I'm only here because I want to twist the structure of my average day
If you've read my Glastonbury write-ups before, you'll know that 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.
If you haven't read them before, then you won't know that they're best avoided due to extreme verbosity.
Wednesday
unknown band
This year saw a radical departure: rather than heading to our usual camping ground from force of habit, we thought we might investigate somewhere different. Maybe somewhere, er, a bit quieter and more boring and less inclined to all-night partying. Did a campsite steward have any suggestions. Indeed he did. How about camping in Oxlyers, right next to the Dance Village. Er, y'know we said "quietish"? Right next to a collection of dance stages which run til 3am doesn't sound ideal. Fair enough, he said, how about Rivermead? Very empty, very flat, very spacious, right next to the river? Well, to be honest, given the weather forecast... flat and right by the river... I can guess why it's empty. We wandered on to try our luck, plodding under the weight of baggage.
At which point, ChrisC had a stroke of genius. Glastonbury is riddled with free property lock-ups. We dropped off a rucksack apiece and, cumbered with nothing more than a tent, went frolicking off to find a pitch. Skipping lightly through the massed nylon domes, we found a nice space and nailed the tent to the floor.
Last year, my write-up commented what friendly, lovely, helpful people we'd camped ourselves among. This year... not so much. As we finished pitching, I smiled at some girls emerging from the next-door tent. They didn't respond. In fact, none of the sub-twenty-somethings in the area seemed to acknowledge our presence all weekend until Monday morning, when someone apparently identified me as a responsible grown-up and asked if I had a plaster. (I had, and I could even find it in the post-festival carnage in the tent. Shit. I am a responsible grown-up.)
Anyway. The site - heavily rained on in the run up to the weekend - was muddy but not horrendous so we set off on a stroll through the Dance Village. Pyramids covered in graffiti art, a replica of Stonehenge made of white cubes (which would, in the dark, flash different colours), and a cluster of venues. We made it up to The Park, the area curated by Michael Eavis' daughter Emily, which has a lovely, quirky, fete-y vibe and - critically - the fabulous Japanese restaurant we found in 2009. It wasn't quite open, but we bought take-away teriyaki chicken... and were criminally disappointed. Bah. It was sub-adequate and - given the fabulous food on offer elsewhere - felt like a wasted meal. We stomped grumpily down the hill to the Cider Bus, found a band on the bandstand and forgot to be grumpy. Impressively, ChrisC managed, in a huge crowd, to find the friends we were meeting in the time it took me to buy a pint. "Get your ID ready", said the sign. I did, optimistically. They didn't ask. Until I complained. And then they refused to serve me til I'd produced it. It wasn't the same, though.
Wednesday night was cold. Really cold. At about 3am, I was vaguely awake and noticed ChrisC heading out of the tent. I assumed he was off to the toilet, and, busy snoozing and shivering, didn't really notice how long he was gone. The first sign he was back was something soft and warm landing on my feet. He had, in fact, had similar thoughts about the climate and had wandered off to Cosy Camper and returned with something whose label proclaimed it a Roasty Toast Soft N Cosy Funky Fleecy Blanket. It was black, printed with multi-coloured Space Invaders and very, very welcome.
It would never have occurred to me that the stall would still have been open. Apparently it was open, happily serving, and only deficient in that they tried to sell him a Pac-Man blanket when he asked for Space Invaders.
Thursday
Mojohookers, unknown pianist, various poets, The Mandibles, Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer
Thursday began around 5am to a sadly familiar sound - rain drumming on a tent roof. There were a few torrential outbursts, a few breaks, and a lot of drizzling. On the grounds not a lot was going on, we lazed about in the tent. Eventually, fortified with porridge (with bananas and treacle golden syrup) we strolled around through the not-quite-open-yet Unfairground and up into the Greenfields where we were waylaid by a stall claiming "the best curry on site"). Without an extensive comparison I can't be certain, but I doubt it; their chickpeas were good, but I reckon they could be bettered.
The circus and theatre fields were starting to wake themselves up, though still had a not-quite-ready-yet vibe. We watched some acrobats practising, springing into handstands to avoid a tractor tyre as someone bowled it along the platform at them. We declined to get involved in the attempt to break the world record for the largest game of Twister as we were heading to meet satyrica who was holding court in the Avalon Café.
We left him an hour or so later, as we were curious to know what the "Glastolympics" scheduled to take place in the Pyramid field were. Either they were finished, rained off, very small... but we never did find out. Lounging about in the tent again, we realised (as something sounding like U2 soundchecked) just how well we could hear the main stage without leaving the comfort of our sleeping bags.
I'm sure that, a few years ago, turning up on Wednesday meant you were "early". This year, I felt that our 4pm arrival was rather tardy, and by Thursday the place was heaving. We wandered gently about looking at things, wound up watching an entertaining but approximate pianist in a tiny venue called The People's Frontroom, then trundled to the Speakers' Forum for the first few rounds of a poetry slam.
I've never been to a poetry slam before. I wasn't sure how it worked. I'm still not sure quite how it works, as before the elimination started I'd realised I was actually in danger of freezing to death and moved on. Really quite cold, Thursday night. I enjoyed it, though. Some of the poets seemed to do little more than ramble a bit at the mic, but others were attention-grabbing, exciting, emotional stuff.
We were on our way to the Croissant Neuf stage to see Mr B when we were ambushed by a fabulous 7-piece ska group on the bandstand. Which meant we were a bit late and, though we arrived well before Mr B did, the crowd around the tent was packed in ranks of those waiting to get in. We waited patiently, and by about five songs in natural wastage meant we'd just squeezed into the baking hot tent. Mr B's brand of hip-hop isn't so much guns, bitches and bling; it's more biscuits, cake and sherry. He's a bit of a one-trick pony, but his chap-hop (complete with 'tache, BBC accent, flat cap and banjolele) is highly entertaining.
Friday
Danny and the Champions of the World, [Chipmunk], Brother, Two Door Cinema Club, The Vaccines, Cage the Elephant, The Wombats, BB King, [Radiohead], [Morrissey], Billy Bragg, U2, Barenaked Ladies
Whoever gets up first on Proper Festival Days has, for some years, had the job of fetching the papers. The papers being, in this case, the tabloid Q Daily which provides news, reviews and general silliness. This year, however, it had been replaced with the non-corporate single page broadsheet Glastonbury Firelighter. Which had been available on Thursday and been, to be brief, a bit shit. On Friday, none of the info points seemed to have any Firelighters.
A large chunk of the daytime was spent running around watching various boys with guitars, with the exception of Chipmunk, who was unexpectedly hip-hop, and BB King, who can only be called a boy with a guitar in the most technical of senses. BB King has style, though - I've never seen anyone else have their hat and coat brought onstage by a personal manservant so they can don them before departing.
For the rest, the Wombats and Two Door Cinema Club were predictably likeable jump-up-and-down-in-the-mud singalongs, Brother were lad-rock of the most forgettable kind, Cage the Elephant potentially interesting but marred by weird sound mixing. Then again, Cage the Elephant were in the John Peel tent; perhaps they were just being played at the wrong speed.
The Park stage is famous for its "secret" gigs - last year saw Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood do a highly-acclaimed Radiohead-lite set. This year, the strong rumours seemed to be Pulp, or Radiohead. We dismissed the latter - surely they wouldn't pull the same trick two years running - and hoped fervently for the former. Packing ourselves into the already crowded field, it became apparent that everyone else was damn certain it was Radiohead. They were right.
(Incidentally, ChrisC and I have firmly held beliefs that some bands bring out the sunshine. Driving to Somerset on Wednesday, we stopped some fairly menacing downpourage with judiciously applied Belle & Sebastian. While we waited in The Park, ChrisC said "you know, if you ever wanted a band who would make it rain...". Damn right. About five minutes before Radiohead even showed up the drizzle started in earnest, and it continued relentlessly into the night.)
And it turned out that the area of the field we'd squeezed into wasn't really in earshot of the stage, and so we departed again. Technically present, but only borderline able to hear, we cut our losses and caught the tail end of Morrissey's set (and what a rubbish version of This Charming Man that was). We'd arrived at the Pyramid just in time to hear the close of Meat is Murder, so I had a truly enormous quantity of roast pork in a bun for tea just to annoy him.
When you purchase a Glastonbury ticket, you are contractually obliged to see Billy Bragg at least once during the weekend. We popped up to his spiritual home (the Leftfield) to hear the end of his set before investigating the beginning of U2. I'm not much of a U2 fan, but was prepared to be impressed by their stage show. As it was, I was more confused than anything else by the multiple projections.
We scarpered after a handful of songs, and made our way to Avalon to watch the thoroughly storming Barenaked Ladies. They opened with Brian Wilson Said ("who on earth would put a bass solo in their first song?" enquired the singer as the super-geeky bass player launched into a solo), and went up from there. Thousands of skinny glow-sticks thrown into the audience! Silly banter! Actually really very good musicianship! Close harmony! Choreographed dance moves! More glowsticks! I enjoyed them hugely.
Saturday
Stornoway, unknown skiffle band, Steve Knightley, Gaslight Anthem, Brandt Bauer Frick Ensemble, DeVotchKa, Tame Impala, Pulp, [Coldplay], Deacon Blue
On Saturday I picked up a couple of Firelighters. They remained a bit shit, reading like sixth-form magazine filler pre-written before the festival even began. Still, Stornoway's beautiful blend of acoustic, multi-instrumental songs more than made up for journalistic disappointments. The Pyramid stage openers are often folkier acts, easing festival-goers into the day. As Saturday's weather got over itself and started playing nice, everyone relaxed into it.
Having headed over to the crazy shit fields to try and get in to the recording of the Infinite Monkey Cage (we failed), we milled about watching a skiffle band and catching part of a crate-stacking contest. "Shall we get along to see Steve Knightley?" enquired ChrisC. Yeah, I said. Just as soon as we've seen this bloke fall off a pile of boxes. (He did. Don't worry, he was on a safety rope.)
Mid afternoon, we split the party as ChrisC went off to watch Graham Coxon, and I trundled down to West Holts to watch the Brandt Bauer Frick Ensemble. Who were, by the way, bloody marvellous. If you imagine someone who wanted to make hardcore techno, but only had an orchestra at their disposal. And who didn't really want to go above 100bpm. They, then, might create Brandt Bauer Frick. What made it so fascinating was that the orchestral players creating the strange, spare music were all playing straight from sheet music. The synchopated, contrapuntal and contradictory rhythms were all very, very precisely scored - rehearsing it must take forever. (If that intrigues you, or if you're a fan of Einstürzende Neubauten, then check out the wholly inappropriately-named Bop. Don't be alarmed by the weird German game-show intro.)
By Saturday afternoon the rumours of Pulp being the secret Saturday guests on the Park Stage were looking good. In particular, a burst of smartphone use concluded that the Pulpiness of the guests was confirmed on nme.com. So we headed up there (meeting in the packed crowd by the simple expedient of having made a plan, in advance, and stuck to it). And Pulp were indeed the guests and they were flippin' awesome. They played earlyish stuff, (including my beloved Razzmatazz), they played the big songs from their peak in the mid-90s, they played post-peak songs from This Is Hardcore. They played an unknown song ("don't worry, this isn't difficult new material") from a '90s film soundtrack. We were, indeed, just twenty thousand people standing in a field. Although the concept of people singing along so enthusiastically, saying "let's all meet up in the year 2000" left me with the giggles. At the time it was a hugely forward-looking chorus, and now it's eleven years too late.
The scheduled headliners were something of a comedown. I caught a few songsworth of Coldplay (in the same way you might catch scabies) while walking over to the Avalon café for a nice sit-down tea. I tried (don't tell anyone) to catch Deacon Blue headlining on the Acoustic stage, but had somehow muddled the stage times in my head and arrived just in time to hear their closer and encore. We sat instead for some time watching the leftovers of the Pyramid audience round their little campfires and wax flares, chatting to a couple with whom we shared a bench before heading off to bed.
Sleeping in the tent was - for the first time I ever remember - hot. Yes, tents are hot in sunshine. But too hot at night? Stupid bloody weather.
Sunday
Fishermans Friends, [The Low Anthem], Bang On, [Jamie Woon], Don McLean, [Jah Wobble and the Nippon Dub Ensemble], dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip, Paul Simon, TV on the Radio, Go! Team, The Low Anthem, [Bellowhead], [Beyoncé], Queens of the Stone Age
I prised myself out of bed early(ish) on Sunday (aided by it being bastard hot) and took myself over to Jazzworld West Holts for my now-traditional kedgeree breakfast. Then back to the Pyramid to have the cobwebs well and truly ousted by the Fishermans Friends.
Ten-part, largely-unaccompanied harmony; unreconstructed shanty singers carrying pints of bitter and bellowing A Drop of Nelson's Blood at the Pyramid audience in the morning sunshine. Fabulous. Fishermans Friends are from Port Isaac in Cornwall, and as the crowds gathered a mass of St Piran's flags waved in front of the stage.
Wending back towards West Holts to see Jamie Woon, we allowed ourselves to be distracted by an aerialist, a person in a dog costume, jugglers, stiltwalkers... all the usual. Having stopped to watch the fabulous Bang-On, and investigate the mysterious metal construction near them (which was pumped up by a foot pump, and returned a fine mist of water, which was very welcome in the baking sun. By night it spat fire instead), we wondered what a small clump of spotty parasols was all about. As far as we could tell, it was a group of 12 singers, clad in red and black, who invited one or two members of the public to put on blindfolds, then surrounded them in a tight circle and sang for them in wonderful harmony.
The Sunday afternoon sunshine spot on the Pyramid was filled by Don McLean who, we agreed, we were only really into for one song. Walking towards the Pyramid, we could hear very faintly the familiar tune. Suddenly, everyone around us seemed very quiet... the usual buzz of chat was gone, and everyone seemed instead to be humming along. We arrived just in time to catch the jester stealing the thorny crown - and, thanks to a judicious quantity of reprising, repeating etc, still felt like we got our moneysworth.
It was hot, so we went and sat in a mysterious, wave-like structure made by Greenpeace out of scrap wood and surfboards. It was near a giant fish made out of CDs. And we climbed a wooden tower made of old doors and windows and dressers, and surveyed the site. All of which made us rather late, and we had to jog through the cloying, welly-stealing mud to the Dance Village for dan le sac vs. Scroobius Pip. We made it into the tent as the opening riff of The Beat That My Heart Skipped rang out - ChrisC apologised for making me run, arguing that to miss a beat like that would have been outrageous.
I think the highlight of my Sunday might have been The Low Anthem, performing a fabulous multi-instrumental set at sunset on the Avalon stage. Sadly, their quiet music occasionally had to fight with the basslines from the nearby Avalon café, preventing it being the truly awesome experience it might have been. Like the Go! Team, the Low Anthem swap instruments. Unlike the Go! Team, they do it in such a laidback, unhurried way that you might not even notice. Wait, the clarinetist's playing the piano, who's playing the clarinet? Oh, the guitarist. And the bassist is now at the harmonium, so... oh, the drummer is playing bass. Etc. They also win Cover of the Festival for a spine-tingling version of Bird on a Wire, performed by all four of them clustered round a single old-school mic. If you don't know the Low Anthem, get on the case.
Sunday didn't quite end as intended. Having watched - for curiosity's sake - the flashbang (literally) showbiz of Beyoncé's opening two songs, I left ChrisC to head off to his own headliner plans and went to watch Queens of the Stone Age. They were in full swing when I reached the Other Stage, and the huge telly screen was showing a close up of... wait, that looks like Josh Homme. Is he in QotSA? I didn't know that. And, er, I don't recognise that guitarist either. And where's...
Oh. Wait.
Y'see, it turns out that Queens of the Stone Age are not, in fact, the Foo Fighters. This probably isn't a surprise to you. It isn't even, technically, a surprise to me. Except it was, because every time I'd said QotSA over the weekend, I had for some reason mentally pictured Mr Grohl &co. Fortunately, even armed with this new information (that QotSA are QotSA), I'd probably have chosen them as my Sunday headliner. They rocked mightily, and had a fabulous laser show, though for obvious reasons they didn't do any of the songs I was hoping for.
And that was it for another year. Due to being either too old, or not on enough drugs, or both, we never made it to the festival's hedonistic late-night area.After upwards of 12 hours walking about and watching bands, queueing to shoulder through crowds just seemed like a lot of effort. Must make more effort next time :)
Next year is a fallow year for the festival; bring on 2013.
If you haven't read them before, then you won't know that they're best avoided due to extreme verbosity.
Wednesday
unknown band
This year saw a radical departure: rather than heading to our usual camping ground from force of habit, we thought we might investigate somewhere different. Maybe somewhere, er, a bit quieter and more boring and less inclined to all-night partying. Did a campsite steward have any suggestions. Indeed he did. How about camping in Oxlyers, right next to the Dance Village. Er, y'know we said "quietish"? Right next to a collection of dance stages which run til 3am doesn't sound ideal. Fair enough, he said, how about Rivermead? Very empty, very flat, very spacious, right next to the river? Well, to be honest, given the weather forecast... flat and right by the river... I can guess why it's empty. We wandered on to try our luck, plodding under the weight of baggage.
At which point, ChrisC had a stroke of genius. Glastonbury is riddled with free property lock-ups. We dropped off a rucksack apiece and, cumbered with nothing more than a tent, went frolicking off to find a pitch. Skipping lightly through the massed nylon domes, we found a nice space and nailed the tent to the floor.
Last year, my write-up commented what friendly, lovely, helpful people we'd camped ourselves among. This year... not so much. As we finished pitching, I smiled at some girls emerging from the next-door tent. They didn't respond. In fact, none of the sub-twenty-somethings in the area seemed to acknowledge our presence all weekend until Monday morning, when someone apparently identified me as a responsible grown-up and asked if I had a plaster. (I had, and I could even find it in the post-festival carnage in the tent. Shit. I am a responsible grown-up.)
Anyway. The site - heavily rained on in the run up to the weekend - was muddy but not horrendous so we set off on a stroll through the Dance Village. Pyramids covered in graffiti art, a replica of Stonehenge made of white cubes (which would, in the dark, flash different colours), and a cluster of venues. We made it up to The Park, the area curated by Michael Eavis' daughter Emily, which has a lovely, quirky, fete-y vibe and - critically - the fabulous Japanese restaurant we found in 2009. It wasn't quite open, but we bought take-away teriyaki chicken... and were criminally disappointed. Bah. It was sub-adequate and - given the fabulous food on offer elsewhere - felt like a wasted meal. We stomped grumpily down the hill to the Cider Bus, found a band on the bandstand and forgot to be grumpy. Impressively, ChrisC managed, in a huge crowd, to find the friends we were meeting in the time it took me to buy a pint. "Get your ID ready", said the sign. I did, optimistically. They didn't ask. Until I complained. And then they refused to serve me til I'd produced it. It wasn't the same, though.
Wednesday night was cold. Really cold. At about 3am, I was vaguely awake and noticed ChrisC heading out of the tent. I assumed he was off to the toilet, and, busy snoozing and shivering, didn't really notice how long he was gone. The first sign he was back was something soft and warm landing on my feet. He had, in fact, had similar thoughts about the climate and had wandered off to Cosy Camper and returned with something whose label proclaimed it a Roasty Toast Soft N Cosy Funky Fleecy Blanket. It was black, printed with multi-coloured Space Invaders and very, very welcome.
It would never have occurred to me that the stall would still have been open. Apparently it was open, happily serving, and only deficient in that they tried to sell him a Pac-Man blanket when he asked for Space Invaders.
Thursday
Mojohookers, unknown pianist, various poets, The Mandibles, Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer
Thursday began around 5am to a sadly familiar sound - rain drumming on a tent roof. There were a few torrential outbursts, a few breaks, and a lot of drizzling. On the grounds not a lot was going on, we lazed about in the tent. Eventually, fortified with porridge (with bananas and treacle golden syrup) we strolled around through the not-quite-open-yet Unfairground and up into the Greenfields where we were waylaid by a stall claiming "the best curry on site"). Without an extensive comparison I can't be certain, but I doubt it; their chickpeas were good, but I reckon they could be bettered.
The circus and theatre fields were starting to wake themselves up, though still had a not-quite-ready-yet vibe. We watched some acrobats practising, springing into handstands to avoid a tractor tyre as someone bowled it along the platform at them. We declined to get involved in the attempt to break the world record for the largest game of Twister as we were heading to meet satyrica who was holding court in the Avalon Café.
We left him an hour or so later, as we were curious to know what the "Glastolympics" scheduled to take place in the Pyramid field were. Either they were finished, rained off, very small... but we never did find out. Lounging about in the tent again, we realised (as something sounding like U2 soundchecked) just how well we could hear the main stage without leaving the comfort of our sleeping bags.
I'm sure that, a few years ago, turning up on Wednesday meant you were "early". This year, I felt that our 4pm arrival was rather tardy, and by Thursday the place was heaving. We wandered gently about looking at things, wound up watching an entertaining but approximate pianist in a tiny venue called The People's Frontroom, then trundled to the Speakers' Forum for the first few rounds of a poetry slam.
I've never been to a poetry slam before. I wasn't sure how it worked. I'm still not sure quite how it works, as before the elimination started I'd realised I was actually in danger of freezing to death and moved on. Really quite cold, Thursday night. I enjoyed it, though. Some of the poets seemed to do little more than ramble a bit at the mic, but others were attention-grabbing, exciting, emotional stuff.
We were on our way to the Croissant Neuf stage to see Mr B when we were ambushed by a fabulous 7-piece ska group on the bandstand. Which meant we were a bit late and, though we arrived well before Mr B did, the crowd around the tent was packed in ranks of those waiting to get in. We waited patiently, and by about five songs in natural wastage meant we'd just squeezed into the baking hot tent. Mr B's brand of hip-hop isn't so much guns, bitches and bling; it's more biscuits, cake and sherry. He's a bit of a one-trick pony, but his chap-hop (complete with 'tache, BBC accent, flat cap and banjolele) is highly entertaining.
Friday
Danny and the Champions of the World, [Chipmunk], Brother, Two Door Cinema Club, The Vaccines, Cage the Elephant, The Wombats, BB King, [Radiohead], [Morrissey], Billy Bragg, U2, Barenaked Ladies
Whoever gets up first on Proper Festival Days has, for some years, had the job of fetching the papers. The papers being, in this case, the tabloid Q Daily which provides news, reviews and general silliness. This year, however, it had been replaced with the non-corporate single page broadsheet Glastonbury Firelighter. Which had been available on Thursday and been, to be brief, a bit shit. On Friday, none of the info points seemed to have any Firelighters.
A large chunk of the daytime was spent running around watching various boys with guitars, with the exception of Chipmunk, who was unexpectedly hip-hop, and BB King, who can only be called a boy with a guitar in the most technical of senses. BB King has style, though - I've never seen anyone else have their hat and coat brought onstage by a personal manservant so they can don them before departing.
For the rest, the Wombats and Two Door Cinema Club were predictably likeable jump-up-and-down-in-the-mud singalongs, Brother were lad-rock of the most forgettable kind, Cage the Elephant potentially interesting but marred by weird sound mixing. Then again, Cage the Elephant were in the John Peel tent; perhaps they were just being played at the wrong speed.
The Park stage is famous for its "secret" gigs - last year saw Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood do a highly-acclaimed Radiohead-lite set. This year, the strong rumours seemed to be Pulp, or Radiohead. We dismissed the latter - surely they wouldn't pull the same trick two years running - and hoped fervently for the former. Packing ourselves into the already crowded field, it became apparent that everyone else was damn certain it was Radiohead. They were right.
(Incidentally, ChrisC and I have firmly held beliefs that some bands bring out the sunshine. Driving to Somerset on Wednesday, we stopped some fairly menacing downpourage with judiciously applied Belle & Sebastian. While we waited in The Park, ChrisC said "you know, if you ever wanted a band who would make it rain...". Damn right. About five minutes before Radiohead even showed up the drizzle started in earnest, and it continued relentlessly into the night.)
And it turned out that the area of the field we'd squeezed into wasn't really in earshot of the stage, and so we departed again. Technically present, but only borderline able to hear, we cut our losses and caught the tail end of Morrissey's set (and what a rubbish version of This Charming Man that was). We'd arrived at the Pyramid just in time to hear the close of Meat is Murder, so I had a truly enormous quantity of roast pork in a bun for tea just to annoy him.
When you purchase a Glastonbury ticket, you are contractually obliged to see Billy Bragg at least once during the weekend. We popped up to his spiritual home (the Leftfield) to hear the end of his set before investigating the beginning of U2. I'm not much of a U2 fan, but was prepared to be impressed by their stage show. As it was, I was more confused than anything else by the multiple projections.
We scarpered after a handful of songs, and made our way to Avalon to watch the thoroughly storming Barenaked Ladies. They opened with Brian Wilson Said ("who on earth would put a bass solo in their first song?" enquired the singer as the super-geeky bass player launched into a solo), and went up from there. Thousands of skinny glow-sticks thrown into the audience! Silly banter! Actually really very good musicianship! Close harmony! Choreographed dance moves! More glowsticks! I enjoyed them hugely.
Saturday
Stornoway, unknown skiffle band, Steve Knightley, Gaslight Anthem, Brandt Bauer Frick Ensemble, DeVotchKa, Tame Impala, Pulp, [Coldplay], Deacon Blue
On Saturday I picked up a couple of Firelighters. They remained a bit shit, reading like sixth-form magazine filler pre-written before the festival even began. Still, Stornoway's beautiful blend of acoustic, multi-instrumental songs more than made up for journalistic disappointments. The Pyramid stage openers are often folkier acts, easing festival-goers into the day. As Saturday's weather got over itself and started playing nice, everyone relaxed into it.
Having headed over to the crazy shit fields to try and get in to the recording of the Infinite Monkey Cage (we failed), we milled about watching a skiffle band and catching part of a crate-stacking contest. "Shall we get along to see Steve Knightley?" enquired ChrisC. Yeah, I said. Just as soon as we've seen this bloke fall off a pile of boxes. (He did. Don't worry, he was on a safety rope.)
Mid afternoon, we split the party as ChrisC went off to watch Graham Coxon, and I trundled down to West Holts to watch the Brandt Bauer Frick Ensemble. Who were, by the way, bloody marvellous. If you imagine someone who wanted to make hardcore techno, but only had an orchestra at their disposal. And who didn't really want to go above 100bpm. They, then, might create Brandt Bauer Frick. What made it so fascinating was that the orchestral players creating the strange, spare music were all playing straight from sheet music. The synchopated, contrapuntal and contradictory rhythms were all very, very precisely scored - rehearsing it must take forever. (If that intrigues you, or if you're a fan of Einstürzende Neubauten, then check out the wholly inappropriately-named Bop. Don't be alarmed by the weird German game-show intro.)
By Saturday afternoon the rumours of Pulp being the secret Saturday guests on the Park Stage were looking good. In particular, a burst of smartphone use concluded that the Pulpiness of the guests was confirmed on nme.com. So we headed up there (meeting in the packed crowd by the simple expedient of having made a plan, in advance, and stuck to it). And Pulp were indeed the guests and they were flippin' awesome. They played earlyish stuff, (including my beloved Razzmatazz), they played the big songs from their peak in the mid-90s, they played post-peak songs from This Is Hardcore. They played an unknown song ("don't worry, this isn't difficult new material") from a '90s film soundtrack. We were, indeed, just twenty thousand people standing in a field. Although the concept of people singing along so enthusiastically, saying "let's all meet up in the year 2000" left me with the giggles. At the time it was a hugely forward-looking chorus, and now it's eleven years too late.
The scheduled headliners were something of a comedown. I caught a few songsworth of Coldplay (in the same way you might catch scabies) while walking over to the Avalon café for a nice sit-down tea. I tried (don't tell anyone) to catch Deacon Blue headlining on the Acoustic stage, but had somehow muddled the stage times in my head and arrived just in time to hear their closer and encore. We sat instead for some time watching the leftovers of the Pyramid audience round their little campfires and wax flares, chatting to a couple with whom we shared a bench before heading off to bed.
Sleeping in the tent was - for the first time I ever remember - hot. Yes, tents are hot in sunshine. But too hot at night? Stupid bloody weather.
Sunday
Fishermans Friends, [The Low Anthem], Bang On, [Jamie Woon], Don McLean, [Jah Wobble and the Nippon Dub Ensemble], dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip, Paul Simon, TV on the Radio, Go! Team, The Low Anthem, [Bellowhead], [Beyoncé], Queens of the Stone Age
I prised myself out of bed early(ish) on Sunday (aided by it being bastard hot) and took myself over to Jazzworld West Holts for my now-traditional kedgeree breakfast. Then back to the Pyramid to have the cobwebs well and truly ousted by the Fishermans Friends.
Ten-part, largely-unaccompanied harmony; unreconstructed shanty singers carrying pints of bitter and bellowing A Drop of Nelson's Blood at the Pyramid audience in the morning sunshine. Fabulous. Fishermans Friends are from Port Isaac in Cornwall, and as the crowds gathered a mass of St Piran's flags waved in front of the stage.
Wending back towards West Holts to see Jamie Woon, we allowed ourselves to be distracted by an aerialist, a person in a dog costume, jugglers, stiltwalkers... all the usual. Having stopped to watch the fabulous Bang-On, and investigate the mysterious metal construction near them (which was pumped up by a foot pump, and returned a fine mist of water, which was very welcome in the baking sun. By night it spat fire instead), we wondered what a small clump of spotty parasols was all about. As far as we could tell, it was a group of 12 singers, clad in red and black, who invited one or two members of the public to put on blindfolds, then surrounded them in a tight circle and sang for them in wonderful harmony.
The Sunday afternoon sunshine spot on the Pyramid was filled by Don McLean who, we agreed, we were only really into for one song. Walking towards the Pyramid, we could hear very faintly the familiar tune. Suddenly, everyone around us seemed very quiet... the usual buzz of chat was gone, and everyone seemed instead to be humming along. We arrived just in time to catch the jester stealing the thorny crown - and, thanks to a judicious quantity of reprising, repeating etc, still felt like we got our moneysworth.
It was hot, so we went and sat in a mysterious, wave-like structure made by Greenpeace out of scrap wood and surfboards. It was near a giant fish made out of CDs. And we climbed a wooden tower made of old doors and windows and dressers, and surveyed the site. All of which made us rather late, and we had to jog through the cloying, welly-stealing mud to the Dance Village for dan le sac vs. Scroobius Pip. We made it into the tent as the opening riff of The Beat That My Heart Skipped rang out - ChrisC apologised for making me run, arguing that to miss a beat like that would have been outrageous.
I think the highlight of my Sunday might have been The Low Anthem, performing a fabulous multi-instrumental set at sunset on the Avalon stage. Sadly, their quiet music occasionally had to fight with the basslines from the nearby Avalon café, preventing it being the truly awesome experience it might have been. Like the Go! Team, the Low Anthem swap instruments. Unlike the Go! Team, they do it in such a laidback, unhurried way that you might not even notice. Wait, the clarinetist's playing the piano, who's playing the clarinet? Oh, the guitarist. And the bassist is now at the harmonium, so... oh, the drummer is playing bass. Etc. They also win Cover of the Festival for a spine-tingling version of Bird on a Wire, performed by all four of them clustered round a single old-school mic. If you don't know the Low Anthem, get on the case.
Sunday didn't quite end as intended. Having watched - for curiosity's sake - the flashbang (literally) showbiz of Beyoncé's opening two songs, I left ChrisC to head off to his own headliner plans and went to watch Queens of the Stone Age. They were in full swing when I reached the Other Stage, and the huge telly screen was showing a close up of... wait, that looks like Josh Homme. Is he in QotSA? I didn't know that. And, er, I don't recognise that guitarist either. And where's...
Oh. Wait.
Y'see, it turns out that Queens of the Stone Age are not, in fact, the Foo Fighters. This probably isn't a surprise to you. It isn't even, technically, a surprise to me. Except it was, because every time I'd said QotSA over the weekend, I had for some reason mentally pictured Mr Grohl &co. Fortunately, even armed with this new information (that QotSA are QotSA), I'd probably have chosen them as my Sunday headliner. They rocked mightily, and had a fabulous laser show, though for obvious reasons they didn't do any of the songs I was hoping for.
And that was it for another year. Due to being either too old, or not on enough drugs, or both, we never made it to the festival's hedonistic late-night area.After upwards of 12 hours walking about and watching bands, queueing to shoulder through crowds just seemed like a lot of effort. Must make more effort next time :)
Next year is a fallow year for the festival; bring on 2013.