sing in English, but since the band has switched to Thai lyrics, they sound like a home-grown version of Supergrass or Mega City 4. Remember them? They rocked. Dry ice and the shirt comes off in the last number and Ooh is all angst and vanity and the crowd loves him for it and goes mad.

The Nation newspaper devoted a half page to the festival, under the headline, ‘Overcrowding, poor security and the sheer lack of planning made last week’s Fat Festival a pure disaster.’
Perhaps the writer was too busy to attend; the scribe certainly did not bother talking to the organizers. While running four pictures of ecstatic crowds and main acts, the article alleges that the festival fell apart on the second day, due to poor organization and excessive alcohol consumption.

No alcohol was sold on the second day at all. The festival fell apart, because it was stopped by the Thai authorities. Heineken must have been delighted.

DJ Yuthana Boonorm, the festival’s organizer and managing director of Click Radio, tells the different story, “On the first day, access was very slow and in the evening there was a scuffle amongst no more than four teenagers on the gate. The police decided that the festival was too close to the Royal Palace and that Royal security might be compromised and asked us to not sell alcohol on the second day and close the festival by 8pm. We complied with these directives. There were no further fights.”

DJ Yuthana, clearly disappointed, sees deeper reasons behind the closure of the festival. “There are plenty of people in this country who think all popular music is evil. What they don’t realize is that the Fat Festival is part of the birth of a major Thai industry. Whatever more conservative sources may think, this is Thai culture and small record companies generate jobs, income and culture.”

The Nation article begs to differ and quotes unnamed sources about the lack of independent traders. At the same time, the article complains about the overcrowding of shops and booths.
That’s because thousands of people were keen to get a look at hundreds of different stalls. Many of the booths were run by bands performing at the Fat Fest and offered their fans a rare opportunity to rub shoulders with Thailand’s premier alternative stars. Crowds were no more dense than at any European rock festival.

DJ Yuthana refutes that there were widespread scuffles, as reported in the Nation, “The crowd was very peaceful. There was no tension; it was a great day. But in the future, Fat Fest might have to move outside of Bangkok in the future, maybe I will organize something like Glastonbury.’

Unnamed sources have claimed even more sinister reasons for the police curfew – the officers had no way to make any money from the event. Several musicians suggested that a minister’s golf game had been upset by the noise coming off the racecourse. The artists making these statements prefer to remain anonymous, much like all the sources in the Nation article.

In the end it all comes down to one thing – people want to have fun. Others want to stop them. Same the world over.

Modern Dog, Thailand’s greatest rock band hit the stage on Sunday afternoon, facing off an ecstatic crowd of many thousands. The crowd is a giant wave as tiny and charismatic front-man Pawd gets down on his knees and trades jokes with his fans. Modern Dog have been around for so long that their short set is spiked with familiarity, almost a kind of sentimental nostalgia for the days when this sounded fresh. But the band has aged gracefully and plays a crow-whipping, totally professional trawl through their best known songs. Pawd does his trademark crowd swaying act, driving his fans into a frenzy, much to the consternation of the police officers backstage.

It gets worse. Futon, Bangkok’s elekto-punk queens whip the surging mass of fans into a ‘I wanna be your dog’ frenzy. Futon play slick electro punk and like Modern Dog are a bunch of charismatic pros doing the Rocknroll thing as unrestrained as Alice Cooper did several lifetimes ago. Futon are all jerky aggressive sex noise screaming over synth banks and testy drum machines and a head-on vocal confrontation with the audience – all members of the band sing and shout in turn. Flying-V guitars, bizarre aesthetically redundant prosthetics of the 20th century, add the touch of class we have all been looking for.

Futon are followed by Paradox, the spectacular festival highlight. Paradox play really bad dirge metal, but the music is almost irrelevant. A fine set of deviants, the band feature a Mexican wrestler who lights his own farts; a bass player who is half man, half woman – down the middle; a fat gimp with a Hannibal mask, covered in chains and bleeding profusely and most outrageous of all, a young man in a police uniform, playing rhythm guitar. The gimp screams, the gender split pouts and rumbles, the guitar player basks in his neatly pressed uniform and a guy with a Scary Movie mask throws talc into the audience. Paradox are singing, sweating and floating above a crowd of thousands. For a moment, as the audience surges, revolution seems possible, RocknRoll has meaning and the world is a wonderful place of young people with bright futures and wicked dreams. But after the last cord, the last scream and the last fart, the crowd quietly and timidly files for the exits, perhaps dreaming of a festival that won’t be closed down, a media that comes out in support of the future and a popular culture that is as much part as it is antidote to the ‘Thai Way’. The kids are alright. See you next year.

If you would like to read more about festivals in Thailand, check the following stories:

Jerry Lee Lewis at the Ko Samui Music Festival 2005

The Illustrated Kill Convention, Thailand 2003

The Illustrated Kill Convention Revisited! 2006

The Phuket Vegetarian Festival

The Chonburi Buffalo Race

Phi Ta Khon - Thailand's Halloween