As promised last week, it is time now to take
you back to last summer with a trip to the legendary Glastonbury Festival.
Glastonbury. Where
the do you start with this? It’s legendary, possibly the greatest festival
there has ever been. Five days of
music, drinking, dancing, mud, drugs… and bums. Yes, bums. At this year’s
festival (my first Glastonbury) I exceeded my normal number of bums seen in a week quota, by quite a lot. Girls
in hot pants, in dresses that were too short, cheeks on show, underwear missing
presumed absent – let’s just get that
particular aspect out of the way first, then we can get on to the other things.
Yes, it was
baffling.
It is possible that
this one might not be as much about booze as it should be, but we’ll see.
“Bare” with me.
Logistics
What’s the first
thing you need then, when going to the Glastonbury Festival? Well, of course
it’s a ticket. And they were something like £230 this year (including a parking
pass), which is fairly ridiculous considering how sharply that figure has risen
over the last decade, but you are getting the greatest party in the world™.
You might also need
some friends (or a partner) who are willing to get out of bed before 9 on a
Sunday morning and continuously hit refresh
on an internet browser while you sleep off the previous night’s debauchery.
Tick, tick and tick
on that one for me.
Then you need to be
thinking about logistics. How are you going to get there? What are you going to
sleep in? What are you going to take? How much booze are you going to need?
People came up with
all kinds of answers to those questions. Let’s have a look at some, shall we?
- How are you going to get there?
For us it was a case of drive down for a few days in Gloucestershire
first, then head to the festival from there. It wasn’t exactly easy because you
had to decide whereabouts you wanted to camp in advance, and then approach the
enormous site from the right direction. In our case it was to be from the West,
but we started North East. On top of that, signs to the site weren’t always as
helpful as they could have been.The site is so big that it was like planning a
military assault, planning which hills you were going to come over.
- What are you going to sleep in?
Most people chose the tent in a
muddy field surrounded by empty beer
cans option, some even by a busy path or notoriously daunting toilets
(having to inhale that smell the whole time… ew). Some have camper vans, and
get to stay in fields a little further away with toilets you can actually shit
in without worrying about catching typhoid or challenging your hamstrings to
support a marathon half-squat.
Luckily, our friends have a camper van with a convenient awning that they
allowed us to sleep in. Quiet and comfortable. Nice.
- What are you going to take?
You can split this one into categories – clothes and booze mainly. For us
it was oldish clothes and waterproofs while for everyone else it seemed to be
hotpants and summer dresses (for the girls), and t-shirts and shorts (for the
boys).
In terms of booze, I took 32 cans of Holsten Pils, 2.5 litres of cider, a
plastic bottle of cheap dark rum and a litre bottle of the Stolichnaya. Mrs
Cake took cans of Hobgoblin and Old Speckled Hen, a number of canned cocktails,
a bottle of Spanish gin and the Green Mark vodka. All I saw anyone else lugging
about on their trolleys was crate upon crate of Foster’s, Strongbow and
Kronenberg. Occasionally you’d see a massive jug of local cider (which you can
buy outside the festival from roadside stalls).
It’s also a good idea to take plenty of toilet roll and some of that hand
sanitiser stuff.
- How much booze are you going to need?
Well, we nearly [nearly] took
enough. But not quite. On the last two days it turned out I only had 6 cans
left, so I had to allocate myself three per day. You can’t take glass into the
festival, so one afternoon I walked back to the car to refill my hip flask with
Stoli, and that only lasted one day. I couldn’t be bothered to make another
trip because it had taken about 45 minutes that first time and my feet were
killing from spending 12 hours a day standing around or power walking in
wellies.
So let that be a lesson to you; overestimate, add a bit more, then add a
bit more. That’s probably almost enough.
 |
| not enough. anywhere near |
Activities
Things don’t really
start until Friday, but most people arrive two days before that, as we did. So
you spend a couple of days wandering around, getting the lay of land and all
that. There’s always plenty going on with sound systems, bars, stages of
performing arts of all kinds as well as just random shit that makes you go: what’s this for? Like a double decker
bus that just has loads of shit in it
– by which I mean pictures, dolls, toys, artefacts, knick-knacks. I just didn’t
get it.
Come and have a look in me bus!
What for?
You just pick a
destination, head over there with your can in your hand, and check it out.
In all honesty, the
line-up of musical acts wasn’t as much to my taste as I had seen billed in
previous years. This year I remember seeing:
Pixies – a favourite
band of mine, who were excellent as usual.
Kelis – she did a
cursory two verses and two choruses of Milkshake, and then we had somewhere
else to be.
Metallica –
interesting that a metal band should headline the Saturday night. They were ok,
but I don’t think Metallica are all that.
The Subways – just
about as average as a rock band can be.
Dolly Parton –
convinced she was miming.
Lana Del Rey – yawn.
Kasabian – what it
would sound like if Robbie Williams had a rock band.
Jurassic 5 – seen
them before, it is what it is.
De La Soul – the
first band I saw, I think. I have a number of their records, but was quite
surprised by how good their set was.
The Radiophonic
Workshop – one of the highlights; electronic music pioneers.
Jack White – I like
Jack White, but this was disappointing.
Rodrigo y Gabriela –
has anyone ever bought one of their records?
Warpaint – nothing
to say, but I do like them.
Tinariwen – nice,
groovy, bluesy north African pscyhedelia… with lots of toffs hanging around, talking
loudly.
I deliberately
avoided Ed Sheeran, Arcade Fire, Elbow, The Black Keys, Jake Bugg, Paulo
Nutini, Kaiser Chiefs… so you can see… it was more about avoiding things I didn’t want to see than there being too
many things that I did want to see.
Your Own Perfect Party
Now, after that last
section about music, you’re going to think I wasn’t having a very good time.
Seriously though: I was. It’s not all about the bands, and the experience alone
is enough to keep you going. There are of course, other means of entertainment
– one of the performance highlights in fact was the English National Ballet,
which was just superb. The entire audience stood in solemn silence through the
whole thing, holding back tears, the peace broken only occasionally by people wandering
in from elsewhere going, “what the fuck
is going on?” – that and a few of us that couldn’t help breaking the sombre
mood by laughing at a girl’s dress that was riding up too high while she
retrieved something from a friends backpack [back to bums again].
The greatest thing
about Glastonbury is that you can go out and find your own perfect party. It’s
all right there. My group’s best night was the Thursday night when we went to
the South East Corner – Block 9, Shangri-La and the Unfairground where everything
is a post-apocalyptic set filled with stages, bars and scenery. We happened
upon a tiny bar playing a bit of metal (that you had to answer a rock-related
question to be granted admission), and seemed to actually get the party to take
off by requesting System of a Down. For the next hour we danced around and
screamed like idiots before collectively thinking our work here is done, fist bumping the dj and a south American
looking dude, and heading off for further adventures.
Two nights later I
saw the same thing happen again when, after Metallica’s set we stopped off at a
bar and a couple of Metallica and Rage Against the Machine tracks brought out a
number of peoples’ inner rock gods and there was all manner of screaming,
air-guitarring, gurning… just pure joy. I don’t know what happened when, 20
minutes later the dj played Eminem and then Outcast and… everyone just accepted
the change in musical styles, though the atmosphere had been lost. For those 20
minutes it was the greatest party those few people had ever seen – just like
two nights before. We wandered on.
Weather
Glastonbury is famed
for its weather – so much so that the media tends to fixate on it to some
extent. If you live somewhere in the world, and you’ve heard of Glastonbury
you’ve probably seen footage of mud and people covered in it, wrestling in it,
sliding in it, even canoeing in it. This year was the same in the media – we
had a bit of heavy rain which resulted in some muddy conditions, but what the
media conveniently missed out was that for the majority of the time it was
sunny and hot – so much so that I got a proper tan.
We weren’t worried
about the mud anyway – I’d brought wellies, waterproof trou and a jacket (I am
in my 30s), and the worst thing was just that it made it hard to find anywhere
to sit down. We actually avoided the heaviest downpour, as we were taking
timeout in the camper van. I made it back from my epic vodka replenishment trip
just in time.
The fuckwits
Now, on that first
Wednesday, when we arrived, the mood was surprisingly subdued as we pulled into
the car park. I was expecting people to be squealing with delight, shouting bollocks, drinking cans immediately, as
they began the weary trudge from their cars to wherever they were going to pass
out for the next 5 nights (like at Leeds Festival), but nothing of the sort. It
had an orderly sense of inevitability about it. Worry ye not, these people are
going to party, and fairly soon they are going to turn into fuckwits – a term
Mrs Cake coined one night with astounding clarity and accuracy.
Yes, these people are all fuckwits, with their ridiculous behaviour, ridiculous
clothes, flower garlands in their hair, leather hats with horns, inhaling
helium in the stone circle, painting their faces, queuing for half an hour to
clean their teeth at the water point, when they could just have collected water
earlier in a bottle, wearing a condom over their head and blowing it up with
their nose while their friends point and laugh hysterically… but… in fairness
the most ridiculous behaviour was perpetrated by only one or two individuals,
and if you apply the rules of an infinite universe, these kinds of things are
inevitable when you have so many people all partying together in one place at
one time.
And anyway, I can’t
exclude myself from these people. I’m older than most of them, I’m probably not
having quite as much fun as them or
being quite so ridiculous… but I’m a fuckwit too. We all become bellends after
dark, but some are bellends all day. And fair enough. Is this a festival or
isn’t it?
Glastonbury is way
posher and way better behaved than Leeds
Festival – at times you feel like you’re in an episode of Made in Chelsea, or you do if you grew up anywhere North of
Cheltenham – but you still get certain types of lazy behaviour like pissing in
bushes (near tents where people are actually living) instead of going to the
toilets… Mrs Cake and “Veronica” actually started a chant about that:
Don’t piss in the bush! Don’t piss in the
bush! You should be asha-a-a-med! You should be asha-a-a-med!
… which “Pablo”
tried to copy to hilarious effect after we’d had a joint a night or two later.
There was also a Who’s the Douche in the limo? chant,
which went down quite well as one drove past us towards the VIP area with two
bored looking girls in it.
Anyway, everyone was
having fun, getting drunk, taking drugs with absolutely nothing negative (in my
experience) to report. Would I go again? Yeah, but not for a while.
Aftermath
So it was a mad, fun
few days followed by a marathon journey home. Oddly though, I was left feeling
refreshed and ready to get on with life again – until Wednesday morning when I
returned to work.
So last summer ended
up turning into one gargantuan drinking session after another, which is fine
and all, but it had never been quite so prolonged before, As this summer
approaches, for some reason I can’t help thinking things will be more
restrained… for some reason… but that’s a different story for another time.
Whatever your plans
for the summer, make them responsibly alcohol fuelled and fun. And if you’re
going to Glastonbury, remember; don’t piss in the bush.
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