You drift like a cloud through the festival crowd, in a frock coat from Saville Row

[venta]

You know what happens in early July, don't you ? Yes, that's right, you get me writing at mind-numbing length about Glastonbury festival. And this year you won't have to hear me complaining about the mud. No mud! NO MUD!

Usual convention applies: bands are listed at the start of each day. []s denote a band I either saw only a little of, or wasn't paying much attention to.

Wednesday

This year, we set off earlier than ever. Pausing only to wait for Simon to show up so we could pack him into the car, we sped on down the A303 (noting that Stonehenge seemed unusually busy. I blame Doctor Who). Sadly, it seems bushels of people had had the idea of going early; although we got into the car park with little bother, we queued for a long way along the A303, and then we queued on foot to get to the actual festival entrance. In at long last, we dropped Simon off at the Pyramid stage, to catch what little remained of England playing footie, and departed in sport-hating glee to put up tents.

So. Many. People. Our usual camping ground of Pennards Hill was already looking full - not rammed, but lacking a commodious space in which one could erect two tents. We tramped on up the hill to an area known as Dairy, where we found a decent-sized space and stopped.

Go us, we chose well. The people camped around us were friendly, helpful and (largely due to overheard conversation) highly entertaining. I had a bottle of wine but no glasses; no worries, here was a spare plastic glass from the people in the teepee. During the course of the weekend we all swapped band recommendations, food, drinks and reading material. When I complained about the queues for the standpipes one morning, a guy popped his head up over a nearby tent: he had a 15 litre water-thingy full, why didn't I just take some of it? Lovely people. Hurrah for them.

Eventually we tore ourselves away, and headed to the fabulous Manic Organic for tea. Vegetable and dhal curray, or coconut, channa and potato curry? ChrisC and I bought one of each, and swapped halfway through.

Incidentally, I have now officially reached the following conclusion: Brothers Cider is not very nice. It's too sweet, and it tastes of chemicals. If at Glastonbury, go to the cider bus and drink Burrow Hill cider instead. If anywhere else, I dunno. Have a cup of tea or something.

Thursday
Unknown girl with acoustic guitar, My Luminaries, Chapel Club, Being Human Collective.

Thursday did not start well. I woke at 6am and, popping out to the toilet, noted that some nearby camper had foolishly left their bag outside their tent, spilling the contents everywhere. Then I realised: it was a couple of tents away, but it looked awfully like Simon's bag. And quite like his shades. And like his iPhone solar charger. As I walked down to the toilets, my brain woke up a bit more. Surely it was his bag.

On the way back past the heap o' stuff, I picked up the envelope which contained a Glastonbury ticket: it had Simon's name and his photo on. After some deliberation we woke him up. I scooped everything back into the bag, taking time only to marvel at just how many harmonicas the guy carries on a regular basis, and handed it in through his tent door. There was a sound of rummaging: his wallet was in the property lock-up, his money was in his pocket. The people who'd snatched the bag from his tent overnight obviously cared nothing for gob-irons or expensive headphones, and not a thing was missing. There was a triumphal shout from within his tent of "stuff you, you cunts!" and we all went back to sleep.

Waking-up mark two was much better, starting with an overheard conversation from the people behind us.

Voice 1: How many bourbons have you got?
Voice 2: Forty five.
Voice 1: Can I have one?
Voice 2: No.

Voice 2: I've got fourty four now!

Then Corinne and Julia, camped next to us, called us in to help with their sausage overcatering issue, and the day was off to a flying start.

The festival proper doesn't begin til Friday, so we ambled round The Park and round the Healing Fields looking at things and trying to stay out of the scorching sun. I highly recommend both the Mexican-stall-in-the-Park's vegetable fajitas, and the £5 salad boxes from Queen Delilah. I tracked down Shiatsu Simone, the lovely lady who made such a difference to my back in 2007, and mercilessly stalked her until she agreed to see me. By the time I headed off to meet satyrica for a quick cup of tea, I was considerably taller, with unknotty shoulders, and feeling thoroughly at peace with the world.

Time-keeping at Glastonbury is a bit of a black art. Times are often quite approximate, and crowds or interesting things can delay you quite unexpectedly. So by the time I'd kept my two-thiry appointment with Simone (I was early, but found a girl-with-guitar to listen to to pass the time), been only slightly late to meet Satyrica, made it in time to hear My Luminaries and successfully met up with ChrisC and Simon again I was feeling quite smug. We even fitted in a bit more wandering before it was time to meet brrm for sausage and tartiflette in Jazzworld West Holts[*].

I kept up last year's tradition, by dragging Brrm to see a band that wasn't particularly good: Chapel Club had seemed promising on MySpace but were rather limp and lacklustre in the real.

The day ended with some more ambling around, accidentally finding a very pleasant band in a teepee called the Ancient Futures Stage, and our first dose of Weird. As a family passed us, the bloke suddenly turned and demanded of us: why would you squeeze a gherkin? I answered "because they enjoy it", ChrisC chose "because she made me" and everyone went on their way happy.

We experimentally poked our noses into the new late-night areas near Shangri La, Block 9, The Common, The Unfair Ground. Even on Thursday, they were crammed to bursting point with people, so many that they weren't fun places to be. Despite the masses of work which had gone into building spectacular venues and sideshows, I just didn't appreciate them jammed in as I was. One exception, in a brief burst of space, was a small white tent which contained a Thing. The Thing looked as if it had been built out of everything someone found in a very old shed, with a few guitars bolted on. It had wheels and wires and spindles and turntables and lights and switches... and its keeper was using it to produce an ethereal, ambient noise which was almost, but not quite, music.

Friday
Rolf Harris, Femi Kuti, Hazah, Goldheart Assembly, Josie Long, Al Pitcher, La Roux, Vampire Weekend, Nouvelle Vague, [Reverend and the Makers], [Hot Chip], [Gorillaz], Flaming Lips, New Model Army.

Overheard conversation of the morning...
Voice 1: You can get cereal from the Kellogg's stall for £2. So if you had that three times a day, you'd still have enough money left over to buy three hats a day.

How do you start a festival with a bang? Rolf Harris. He was the opening act on the Pyramid and he went down a storm. I can't imagine I'd ever pay to see Mr Harris particularly, but in a field with thousands of others singing along? Bring it on.

Incidentally, for those not familiar with Glastonbury, the Pyramid is the main stage. The second stage is called the Other Stage, and then there's a bunch of smaller stages (Avalon, John Peel, West Holts, The Park, Acoustic, Leftfield). Then there's the Dance Village, which comprises more than half a dozen venues of various sizes, and... well, there's even smaller stages everywhere. The printout we took with us gave stage times for forty one stages; there are many more ranging from small "shell" stages, to bars which have music, to tents which just happened to have someone with a guitar... It's busy. There's a lot on.

Left to myself, I wouldn't have watched Femi Kuti. I don't get African music, I really don't. But while I still can't imagine standing and watching him and his strikingly-clad band (and his amazingly wiggly-bottomed dancers), he certainly provided pleasant background music to sitting about with a bunch of people on the grass. In the sunshine. In fact, under brollies because it was so damn sunny. I am assured, by the way, that Femi Kuti is a legend; failing to appreciate his music is entirely my Euro-centric fault.

Getting distracted by Hazah (forget drum and bass, try bagpipes and bass!) we ate lunch and I hoofed off up to the not-the-Leftfield-any-more, where I'd signed up for a British Sign Language lesson. Forty five minutes, taught entirely by a deaf guy in sign language (with occasional reversions to a whiteboard when necessary), it was very enjoyable and very funny. BSL, when needing a "word" for something tends to grab at the obvious - to sign Scotland you mime bagpipes, to sign Ireland, a pair of fingers dancing on the back of the other hand. Wales is a clawing dragon, and England is something terribly disappointing based on the letter "E".

On leaving the lesson I failed both to navigate correctly, and to tell the time correctly. So I ended up in the wrong place, and instead of hurrying off to fix it and catch Mariachi el Bronx, I got distracted by a jewellry stall offering repairs, and had the broken link of my necklace resoldered while I waited (and cleaned and polished, £5, job done).

There was then a brief run of disappointment: Goldheart Assembly were fabulous 6 months ago in Oxford, but less impressive on the Avalon stage. Josie Long has dropped her cutesy act, but also largely stopped being funny. La Roux was somewhat lacklustre, and not the electrodancealong I'd hoped for. Things picked up with Vampire Weekend, though, who were all jangly guitars in the still-blazing sunshine.

We called at the badly-named Information stand. Where was the venue the Lunar Sea Lounge? Er, no idea, try Shangri La, or somewhere at that end. Who were the special guests on the Park Stage? The Chemical Brothers (that question was at least answered briskly and definitely, it was just totally wrong). Had Mos Def cancelling affected the running times at West Holts? Oh, said Information, has he cancelled? We gave up.

The running times weren't affected, so we saw almost all of Nouvelle Vague's twee, French-pop renditions of punk classics (sounds like an awful idea: isn't. Promise.) To me, Nouvelle Vague were the one truly disappointing time-clash of the weekend; even sprinting away from the stage we only made it to see the last 90 seconds or so of Reverend and the Makers.

I watched only the beginning of Gorillaz set. Given that Gorillaz is made up entirely cartoon characters, I was interested how they'd do a festival appearance. Apparently at early gigs, they hid coyly behind screens and were seen only in silhouette. But now, big stage, big budget, I was expecting something great. Instead, Gorillaz didn't show up and just got a bunch of humans to play in their place. Bah. I lost interest and ate pie instead (oooh, pie - chicken, leek and ham with mash and gravy).

I watched the thoroughly barking first half of the Flaming Lips set: man appears in zorb, is passed around over crowd! Balloons! More balloons! Confetti cannons! A streamer-bazooka! More confetti! Halfway through I ran off to see NMA, which was a bad choice. Firstly, because the Flaming Lips had been bloody great up til then, and secondly because NMA were probably the least interesting I've ever seen them. They plodded on through a set list which wasn't really to my taste, woke up to play No Rest and Poison Street then abruptly vanished offstage. Boohiss.

Saturday
Rob Chapman, John Niven, Peter Hook, The Ambling Band, [Drugstore], The National, [The Cribs], Editors, The xx, Pet Shop Boys.

Overheard conversation of the morning was the same people as Friday, but this time veering between drunken rambling and being a living logic puzzle. Lots of sentences like "Pip loves me more than you, but Jim loves sausages more than he loves me" drifted over. Pip could occasionally be heard saying "but you still can't infer from that how much I like sausages". The whole thing fell apart when an indignant voice demanded "are you using a sausage as a scaling funtion?"

Anyway. Yeah, by my standards, that's not a lot of bands, is it? Y'see, I've mentioned the blazing sunshine a few times. And really, given the total mudfests of other years, I don't like to complain. But it really was bastard hot. Standing unshaded, in a field, was just not an appealing option. So we spent the whole of Saturday morning in The Free University of Glastonbury listening to speakers - the FUoG being in a nice, shady tent pleasantly decorated with wooden seagulls, plastic palm trees, mock tea chests and some rather suspect lashings that I, as an ex-Scout, could easily have bettered.

Peter Hook was speaking on the topic "how not to run a club", which was basically an excuse for him to wheel out anecdotes about the Hacienda years in Manchester. The short version of how not to run a club is "don't spend 15 years drunk and on drugs".

When the University knocked off for the day (around lunchtime, bloody students) we cautiously ventured out to the circus fields for our daily dose of Weird. And to find The Box, the one-audient theatre-show which so wowed us in 2008. This year they had a horrow show; the people with the booked slots hadn't showed up, so we took it in turns to go into the stifling hot tent and watch the (really quite scary) micro-play. Anywhere else, a bloke doing complicated whip-cracking, a pink-clad swing band and some stilt-walkers might be the RDA of Weird. Not here: we required a gentleman with a Victorian "gaiety engine", some people on counterbalanced ropes doing Matrix-style fighting and a bloke speaking cod-Norwegian and demanding directions to Albert Dock before we felt well enough to zoom down to the Hub to see Drugstore.

Sadly, the misleadingly printed posters were right and the published stage times were wrong; we saw only two songsworth of Drugstore. Interestingly, though, they were playing as part of a sub-festival aimed at the deaf and they had a fabulous signer with them. Instead of standing to one side and signing the lyrics, she'd developed a half-signing-half-interpretive dance-style which was beautiful to watch (even if you had no idea what she was signing and could hear the words anyway).

The xx surprised me. Simon and I left Editors to catch what I'd assumed to be a minority-interest band, but found the John Peel stage packed out with teenagers determined to clap along to the unclappable and sing along to anything going on. It was a great set (and featured a surprise Florence Welsh for their closer of You've Got The Love), with a hugely enthusiastic crowd. Despite the rather spare melodic quality, The xx were easily the least apocalyptic band I saw on that stage all weekend; if you've never heard of them try this.

And Pet Shop Boys, you cry? No Muse? Er, no. I like the way Muse sound, I just find that they sound the same all the time. I accept this is my fault, but the PSB were kind of fun :) We braved Arcadia (the busy, busy, south-east corner) again, and found a giant stage on legs. With very very loud music and giant spouts of flame. I would not like Arcadia's gas bill.

Sunday
Aisle 16, [Norah Jones], These New Puritans, [Slash], Portico Quartet, Gang of Four, MGMT, Broken Social Scene, Faithless, Alabama 3, Stevie Wonder, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip.

On Sunday morning, my I-haven't-had-any-kedgeree alarm went off, and I mutinously stomped over to West Holts to get some for breakfast. ChrisC followed me, because the kedgeree stall is right next to the nice banana milkshake stall. It was still scorchingly hot, so we made ourselves a den under the milkshake stall's A-frame sign and happily camped there. It was a biggish sign, so there was almost room for Brrm as well when he happened past.

I demanded to go and see Aisle 16, the wonderful poetry collective I encountered last year. In line with everything else I made Brrm watch, they were disappointing and not as much fun as I hoped :( However, on the way there a strange and awe-inspiring thing happened. As we walked towards the Cabaret tent The Masters of the Kazooniverse (a kazoo marching band) approached from the left. A gang of "free hug" trolls approached from the right. We were caught in the middle of performance artist crossfire as huggy kazoo-y troll-y dancing broke out.

We saw acrobats and diablo-ers, and eventually made it through to the Kidz field. Which is a fabulous place. Or would be, if I weren't too big to be allowed to play with most of it. We watched a small girl happily squirting paint onto a cardboard disc while her friends pedalled the bike which turned the cardboard disc, speading the paint into centrifugal patterns. There's structured stuff to do in the field - entertainers, and BMX demos, and workshops, and story-sessions, and yoga for babies - but also someone who's worked out that if you give kids something to climb on, a massive pile of sand, and all the art and craft supplies they can eat they'll be happy. It turns out that the Kidz field also contains a laundry, which is presumably indispensible for anyone with small children, particularly in mud years.

Skating past the queueues of people trundling out of the site to the fields where large football screens had been set up, we began to charge about seeing bands. Past Norah Jones and up to John Peel for the slightly apocalyptic These New Puritans, back past Slash to eat ice cream (and very nice it was too, strawberry flavour sandwiched between two chocolate cookies) in front of Portico Quartet, and back up to John Peel for the very apocalyptic Gang of Four. Truly only a 70s throwback band could look so serious while destroying a microwave with a baseball bat. MGMT were surprisingly limp, and afflicted by bad sound, Broken Social Scene were much more fun.

In between times we'd tried to catch Babeshadow, but they never showed. Asking the soundman beside some very loud speakers where they were suggested that they'd had trouble getting either their guitars (what I heard) or their guitarist (what ChrisC heard) onto the site. Said soundman also told us Jools Holland was their late-night secret guest. We didn't really believe him.

We headed back to watch Faithless (and ate monster Yorkshire puddings while doing so). Faithless were righteously popular, the field in front of the Pyramid packed out. Many people had mocked us when we expressed little interest in Stevie Wonder so we thought we ought to give it a whirl. After listening dutifully for several songs, we conspired to sneak away and go wandering. A speed flamenco duo covering High and Dry on West Holts? I think so. We stayed a little longer, then got distracted by the towering inferno of fireworks in the next field, which turned out to be External Combustion's closing fireshow.

Our secret plan had always been to go to the Queen's Head to see Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip. A performance poet and a DJ don't sound like floor-fillers, but I think they drew the most enthusiastic crowd I've seen all weekend, a packed tent dancing and singing along right from the beginning. If you can't imagine what they sound like, try this. We headed home via the Park stage to verify: the soundman had been winding us up, there was indeed no boogiewoogie piano to be had.

And so Monday arrived and we packed up, lightly sunscorched and tramped away. I've always been mystified by the Glastonbury car park system; ChrisC navigates his way through a bewildering array of fields, with no signposts, to the car. Only this year we got mildly lost - going in the right direction, but the wrong side of a fence - and lost an hour or so. Someone parked near us had abandandoned a large and expensive-looking fridge box full of rather old salad so I wombled it tidily into the car. I needed a big fridge box. The legendary car park queues hadn't materialised, and ten minutes later we were out onto main roads... where the queues were. Still, 9 hours from waking up to arriving home - it's been worse :)

I feel that this year we never hid it quite so lucky with the weird-stuff fields, and found fewer things which made our jaws drop open. But, you know? It's still the most exciting place I've ever been.

[*] Ever since I've been going to the festival there has been a rather inaptly named stage called Jazzworld, which didn't particularly show jazz. This year the stage had been renamed to the West Holts stage. The Leftfield, back after a year's absence, was in a new place, and the Queen's Head venue (plus the Stupid Workers Tower) were occupying the old site of the Leftfield, now renamed to William's Green. This led to a lot of confused and confusing conversations.

Comments

[alien8.livejournal.com]

a aplendid round up - thanks :)

(maybe you could do a post on the 'what you really need to take with you' for a festival goer in the same tone? too many people take the kitchen sink etc. it'd probably be funny.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I was considering something like that...

Also incorporating Venta's Guide to Festival Toilets :)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That would be very good.

I mean, I already know what to take to a hacker-camp.