Glastonbury festival, 2014

So, folks, I've been to Glastonbury! It's often presented in the media as the festival-to-end-all-festivals, and it always gets loads of coverage on TV. You have to buy tickets before the line-up is announced, so investing in Glasto is always a leap of faith - yet, every year, thousands of musicians from across a whole load of genres perform, so it's unlikely that you'll be disappointed. Nevertheless, I had some reservations - not least its nine-mile-square dimensions and the sheer number of people, many of whom (according to the press coverage) like to do this kind of thing:

Glastonbury was as huge as I imagined - but its hugeness didn't matter all that much. In fact, its hugeness was one of the attractions. I stayed from Wednesday 25th June to the following Monday, and every day, I discovered a new area on the site. Writing up the whole experience would be impossible and a little too self-indulgent even for me, so here are my highlights from Glastonbury 2014.

10. Head-ing to the Healing Field

Whilst music is still the main entertainment at Glastonbury, there really isn't any shortage of things to do for those who want to take a break from watching bands. In fact, you could spend your whole festival just chilling in the Healing Fields, where you can book in for massages at 20 or 30 different tents. You could go on a massage crawl - but only if you have a small fortune in your pocket. I was told that these tents ran on donations, but as soon as I got into one, the masseuse made it pretty clear how welcome I'd be if I couldn't pay. I managed to fork out a fiver, a quarter of what she'd asked - but she sighed and went a-head with it anyway.

9. The dramatic Mr Scruff thunderstorm

Image courtesy of AudioCore

On Friday, a few of my troupe wandered up to Arcadia, which was on the other side of the festival to our tent, so it was quite a commitment, all in honour of Mr Scruff. If you think you don't know Mr Scruff, try this video and you might realise you do.

The feature piece of the Arcadia section at Glastonbury is the massive metal spider (pictured above) which spews fire at night, a spectacle which everyone on high ground can see - and it is wildly impressive, even from afar. But at a festival renowned for its thunderstorms, a giant metal structure on a hill isn't the best choice for a main attraction. As the dark clouds gathered, crowds umm'ed and aah'ed at the distant lightning, but the show was put off for around an hour while the storm passed over. In the meantime, the warm-up DJ stayed on a smaller stage and played music, while it began to rain. Torrentially.

I managed to dart into a backstage area in all the confusion, sheltering in a booth with a load of stray PR teams, but joined my friends reluctantly in the half-shelter of the bar tent when I realised we'd been separated. The rain went on and on, so we decided to brave the open air again, dancing ecstatically in the sodden field like pagans worshipping Mother Nature. Eventually, Mr Scruff started on the small stage, and the sun returned, giving rise to an impressive rainbow. We regretted our carefree attitudes later when we couldn't get our clothes dry.

8. The Radiohead/Rodrigo y Gabriela moment

I'm the first to admit that my iPod can look a little strange from a beginner's point of view. On the alphabetised artist list, Rodrigo y Gabriela, the talented percussive guitarists, are followed by Radiohead, the world-conquering experimental prog-rockers. Despite having normalised this juxtaposition in my listening life, it was still surreal when Rodrigo stopped playing his wordless Latin tracks and asked the crowd, "Don't you know anything?!", before launching into a cover of Radiohead's 'Creep'. The crowd joined him enthusiastically, but he didn't really need their help - Rodrigo was a pretty great singer. A sound recording should be available from the BBC's website, and I've posted below a video of the crowd-pleaser 'Tamacun' above.

If you love Rodrigo y Gabriela's virtuoso style, I went to see another great percussive guitarist on the Sunday up at the Toal Hall tent, a small stage which showcased a lot of alternative folk and acoustic music. Chris Woods Groove played a relaxed, entertaining set there, beginning with very few people to play to, but attracting people as he played. He's definitely worth a listen.

7. Mark Steel asking us why we weren't at Dolly Parton

On the Saturday of the Glasto weekend, Mark Steel was scheduled to perform a comedy stand-up set at the same time Dolly Parton was making headlines on the Pyramid stage. He tweeted:

Such torture. I'll have to leave Dolly Parton, to do my own show, which will be to the sort of people who didn't want to see Dolly Parton.

Being offensive about your audience seems to go down well on the left (see: Stewart Lee) but I in fact watched both Mark Steel and a bit of Dolly Parton - I spent a few minutes at the back of a 70,000 strong crowd by the main stage before thinking "Sod it, it'll start raining soon and then everyone will wish they were in a tent too". While I was there, I caught 'Jolene', though most of the sound was blocked out by people at the back chanting "TURN IT UP! TURN IT UP!". The iconic songs were so far in the distance that you could barely hear them. Amazingly, the sound desk did turn it up, but I'd had enough of feeling like I was at an American Butlin's, so I made my way to the Left Field tent and watched Mark Steel. He proceeded to chastise us all for not being at Dolly Parton - I genuinely think he would have tolerated an empty tent in homage to the great lady he was truly traumatised to miss.

Mark Steel is, it turns out, quite a funny comedian. However, the real success story of this year's Left Field was Francesca Martinez, a disabled comedian who managed to get us all reflecting on our privileges in life without feeling too shit, while being (arguably) funnier than any of the other comedians I saw there. The audience were friendly too - no ableist heckling, and a generally supportive atmosphere.

6. tUnE-yArDs giving us the Powa

I used to listen to tUnE-yArDs all the time, and I still pause to appreciate the high note in 'Powa' every time it comes up on shuffle. By the time the tUnE-yArDs were on stage, my boots were hugged by a crust - no, a platform - of mud, so thick that I had to dance stock-still like someone trying to wriggle free of quicksand. Needless to say, I totalled those boots (R.I.P. their blessed soles). Nevertheless, the high note in 'Powa' (4:40 on the album version) was remarkable and I don't regret in the slightest how ridiculous I must have looked. If it's all still online, you should be able to relive my near-religious experience here. I don't enjoy the kindergarten-theme Merrill Garbus stages, but it's certainly very different from most female artists' highly sexualised performances. Maybe that's what she's going for.

5. Fine alfresco dining

Oh my God the food. Glastonbury has a reputation for having better food than most festivals, but that really isn't a hard title to win. At Sonisphere, I felt ill most of the time from the £6 noodles, and at YNot, I ate two lunches because the first just wasn't nice enough to finish (well, that's how I've reconciled it to myself, so we'll stick with that explanation). At Glastonbury, I was in a perpetual battle with my self-control and my wallet, and I spent as much time looking forward to the next meal as looking forward to bands. My personal highlight was Square Pie, but there were food outlets lining every major walkway in the festival, in a scene which could have been sickeningly consumerist, but which actually looked like a funfair for the tastebuds. We had pizzas, pies, thai green curries, burritos, roasted nuts, churros and chocolate, curry, soup, fish and chips... and that was just the Friday! No, I'm kidding, but it was tempting. The worst meal was a bacon bap served by a tetchy Welshman on the morning we were leaving, but he was probably cross because he knew his bacon bap was crap compared to literally everything else you could eat there. I would have killed for that bap at Sonisphere though. The Glasto food was in a league of its own - the one-team Premiership of Festival Food.

4. Showering with a lot of ladies, some Ecover* and no clothes at all

This one has no picture. Sorry guys (which covers boys, men, lesbians, bisexuals, queer people - none of whom were covered in the Greenpeace showers). If you find going a week without washing disturbing, you may well have deep psychological scars after Glastonbury; furious zipped-tent sessions with wetwipes just aren't enough to deal with the sheer volume of mud, sweat, beer spills, rain and puddle water that you encounter at Glasto. Whilst most of my friends thought wetwipes did a good enough job, I trekked out on the Sunday morning to the communal shower. I'd not showered naked with other people, even of the same sex, since pre-puberty; though I know nakedness is the most natural state of humanity, I was... well, shy. But I'd had enough, and it's amazing how normal abnormal things can seem when everyone's doing them. So, I stripped off and spent a lot of time staring at the ground so as not to embarrass anyone, but afterwards I felt surprisingly liberated.

The beauty industry makes us paranoid by providing the only source of information about other people's bodies, showing us slim, hairless, shapely nakedness, even if it means photoshopping their pictures to all Hell. So, being amongst other women's bodies, candidly but without objectification, felt like a really radical yet simple resistance to advertising propaganda. I think the alternative-lifestyle feeling this gave me is representative of the wider atmosphere at Glastonbury - you could buy everything from eco-friendly deodorant and reusable tampon sponges to craft items made from recycled materials. Though the cynics dismiss this stuff as quaint hippy lifestyle politics, I think it's really inspiring that people are choosing to do their best to halt our global climate crisis in the face of seeming impossibility, whilst fostering healthier relationships between human beings. I left Glasto feeling oddly hopeful, where I usually leave festivals feeling a bit misanthropic.

*If you're wondering what Ecover is, it's an eco-friendly body and hair-washing gel which people were reluctantly using, on the orders of the woman who cleaned and managed the shower block. She was a dictator, but a benign one.

3. Nights out at Block 9

At one end of Glastonbury's remarkable site, there is a section dedicated to late-night clubbing sessions - Shangri-La (which is split into areas called 'Heaven' and 'Hell'), the Unfairground and Block 9 make up a ferocious trio of nighttime resorts. Each of them is themed to the hilt - the Unfairground has a slightly disturbing Trainspotting-chic going on, with scary broken dolls and enormous skinless horses hanging from the tops of rides. Parents pushing buggies soon turned back when they saw the Unfairground - this was not a place for small children. Shangri-La Hell is plastered with red paint and plays only the most hardcore club music late into the night. At one venue, you had to have a tattoo to get in - either real or fake - and if it was real, you got in for free. I'll elide Heaven because I'm an atheist and so I'll never get there anyway.

Block 9 (pictured above) was my favourite of the three zones. Designed to feel like a urban inner city after the apocalypse, its towering buildings, including the 'London Underground' and the 'Hotel', look like buildings caught in the act of being demolished, coughing up smoke and giving off eerie green and red light. During the evening, stand-up acts and bizarre artists gave cabaret-like performances on the stage placed in the Hotel's gaping second-floor, but at night, the whole place became a queue for the clubs tucked up behind these elaborate façades. In the damp, dark interior of the London Underground building, the DJ played endless house music to thousands of high people. I danced, not high but loving it anyway. The air was nearly solid with heat, damp and glitter. A couple of my friends chose to repeat this every night, but I wanted to focus on the music (and, frankly, get to sleep before the guys in the tents behind us started chatting shit through the early hours).

2. Shedding a Teardrop to Massive Attack

Image courtesy of d3 Technologies

Massive Attack were the one band I swore this Glasto that I wouldn't miss - everything else was negotiable, but Massive Attack were my baseline demand. I turned up just as it was getting dark, and pretty much all of my friends were there, gathered at the back of the crowd. Unlike at Dolly Parton, being at the back for this was more therapeutic than disappointing, since it meant you had space around you, a sense of the overall atmosphere, and couldn't be distracted by the words and images flashing up across Massive Attack's backdrop. The messages were political and charged with meaning, but that's something for me to explore in the BBC recordings of the set. While I was there, I just basked in the gorgeousness of 'Paradise Circus', possibly my favourite track ever, and the perfectly-delivered melodies of 'Teardrop'. I'd say it was my second favourite performance of the weekend.

1. Enjoying The Beat

The award for my favourite performance goes to The Beat. The Beat are a Birmingham-based band, some of whom my parents knew when they were young adults living in Handsworth. Their sunny ska sums up their scene perfectly - the racial politics were tense in the 80s but there was a lot of solidarity and unity between black people and the white community, especially the younger generations and the left-wingers. In opposition to societal racism and fascist groups like the National Front, bands like The Beat and The Specials made fiercely political music in racially-mixed groups of performers, fusing the musical styles of reggae and punk rock. The Beat's music is relentlessly upbeat, angry but also joyous, and their happiness onstage is infectious - every single person in the crowd at Glasto was dancing and the crowd was huge.

I went to see them thinking they'd pass the time, but within three songs they were the highlight of the festival - lead singer Ranking Roger bounced about the stage, performing the staged but seemingly spontaneous act alongside his son, Ranking Junior, who you may remember from the Ordinary Boys track 'Boys Will Be Boys'. Their performance was absolutely flawless, and their messages of unity and love made me realise how little love there is in my own politics. If only we could combine anger at the state of things now with this overwhelming enthusiasm and pleasure, perhaps we could attract more people to an otherwise very intimidating movement. I grinned right through tracks like 'Stand Down Margaret' (which united people in the 80s around the hope that maybe, if a ska band asked nicely, Margaret Thatcher might step down from her role as Prime Minister). They also did a great cover of 'Rock the Casbah' in honour of Joe Strummer, and ended the set with an extended version of 'Mirror in the Bathroom', a truly brilliant track about the hedonistic narcissism of wealthy city-dwellers.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the photographer who was bouncing about in front of the stage - I've never seen a paid professional having such a damn good time at work. If you don't know much about The Beat, I've put a few of my favourites below for your delectation (under the name 'The English Beat', which is what they're known as in the US).

So, that's it. As my friends and I cleared our little campsite, folding away our tents and dumping our rubbish at the nearest bins, it was amazing to think what the festival had been just hours before. Tents had left dirty yellow patches across the fields of Michael Eavis' land; people trudged through the drizzle along muddy walkways in the annual exodus. We didn't get caught in traffic for long, and soon me and two of my much-loved schoolfriends were in Derby getting tattoos, a symbol of our friendship, of the year of our 21st birthdays, and of our first Glastonbury. The same cynics who will dismiss Glasto as hippy rubbish will dismiss my tattoo as sentimental and foolish, but for me it's a little reminder of being young and idealistic and still in love with music.

Image courtesy of David Hodges

The lonely festival experience

This year, I managed to get a ticket to the YNot festival in Derbyshire. It's an annual 'small' festival (with around 8,000 tickets) costing just under £80 for the weekend. When I was offered a ticket with the press, I searched far and wide for people to accompany me, visualising beautiful afternoons lounging in a campsite with six or seven of my favourite people, music playing in the background, the sky blue, etc. etc.. That scene was never to materialise - one by one, my friends either turned me down or dropped out after assessing their finances and schedules. Having promised an article to the Oxford Student newspaper, though, I realised I was going to have to go. Alone.

The lonely festival experience didn't really appeal to me. In fact, I was dreading it. I whittled my plans down so that I only had to go for one day, and I wrote some lines in my mind which I could use to approach, and then befriend, strangers. I climbed into the taxi which would take me to the site, feeling nervousness - I was going to conduct my first live, face-to-face, in-the-same-room interview. I also felt pre-emptive boredom though, seeing the day stretching out ahead of me like a desert of solitude.

When I turned up, the festival was muddier than Sonisphere and Hard Rock Calling put together - every walkway was two feet deep, and every step felt like walking on the moon. Zero gravity mud. If I stood still for too long, I'd sink to my ankles, so I kept moving, finding my way to different tents. I've talked about the music and the atmosphere and stuff in my article at the OxStu. The highlights of the smaller acts were the Anything Goes Orchestra, Emperor Chung and Elliott Morris, and disappointingly, there was no-one bad enough for me to use my cruel witticisms. "Never before have I heard a band so bad that the crowd were chanting 'less! less!' at the end of the show" had to stay in my head, where it probably deserves to be, until now.

Once I'd wandered round, I started to get that bored feeling I'd anticipated. Standing in the VIP press area was kind of intimidating - sure, I could see the Jarman brothers talking in the backstage area, and it was awesome, but amongst the cool swaggering thirty-year-old men who were probably all from the NME, I felt unable to grin and cry "IT'S GARY JARMAN". Instead, I had to lean back and pretend that I encountered my heroes every day. Or even better, pretend I had no heroes, like the cynical bastards that are seasoned music journalists. And even then, I got a funny look from someone sitting in a press tent with an Apple Mac and headphones. I repeated to myself the mantra, "cynicism is just defensiveness", then attempted to be defensively cynical enough to fit in.

The boredom and discomfort made me seek out something else to do (or drink), but I was also getting a headache. I had to make the choice between cider and aspirin - I chose, after a long deliberation, a small drink and then a load of painkillers. Luckily, the ginger beer I chose was foul, so I decided to give it away - that'd be a good way to make friends, right? Little did I realise how hard it is, as an individual, to approach groups of strangers. They're all having too good a time, or they're too busy, or too drunk. In the end, I fobbed it off on a woman waiting for her friends at the portaloos and ran off, still alone.

After an hour or so, the better bands started to assuage my feeling of isolation, and I realised that actually, I was having quite a good time. At most festivals, I spend a lot of time worrying that the people around me aren't having fun, or considering when to broach the "Can we leave now? I need the loo and these guys are shit" topic. Here, I was totally free to leave when I stopped enjoying bands. I valued that freedom, but not as much as the freedom to eat two lunches without being judged.

There was another hiccup to come yet, though. I went to watch Sky Larkin, content in the knowledge that I was meeting them for an interview at 4.30pm after they'd been onstage. At 4.20, I nipped into the press area, envisaging a quick turnaround. I should have known that nothing is that simple. At 4.30, I saw Katie Harkin, the lead singer, emerge from the vans and run across the band area, but she didn't then come to meet me. I started wandering about, feeling lost, intimidated by the NME-men, and not nearly drunk enough to relax. It took 45 minutes for them to finally emerge, and then I realised I was in a queue. Feeling like I'd probably been forgotten, I sat in a VIP sun-lounger and tried not to look like an amateur.

At last, Katie and Nestor, Sky Larkin's drummer, greeted me - their manager (who I think, but can't be sure, was Wichita's Gareth Dobson) shepherded them towards me in a paternal fashion, and I did the shaking of hands and smiling that I assumed I was meant to. We disappeared into a press "yurt" and had what turned out to be a very relaxed chat while sitting on the floor, which I wrote up into a proper interview here. After that, I got a lot more comfortable. I'd had some human contact, done what I'd set out to do, and all that was left was to enjoy The Cribs.

Ash gave a brilliant performance on the mainstage, playing and performing to a standard I hadn't expected (even if the lead singer does look like an Irish James Blunt), and then I waited for The Cribs, free to find my own favourite place in the crowd. As I wandered, searching for the best spot for combining jumping with a good sight-line, I was accosted by two incredibly drunk teenage boys. My mistake was humouring their attempts to dance around near me. A smile was too much encouragement. One of them approached me and asked "Who're you with?" I, not wanting to say, "Oh Lord I'm so alone", replied, "I'm with the press". Yes, I embraced nobbishness for a few seconds to raise myself above pity. Instead of the contempt I expected, he was so drunk he replied, "That's so cool", before falling over onto his friend and then attempting to turn the fall into a dance move.

I managed to back away behind someone with a beer belly dramatic enough to hide me (and/or shelter me if it rained). Human interaction, I'd decided, is overrated - I couldn't make friends in a few hours, and moreover, that was fine. Being alone was fine. I'd decided that when The Cribs came on and reminded me why I usually like human beings. They were fantastic - more cheerful than usual, beautifully discordant, as wild as they were ten years' ago, if not more so. Ryan's recent weightloss and depression have coloured his character: in his new diminutive form, he seems fragile, lending more meaning to tracks like 'Back to the Bolthole', and yet he's a more imposing figure for his new sharp, shadowy jawline and uninhibited screaming. The Cribs were always impressive, but ten years on, five studio albums in, their retention of the outsider spirit and the untamed sound is really admirable. The crowd loved them - they had people jumping and singing right back into the audience.

If anything, seeing my favourite band alone was better than seeing them with my friends. My relationship with The Cribs is too intense to share - it's a secular worship, the only worship I allow myself, and I always feel a little bit embarrassed to enjoy them wholeheartedly with friends watching. I want to jump and scream and yell and laugh, like a small child who's had too much sugar watching Disney. On my own, knowing that nobody judging me mattered, I had a great time, full of abandon. I realised as I walked into the night, searching for my taxi back, I'd actually enjoyed being alone. The lonely, sober festival experience had been... good. In fact, I think I recommend it.

Sonisphere @ Knebworth 2010

It's been a while since my last post; I've been enjoying the summer for reasons other than music, which is a surprise even to me. Since I last wrote, I've done several musical things, like go to metal fest Sonisphere, get into Bright Eyes, and reboot my dead iTunes.

The most important of those being Sonisphere.



On July 30th, I went to Sonisphere with my boyfriend. If you read any of the posts below, you'll know that metal is not really my favourite genre. I was definitely one of the girlfriends there whose sole purpose was to keep the tent warm - I made myself enjoy it anyway. I only saw a handful of bands: when most of the names are unfamiliar to you, you never quite know where to go.

We caught a few minutes of Gary Numan and Europe on the Friday night, and that was all. For the rest of the time, we explored the campsite and arena. Large numbers of men in tutus and girls in Newrocks wandered the fields, graffiting the much adored 'Pantera' on tents and queuing for portaloos, whose scent defined my weekend.

Alice Cooper was the best on the Friday night. Onto the Saturn Stage he strutted as the sun went down, dressed ridiculously with a myriad of wrinkles criss-crossing his face; he launched into 'School's Out', and the crowd's mixture of amusement and adulation added to the great atmosphere. From there, Alice proceeded to die onstage about five times, kill various hideously made-up humans and sing over his few-chord showman's punk. It was fun, and very tiring.



The first night was soundtracked by random cheers which spread across the campsite like mexican waves, skanky people talking and smoking shit, and the calls and jeers of drunken insomniacs.



On Saturday, we saw Family Force 5 on the Apollo Stage in the morning. They are incredibly scene, described by the term 'Christian Crunkcore' (?) and talking a lot about dancing. And dancing. Wearing lots of leather. That day we also saw Andrew O' Neill in the comedy tent, who definitely topped Tim Minchin, the act he was opening for. Rammstein finished the evening. I've never seen the deal with Rammstein: it's dull to me, repetitive and humourless. I enjoyed the stage show - fire, fire and more fire - but I wasn't particularly bothered when they went off early. A beachball ricocheting off a bald man's head and a mass singalong of 'Du Hast' were my highlights of the set.

On Sunday, my day started badly when my boyfriend's uncle arrived early and had to go back home, meaning we thought we were going to have to get the train home. Not having washed for two days, this seemed a harrowing sentence, so we didn't enjoy the morning. Finally, it was agreed he'd come back in the evening, so we were free to enjoy the empowering reggae metal of Skindred, who were bested only by Alice Cooper's set. Later on, we saw Kylesa, a hard punk band who headlined the Jaegermeister Stage, then Pendulum, and ultimately, Iron Maiden.

All weekend, girls had been baring their breasts to big screens, but it got stupid during Pendulum. There were so many incidents of chest-exposure that even the laddish men in the crowd stopped cheering, and it became a bored expectation of the women on camera. I got pissed off by the misogyny and it ruined Pendulum for me. We went for a wander before Iron Maiden, immersing ourselves in the atmosphere of all the expensive food tents, the legal highs tents, then spending too much on the 10p machines at the amusement arcade.



Iggy Pop was weak. He looked even more decrepit on stage than Alice Cooper had, but unlike Cooper's, the show was without fun, and unless you were in the pit, a mere irritation en route to Iron Maiden. They were also disappointing, for me. Rammstein had burned things. Alice Cooper had died. Iron Maiden didn't do anything fun which a less-metal fan could watch, Bruce Dickinson just talked in clichés before playing the songs, straight.



I think the crowd enjoyed it, though. It's just not my taste. My boyfriend didn't much care for their setlist either however, so we left early and packed up to go home.

And that was Sonisphere. On the journey home, sleeping on Jozef in the car, I had a heavy rock band playing invented songs in my ears, vaguely Metallica, and they didn't go away for days. We were exhausted and disgustingly unwashed, but happy. Very happy. It was my first festival, and I've discovered the charm of a permanent hum of music, overheard comments ("Slayer were amazing. I love my cock."), and nighttime fairgrounds lighting up littered fields.