‘I was sent to chaperone my cousin – who was older than me’: were you supervised too much, or not at all as a teenager?

‘Being young and rocking out with thousands of strangers.’ Photograph: Matt Jelonek/WireImage

I was 15 when I plucked up the courage to ask my mum if I could go to my first festival. It was Big Day Out, 2009. The Prodigy were playing, and Lupe Fiasco, and the Arctic Monkeys, too – I had to be there. But as my mum scanned the flyer while she was deciding if I could go, she noticed a name she had to be there for too, Neil Young.

My mum likes to reflect every now and then on her missed chance to see Guns N’ Roses when they came to Australia in 1993 because she was eight months pregnant with me, so I sucked up the 15-year-old shame I felt at my mum taking me to a music festival and didn’t protest. Plus, being from a rural area, the festival was a seven-hour drive away and I had to get there somehow.