I put the photos up on my Flickr a couple of weeks back. To sum up, it was an enormous amount of fun. It's such a huge thing, like nothing I've ever been to before, and there's such a good feeling there. We were really lucky that we mostly had good weather as well.
That's our tent, taken on the Friday (the wet day) - that's as muddy as the campsite got, ie not very, so that made life a lot easier! I decided I actually love sleeping in a tent. It's like a cocoon or a womb or something, all snugglesome. Although we cheated and took an inflatable bed with us for ultimate comfort (we are old now).
We got the bus from Bristol on the Thursday lunchtime, found a good camping spot, ate our picnic, drank some of our box of wine and set out to explore the site.
The festival proper didn't start til Friday, so there wasn't a great deal to be done. The ground was thick with mud from the previous day's rain so even though the sun was shining, walking wasn't too fun. Getting a bit fed up, we ambled into a fun looking bar tent that had brilliant bright pink decor, fun music and cocktails. Best move ever. The mojitos were expensive and we thought they might be a rip off, but they were amazing! Generous and tasty. We cheered up no end.
That evening, we made our way to the Park area of the site, met a cool Irish couple and hung out with them in this amazing mirrored pergola for the night.
Friday started well with Metronomy on the Pyramid stage, can't believe I hadn't heard them before, amazing band! Their album 'The English Riviera' has been on repeat on my iPod for the last 2 months. Unfortunately, as they left the stage, the weather took a turn for the worst and the rain started. We grabbed coffee and toast and headed over to the Leftfield to see some comedy from Andy Zaltzman (an old Edinburgh Fest favourite and the man that can be credited secondly only to Mark for making me interested in cricket).
The Leftfield had the benefit of being in an indoor marquee, and was run by Billy Bragg, it had a really great mix of stuff on over the weekend. Political debate, music, comedy. It was a good place and we spent a large amount of time in there even when the sun was out! Friday evening we went back to watch Billy Bragg's live set and despite the fact that I was cold and wet and a bit miserable he is such an uplifting person to hear, so true to what he believes in. That evening we were stood next to this family, a couple and a little boy maybe 8 or 9 years old, and several times they leaned down to explain to him what Billy was saying, about why it's important we pay our taxes and what trade unions do. It gave me hope that there are still people who believe in good things, haha. Also in the Leftfield we discovered some brilliant artists, like this guy Jonny Neesom who played guitar and sang these really funny, perceptive songs (we got his CD in the tent) and this incredible spoken word artist named Kate Tempest. Seriously I've never heard anything like her, she was so powerful. I need to track down of her stuff recorded.
On Friday night we went to sleep really early, haha! We were lying in the tent and where we were camped you could hear Primal Scream playing in the distance. It was lovely to drift off listening to 'Country Girl' drift over the fields.
Saturday was a MUCH nicer day. The sun came out, it was really warm and the mud started drying up fast. We used our Green Passes to try out the solar showers (SO GOOD...well ok it was like washing under a low-pressure, luke-warm hose in a shed, but still....SO GOOD!) and feeling rested, healthier and CLEANER we hung out at the tent into the afternoon and drank some wine and ate a lot of cereal bars (main food source) before it was time for music. Annoyingly the two acts I wanted to see most out of the whole festival were on at overlapping times. So we decided to go to most of Anna Calvi, then skip the end (we saw Anna Calvi a month or two earlier at the Thekla in Bristol) and run over to Patrick Wolf for a full set. Anna Calvi turned out to be so captivating that we stayed the whole thing, but at least we still caught most of Patrick Wolf. Both were amazing, complete highlights. Patrick Wolf is pretty much the most upbeat person ever to exist. This is the video to his last single, The City. It is impossibly upbeat:
Saturday night was so amazing as we went over to the 'after-hours' part of the festival, it was the most incredible thing. I sound like I'm gushing but seriously, it took your mind to a whole other world. Block9 and Shangri-La are like whole worlds built at the festival.
That's the London Underground part of Block9, you don't get the sense of scale from the photo but that is a life size block of flats, with a life-size tube train hanging out, and underneath it is a club. The attention to detail is so amazing. Then round from Block9 is Shangri-La. This area has run on an ongoing futuristic, dystopian storyline for the last couple of years; in 2011 the city is being ravaged by a virus, so the inhabitants are moving out to a new planet, and this is the last party before they leave, 'a rave to end all raves…'
It's built like a film set, I have never seen anything like it. It's a whole town, the centre of which is the slum, a series of covered alleyways leading to all sorts of places...weird shops, crazy bars...half of it boarded up as the residents flee.
The Shangri-Spa!
This shop sold that well-known complementary trio of items phones, crack and biros, before the virus forced its untimely closure.
We went into this mad strip club behind a cage door named Fish and Tits...
...no really.
There was a bizarre mirrored nook inside.
At midnight we went through to the Arcadia midnight fire show at the 'spider', which was also fantastic.
Arcadia take military scrap and use it to make spectacular shows. They had live singers, musicians, acrobats, it was pretty impressive.
Sunday was consequently a lazy day, spent hanging out at Leftfield (trying to avoid heat this time, made a change to the rain!), eating potato wedges, seeing the epic danlesac vs Scroobius Pip show, relaxing in the green fields and the healing fields eating ice cream, and late in the evening watching the only appropriate alternative to Beyonce in existence - Simon Munnery in the Cabaret tent!
He had converted the League Against Tedium/Attention Scum hat into a BUBBLE MACHINE!
In a pleasing Simon Munnery-related side-note, I was packing up my books in Bristol to move them up to Nottingham last week and I found a book that an old friend had given me as a present in 2001, over a decade ago. I was flicking through it and I found he had inserted into the back cover a little Simon Munnery interview/article clipped out of a newspaper! That made me smile a lot and think about the many years in which my life has been made happier by Simon Munnery and his brilliance.
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