Searching for Happiness at Primavera Without Frank Ocean

I would like to tell you a story about my childhood. The year is 1994 and I, aged five, am at Disneyland Paris. My parents foolishly let me have a Robin Hood hat – the deep green felt one, with a red feather – and I am wearing it while strutting pompously across a bridge thinking I Am The Shit, like the harbinger of the goddamn Boss Baby. Suddenly a prophetic gust of wind comes out of nowhere, knocks the hat off my head and directly into the water. I don't actually remember this happening but it is captured forever on VCR and you can hear my parents creasing with laughter as grief settles for the first time upon my fat little face and it crumples into a james_van_der_beek_crying.gif. I die inside. I am born anew. I become: disappointed.

This information is important because realistically nothing captures the depth of human disappointment more than a toddler believing they have become their favourite Disney character while at actual Disneyland Paris and having that dream blown away in an instant to the tune of two knowing chortles. Not even small-town Tinder is that depressing. And yet this disappointment, this disenchantment, this soaking wet flannel wrung upon the flame of the spirit paled in comparison to what happened to my feelings when Frank Ocean cancelled his set at Barcelona's Primavera Sound.

Blond(e) is my favourite album of 2016, and 2017, and of the last five years, probably. I wrote at length about what it meant to me in terms of identity and sexuality here. The first time I heard "Self Control" it prompted me to drop my bags of shopping, cry in the street and want to hug a stranger. Suffice to say: I was crushed. Spiritually, emotionally and existentially flattened like an egg under an anvil. I quickly rocketed through all five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and tweeting. A part of me expected it, the same way you can anticipate being dumped. There were rumours and silences in telling places, cancelled sets for Sasquatch! and Hangout created a general air of suspicion and unease, and then, just days before Primavera was due to take place, the final blow arrived: an announcement confirming Frank Ocean wouldn't be performing due to "production delays beyond his control".

Frank Ocean, famously, is not one to skimp on artistic vision at the expense of other people's time and energy. The same brain that produced "White Ferrari" is the same brain that made us wait four years for his second album, trolled the population of Bristol into thinking he was playing Lakota with James Blake and kicked off his comeback with a livestream of himself building a staircase. Who knows what "production delays" relates to – probably some video-based installation of abstract yet emotionally #impactful footage that wasn't properly rendered in time – but it's a hard pill to swallow when you know he could just stand on stage with a mic and say "what's up" and 40,000 people would die because it's the best thing they ever heard. Yes, Grace Jones, The xx and Slayer would all still be there, but it wouldn't be the same.

Profoundly shook, I decided to approach the experience as though I had booked a holiday with someone and they'd binned me right before the flight, so I went on my own. You know the first Sex and the City film when Carrie goes on her honeymoon to Mexico with her mates instead of Big? Like that but if they spent their time getting rat arsed instead of mincing about in crap hats and without the deeply unfunny bit where Charlotte shits herself. Using Wikihow's Dealing With Emotional Pain page as a rough guide, I embarked upon an emotional pilgrimage to see if I could find happiness at Primavera without Frank Ocean.

In the context of an actual relationship, this is the bit right after someone comes to collect their rogue socks and copy of Howl from your house and you spend the rest of the evening watching Love Island and texting your friends about how you're going to die alone. When Frank Ocean leaves you to dry out in Barcelona without him, the best thing to do is consume your feelings. Arriving on the Wednesday, before the action at the festival's main site at Parc Del Forum kicked off, I spent most of the day solemnly eating olives, sinking Estrella and screaming at small dogs before the evening eventually swept me into a dank alt club with a broken vending machine full of Desperado in the front and a halfpipe in the back. In Biblical terms, I believe this is called "a sign". Maybe everything would be OK after all.

If I was going to have to confront live music, I was going to need to ease myself in with something so far removed from Frank Ocean that the very concept of Frank Ocean would feel as out of place as a skinny Dwayne Johnson. I began with Broken Social Scene's reunion set because it is impossible to feel sad when Feist – correctly identified as the Bez of Broken Social Scene – is visibly having the time of her life, drunk on freedom from playing instruments. Add Emily Haines into the mix and they were singing joyously into each other's faces like it was an episode of Glee. Miguel also provided some much needed escapism by serving one of the greatest rock and roll performances this side of Prince, replete with dance moves that I'm pretty sure knocked up half the audience.

Still, none of this was quite as distanced from Frank Ocean as I wanted. So I did what any sane person would do, given the opportunity, and went to see Slayer. There was a circle pit to "Reign in Blood". Someone held a Minion balloon aloft in front of Kerry King throughout. It was perhaps the happiest moment of my life to date. That spurred me on to watch Converge for the fourth time in life at which point I was so pissed I didn't even realise that my friend had spent the entire evening referring to them as "Cofveve".

I wake up on Friday and look at my phone and oh, what's this? A photo of Frank Ocean out shopping with Kendall Jenner, sporting a new millennial pink haircut on the very day he is supposed to be in Barcelona headlining Primavera? 'The absolute bellend. The absolute, rude prick,' I initially thought to myself before remembering he is an adult man who can go outside whenever he feels like unless he's wearing a romper. Thankfully Mitski was on fairly early and watching her scream about heartbreak and self-respect almost as gutturally as Tom Araya properly sorted me out. Then Sampha performed on an enormous outdoor stage and the area became so rammed throughout his set that by the middle you couldn't even walk up and down the stairs without stepping directly over someone's head and giving them a premium view of your crotch. I reckon Sampha, by virtue of being the most sensitive lad on the line-up that day, became the emotional safety net for most people. At least I hope that's what it was, because I saw who was on right after and I refuse to believe that many people turned out in advance for Arab Strap. By the end of the night I was in such a positive mood I actually had the time of my life watching The xx, who I normally consider to be the musical equivalent of an over-the-jeans handjob. I'm glad I chose to end the night there, though, because Jamie xx did a DJ set in place of Frank Ocean and he reportedly played "Nikes" and that would have sent me raging straight back to step one.

It is important to have people around you so you can support each other through trying times such as Frank Ocean cancelling his Primavera set. This was what Saturday became for me, as the two men who gave me and my friends a row for doing Jeremy Corbyn football chants at the two-hour long (TWO-HOUR LONG) Arcade Fire set will attest. Elsewhere, Swet Shop Boys artfully did that thing they do where MC Riz says lots of serious shit about politics and Heems blurts out "Veganism!" and "Hypebeast!"; Skepta shutdown a crowd of excitable young people holding fidget spinners; Grace Jones, with an agility and energy level I could only dream of possessing now let alone at 69 years of age, bashed through her iconique catalogue in full body paint and kept making jokes about coke. The next thing I remember is DJ Coco playing a disco remix of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in broad daylight and then I decided it would be a really good idea to walk five miles then jump in the ocean at 8AM. Frank whom?

The first rule of dealing with disappointment is to always crack open a cold one with the boys. I'm pretty sure that's the common phrase that definitely won't lead to any casual drinking problems. When life takes your lemons away, turns out it doesn't actually matter that much when you're in Barcelona because Fanta Lemon exists and that tastes loads better than real fruit. That said, mixing it with vodka is arguably why at one point I found myself surrounded by several polo-shirted white men dancing gracefully around me to the half-arsed whinges of Van Morrison.

If you go through these steps and still don't feel any better, the internet informs me that the thing to do is to seek therapy. Like most people who spend the majority of their day making terrible life choices and tweeting about astrology, I'm already in therapy, so this advice isn't going to cut it for me. We did however buy a puzzle book at the airport on the way out to defer to in our darkest moments, and I can safely confirm that stressing out over an Arrowword is a really good way to forget that Frank Ocean ruined your life.

That said, if he cancels Lovebox I will kill myself.

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(All photos artfully shot by the author)