It was the summer of 1984. I was 16. I wanted, finally, to see the Fall. I’d been fixated on the group since a 1981 Peel session suddenly flipped somehow from irritating me beyond reason to enthralling me beyond imagination. Provocative repetition. Monotonous drones. Withering sarcasm. I’m lucky I was struck by something so utterly superb when I was in my culturally vulnerable teenage state, otherwise you could be sitting here reading an article about Toto.

I saw an advert saying the Fall were playing at a rock festival in Cornwall and persuaded my mum, against her better judgment, to let me go, alone, with a sleeping bag and a tent. The rolling grassland sloped down to a stage, shadowed by the ancestral home of Lord Eliot, unlikely benefactor of one of the last gasps of the real 60s counterculture. The Elephant Fayre.

Wafty pre-Raphaelite women wandered bare-breasted. Terrifying crusties, friendly if approached, roamed the site. In ignorant bliss I saw the then‑unknown to me John Martyn, fortuitously abandoning his gloopy 80s jazz funk to return spectacularly to his 70s echoplex experiments, and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, of whom I was similarly unaware, deliver a set of entrancing faux-naivety.

The Fall, Mark E Smith centre, on the main stage at the Elephant Fayre, July 1984. Photograph: Gentleman_Dude/Flickr

Darkness fell. A woman gave me free homemade tea and I sat in a little tent and watched a band I never caught the name of play a three-hour-long version of the Beatles’ The Fool on the Hill. It was only many years later, remembering the experience, that I realise it was unlikely anyone played The Fool On the Hill for three hours, and that the tea was probably slightly stronger than I realised at the time.

In another tent, a lone Rastafarian and I sat together and watched John Carpenter’s The Thing, when film still felt special, in those pre-DVD days. A screaming scientist turned into a weird mutant dog. “Lord Jesus Christ,” said my companion, his hand on my shoulder, blowing sinsemilla into my face.

A hippy antiques dealer lectured me by moonlight about the ninth-century Welsh monk chronicler Nennius, on whom I had written my O-level history project, and gave me a copy of a solo single by Dave Oberlé, of 70s medievalists Gryphon, which I have never since seen listed in any official discography. Did it even exist?

The Fall took the stage by the light of burning torches, the classic two-drum-kit line-up, now augmented by American guitarist Brix. Without a word of greeting, the group dropped into the spindly descend of Smile. I’m listening to a bootleg tape now and touching the entry ticket, still tucked into the cassette box, and I relive the exhilaration of experiencing the stolen riff of Elves for the first time, and a vast 10-minute version of the soon-retired Garden, still my favorite Fall song, with Brix singing the “Jew on a motorbike” refrain through some strange dub-effects pedal. I can taste the wet air in my lungs, see the black-clad couple in front of me, and I realise that the rest of my life, which can have such profound and disorientating pleasures in it, is going to be both wonderful and frightening.

The next day, my dad and his new wife, holidaying somewhere in Devon, intercepted me in Exeter. On the way home we stopped at Gordano services and I shat blood into a toilet bowl, the first signs of a stomach disorder that has since been my constant companion. As have the Fall. Next month I will see them for the 48th time.