Don't believe me? Just watch!
Right. It's been a week since I got back from the greatest performing arts festival in the world / that shithole in Somerset (delete as applicable). I've just about caught up on sleep and sorted out the photos. So!
(As usual, a band in [brackets] is one I either saw very little of, or heard vaguely in the distance while I was doing something else.
Also as usual, this entry is far too bloody long. Read at own risk.)
A lightweight, largely text-free version of what I did can be found on Flickr.
Wednesday
Big Beat Junk Band
Having eventually got ourselves tickets in the Glastonbury returns resale, we ended up with tickets which were part of a coach package. So we trundled ourselves all the way over to the O2, got on the 3pm coach (at about 4pm) and were driven all the way back across London. Then down to Glastonbury very smoothly and efficiently, and got spat out at the North Western entrance, conveniently near our new favourite camping corner. We were all pitched up, had chatted a bit to our neighbours, had had dinner, and were only slightly late to meet Carolyn at the Ciderbus at 9pm.
Carolyn wasn't there, of course. She moved to Hong Kong some years ago. But we always used to meet her at 9 so there we were, sending her photos of the 'bus and drinking cider on her behalf.
Now: every year we meet Carolyn, and at some point a whole load of fireworks goes off, and we turn and look vaguely towards the Stone Circle and say: yeah, fireworks. There's a thing up there. Next year we should go and see it.
This year we actually remembered, and headed off to watch them. Except we drifted off-route a little into the "engine room" of a very large boat to watch the Big Beat Junk Band. Greenpeace always has a field at the festival, and always builds loadsof stuff which will invariably involve (a) a climbing wall and (b) a skate ramp. This year, their theme was "Save the Seas" and their main stage was built into a huge vessel called Ocean Destroyer. Some clever magic meant that in the day time you watched the stage from outside the boat, and at night the backdrop moved and you watched the stage from inside the boat's engine room.
Anyway, the BBJB were playing... junk. A few carefully-chosen lengths of drainpipe provided enough notes for easily-recognisable basslines, and the rest was joyous and riotous percussion (including bibliogirl playing, I think, the shopping trolley). It was a lot of fun (if a bit confusing when the tuned bits of percussions were clearly playing Push It and the band leader was encouraging the audience to sing along with the chorus from Sweet Dreams...) We cheerfully raucous'd along until we headed up to the Stone Circle.
We managed to miss the opening ceremony, but caught the fireworks and the Phoenix-shaped giant bonfire. We dispersed as best we could with the huge crowds, and ambled ourselves slowly home to bed.
Thursday
Wilco Johnson, New York Brass Band, [Gecko], Rory Mcleod, [Showhawk Duo], Beans on Toast, Mik Artistic, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing
Thursday dawned as one of those sunny days where you wake up and think "that's nice... oh, crap, it's too hot in this tent". We pried ourselves out of bed and went seeking breakfast. (Because people have asked me about it, and because I can waffle for ages about food, I'm going to do a separate post about food. With very poorly-executed pictures.)
Having collected the festival news-sheet (printed on the resident antique printing press) and listened to Wilco Johnson we cautiously peeped into the Theatre & Circus fields. They've installed a new tower, from which one can view the site. Rather disappointingly, and unlike almost everything else at the festival, it was rather plain and functional. Given the amazing amount of effort that goes into painting anything from bins to benches to wooden shelters, and the detailed and gratuitous decoration of everything, finding a structure that was just unadorned scaffolding was something of a surprise. Still, we climbed it and viewed, and came down to find a bunch of circus performers rehearsing.
One in particular drew attention: he stood inside a huge hoop, like Vitruvian Man, and rolled around doing various tricks. It's not something I've seen before, and was quite fascinating. I thought I took a lot of photos but apparently not, so here is a slightly poor one.
Then we watched the half-dress-rehearsal for some tight-rope walkers, who were balletic and beautiful, half-walking and half-dancing a story of two lovers crossing a bridge.
There was almost a tantrum shortly after that, as it was discovered that the coffee-stand-that-sells-banana-milkshakes had turned into a coffee stand. With no milkshakes at all. Fortunately, the day was saved by ambling back past Greenpeace and finding the New York Brass Band. They are not from New York, but they area brass band. If you've ever met the Hackney Colliery Band's blend of trad jazz and cover versions, then the NYBB are very like that. They had a huge crowd in the sunshine, dancing and singing along to A Message To You, Rudi and Uptown Funk and Get Lucky and Walking on Sunshine.
You know I mentioned that Greenpeace always fitted in a climbing wall somewhere?
Yeah. It's really very hard to keep this band on the stage.
Anyway, there seemed to be millions of them, and they kept up their show full tilt, and it was bloody brilliant. Then they started playing Rick Astley, which apparently makes ChrisC spout blood from the nose. But apart from that, they were amazing.
Having mopped ChrisC up again and gone for a little walk, we found the welcome shade of the Tiny Tea Tent: tea in real mugs, a free-range piano, and satyrica who somehow managed to score a squashy sofa. The tent was warm, but at least shady, and we lazed around and chatted while someone (whom Satyrica identified as Jaz Delorean from Tankus the Henge) sat and played boogie-woogie piano. I think he was paid in mugs of tea.
We tried to take Satyrica's recommendation of Gecko, but it was a bit too sunny and we wussed out, slinking off to Avalon to see Rory Mcleod. Sadly, the Avalon Cafe tent was rather full of people who weren't watching Rory Mcleod and although the songs were fine, the long and rambly between-song anecdotes were hard to hear over the hubbub.
On the way from somewhere to somewhere else we paused by the Bandstand to hear two guys with acoustic guitars doing an amazing instrumental Daft Punk medley. The blackboard said they should be The Showhawk Duo, and a bit of Googling confirms they probably were. It's always great to stumble accidentally across something like that.
We beat the crowds down to the South-East corner to see Beans on Toast playing on the Hell stage, to a surprisingly large audience (many of whom sported placards in Mr Toast's distinctive handwriting), and then The Men in the Rocket Lounge. We caught up with kauket, and discovered she has a superpower.
Glastonbury, you understand, is massive. Getting on for 200,000 people. Big site. The chances of bumping into someone are tiny (and so we assured our camping-neighbours every flippin' time we bumped into them). The chances of even finding someone you're looking for and know is in your area are pretty small (the whole weekend is peppered with overheard phone conversations that are all variations on "but I'm right by the Pyramid as well!")
However! We found Kauket, and then she found two of her friends. Then we bumped into Steve (from Totally Acoustic), and it turned out her friends knew him too. Then she found some more friends, who had bootpunk with them. And so it went on... By basically standing still, Kauket appears to exert some strange force that allows people to find each other. It's quite a knack.
There was various talk of late-night bars, but I also have a superpower: that of making people think a nice cup of tea and an early night is a good idea. So we chatted over some chai in the Bhangra Bus, and then shuffled quietly off towards tents.
Friday
Charlatans, The Egg, Bastille, Other Lives, Stornoway, Stealing Sheep, [Mary J Blige], [Motörhead], [TOY], The Libertines, Mark Ronson, Florence & the Machine, [Super Furry Animals]
The really-not-very-secret secret opener on the Other stage was The Charlatans; I aimed for culture and decided instead to go and see the Michael Clark dance company open the Pyramid stage. Having really enjoyed the English National Ballet on the Pyramid last year, I was optimistic. However, after ten or fifteen minutes my considered opinion was that this was just people in lycra wanking around, and I gave up on being highbrow and went back to see Tim Burgess' merry band.
In recent years, Williams Green - the festival's own "village green" - has begun having a lot of slots in its schedule that say "live band". These are usually big-name bands that are rather too large for the venue, and word gets out via rumour-mongering and Twitter. We'd ignored the usual run of secret bands on Thursday night, but on Friday we joined the crowds outside the tent to hear Bastille. This year, the tent had repeater speakers on the outside, so sitting comfortably on a bench/the grass outside meant you could still hear when the tent was too dense to fight your way in. Bastille put in an early entry for cover version of the festival with Rhythmn of the Night.
As we sought out lunch, there were occasional spots of rain and light drizzle, but nothing worth bothering about. Then all of a sudden the sky indicated that actually, it really meant business, and we dived back into Williams Green's nice roofy tent. In there we found a band called Other Lives (although subsequent Googling suggests actually we only found two of them, playing a short set due to 'technical issues'). For a chance-met band they were really rather good, playing haunting and spare songs on violin and guitar, andput in an entry for cover version of the festival with Nirvana's Something in the Way.
Waiting cautiously between showers, we caught Stornoway and Stealing Sheep (the former suddenly leaping into cover version top spot with a hilarious slowed-down acoustic take on The Only Way Is Up). Then we figured we'd pop back to the tent to grab an umbrella, just in case. With brilliant mistiming, we got torrentially rained on and made it back to the tent soaked to the skin. Once we emerged again, the paths were churned up into mud. But! That was more or less it for rain, and conditions remained pretty good all weekend (helped along by copious quantities of preventative woodchip). And, on the plus side, Motörhead were playing Ace of Spades.
You may have seen in the news that Friday night's headliner, The Foo Fighters, had to pull out because Dave Grohl's leg fell off. The second-on-the-bill, Florence and the Machine, were bumped to headliner, and the gap was filled by... yet another secret mystery band. This one almost actually managed to stay a secret, but by lunchtime was strongly (and correctly) rumoured to be The Libertines.
Mark Ronson is back to being man-of-the-moment again, with a roster of celebrity on-stage guests (Boy George!) and a packed audience. I'm not a big fan of the ubiquitous Uptown Funk, but a massively enthusiastic, dancing crowd made his closing rendition (complete with Grandmaster Flash, Mary J Blige andGeorge Clinton on stage) a lot of fun.
I wasn't very enthusiastic about Flo + the Mac as a headliner, but went along to hear a bit before moving on. In the end, I stayed - and I concede that they are perfectly decent headliner material, Florence is much more commanding a stage presence than I'd expected. I'm disappointed that my photo of the guy in wellies, combats and no shirt dancing crazily in the middle of a large puddle (to Dog Days Are Over) didn't come out :) We sidled quietly past him and proceeded with all due haste up the hill to the Park stage to catch the very end of the Super Furry Animals. Fortunately, they still close their set with a massive wig-out version of The Man Don't(this time with an extended period of offstage electronoodling while they all changed into actual furry animal costumes).
We began to stroll home, but got stuck in a huge people jam that had no obvious cause. A taller guy in the crowd said he could see blue lights ahead, and indeed there did seem to be an above-average number of ambulance cars around. In the end, we gave up and instead walked home through Arcadia, because the giant mechanical fire-breathing laser spider was less crowded. Silver Hayes (né the Dance Village) was surprisingly quiet; at around 1am it really hadn't even begun to wake up.
Saturday
Frank Turner, Everything Everything, [Burt Bacharach], Thee Faction, Paloma Faith, Todd Terje, Suede
Our new stamping ground of Woodsies (the site's north-west corner, behind the John Peel stage) means the first stall (more or less) we pass in the festival proper is a juice and smoothie place. I started Saturday with a nice, healthy watermelon, ginger and lime juice. Which was lovely. Right up until the point where I skidded in some mud and threw it quite spectacularly down my front.
"Arse", I thought. Then I noticed that the expressions of the other people carefully avoiding me were rather more... disgusted than someone spilling a drink merited. If you pour freshly squozen, somewhat fibrous, pale pink juice over your clothes, it looks pretty much like you've just thrown up over yourself. Not a great start.
First proper port of call on Saturday was the Other stage, for Frank Turner's really quite surprisingly low-down-the-bill slot. We're both big fans of Frank Turner; I expected him to be great, and he was, with a crowd dancing and singing along to every word.
Shortly afterwards, we were strolling past the Avalon stage and abruptly turned in. If ever a sentence is likely to grab our attention and make us veer sharply towards a band then "We're going to fuse 90s hiphop with bluegrass" is that sentence. Coco and the Butterfields' frenzied version of House of Pain's Jump Around was massively unexpected, and utterly glorious, with the distinctive high-pitched squeal filled in by a trumpet. Another hot contender for festival cover version top spot.
We sacked off the bands for a while, and wandered through Green Crafts. More forges than your average festival, plus an embarrassment of leatherworkers, wood carvers, stone carvers, people demonstrating how to shingle a roof with old Fosters cans, people working with willow... If you'd like to learn how to steam-bend a wooden hoop, there's a tent for that. If you just fancy having a bit of a go at something, just wander in. Although the Healing fields do veer a bit towards the highly avoidable (gong baths or palm-reading, for example) I do love the Greenfields and always try to spend a bit of time there.
We tried to go to Burt Bacharch, but instead we found our favourite theatre company, Bootworks, and then! Los Voladores, the "flying men" of Mexico. As part of some pre-Columban ritual, five of them climb up a huge pole. Four of them wind ropes around it and the other stands on the very top playing pipe and drum, and jumping. I'm pretty good with heights, but a man leaping up and down on a 15" platform at the top of a very, very tall pole unnerved even me. At the climax of the pipe music, the four men fling themselves backwards off the top, and "fly" down as their ropes unwind (photos on Flickr!).
Later in the day, catching the end of Paloma Faith's set, there was a surprisingly loud THUD. Next to us in the crowd, a rather tall and well-built gentleman had reached his capacity for alcohol and keeled over like a felled tree. His friends laughed, then laughed some more when he couldn't get up, and then realised that actually he really was completely incapacitated. His (I presume) girlfriend got pretty stroppy with him, trying to persuade him to lie in the recovery position until he'd sobered up a bit. He was having absolutely none of it, and proceeded to flop about violently trying to stand up; she gave up and just tried to make sure passersby weren't within getting-fallen-on distance. (I saw him the following day with a grazed face, a badly discontented expression, and a can of Tango.) Given the vast, vast quantities of alcohol consumed at Glastonbury, I've often commented that it's relatively rare to see someone in a genuinely bad way. And I don't think I've ever seen someone conscious but so completely unable to get off the floor before.
On a bit of a whim, I went to see Todd Terje in West Holts. I enjoyed the set a lot, although I was moved to wonder exactly what it was I was listening to - alternately chilled out and euphoric electronic music, largely instrumental, but something I'd find very hard to describe. ChrisC later pointed out that the stage themselves had tweeted "Todd Terje is it house, funk, techno or disco? Whatever the crowd is loving it!". Not just me, then. On the way to Todd Terje we encountered a "nude art" class. Half a dozen gentlemen, all wearing the absolute minimum required for public decency, had set up easels and were industriously painting their reclining model (who was, of course, fully-dressed).
Saturday night didn't really go to plan, as in the evening I developed something of an upset stomach. Which is really, really not something you want at Glastonbury. (A somewhat superfluous remark: it's not something you want anywhere. And there are, of course, much worse things that could happen at a festival). But instead of various bits of fun I had planned (including a Public Service Broadcasting show in the Glade I'd been really looking forward to), I flopped myself on the ground outside John Peel and half-paid attention to Suede before putting myself to bed.
Sunday
[Rival Sons], SOAK., [Unknown band], Cassetteboy vs. DJ Rubbish, Patti Smith, Alvvays, Django Django, Future Islands, New York Brass Band, Unknown-band-in-Engine-Room, [fka twigs], Idlewild, FFS, Slamboree, Gaudi
I got up somewhat cautiously on Sunday, and lazed about to the sounds of sound-checking. The declared that I was fine and that we really ought to make the effort to go to the Stone Circle. As we passed John Peel, there was an announcement that the guy who runs the stage wasn't doing his usual Sunday-morning walkround because he'd gone "to see a man about a Lama".
Below the Stone Circle, from a little roofed platform, the Dalai Lama was addressing a sizeable crowd. People stood quietly in the morning drizzle, listening to what he had to say. We missed most of his main speech, but heard him answering questions. Having heard a lot about his legendary humour, I was a little disappointed not to see more evidence of it. Although he dismissed the interviewer's suggestion that there would be less conflict if the males of our species had "more girl" in them: "No. Perhaps more monk."
SOAK. was interesting to see on one of the main stages, given that last year we saw her as a nobody with little audience on the Leftfield. She was compelling then, solo, and with a backing band she made a great start to a Sunday. Walking off to do a little t-shirt shopping we were again distracted by an unknown band on the Bandstand, this time playing Subterranean Homesick Blues.
We unexpectedly got more Lama later, when he joined Patti Smith on the Pyramid to deliver an impromptu address, cut his birthday cake, and be sung to (he's 80 in July). Patti Smith, incidentally, is amazing. I'd not been all that bothered about seeing her but seeing someone who is clearly in their sixties rocking out with such conviction is surprisingly moving. And though the Mick Jaggers and Neil Youngs and Ozzy Osbournes of this world get away with it, it's almost unheard of for a female. Later in the day, the LCD info screens around the site displayed among their messages sections of the poem she'd written for the Dalai Lama's birthday.
After a run of b ands - plus some incredibly clever and funny cut-and-paste political satire from Cassetteboy and DJ Rubbish - we went to chill out in the Circus fields again. They were mostly packing up, lots of areas empty and just some buskers on the circus riser. We strolled down to the south-east corner, but found it mostly closed up (awaiting its last night of fun/carnage). In the Greenpeace vessel's Engine Room, an interesting-sounding band were playing to no audience. A man playing a bongo very inexpertly had escaped from the stage on a long mic. lead and was encouraging us to sing into it. At least, I assume he was with the band; he had a mic. Although he really was very bad with the bongo, and seemed to be more wandering about than participating. Possibly it was a rehearsal? Confused, we drifted on to the Permaculture gardens to overtones of fka twigs, and discovered that this year's cob oven was built like a reindeer (baking things is apparently what Rudolf does on his summer holidays).
Idlewild were my chosen headliner, playing gentle indie-rock down in the field of Avalon. They curfewed fairly early, and I hotfooted it up to John Peel for the end of FFS (a band improbably composed of Franz Ferdinand and Sparks), who were massively over-the-top operatic and great fun. Fortunately, Avalon is right on the disused railway line - Glastonbury's nearest equivalent to a motorway, as it's a straight, wide, and well-made path. 6 minutes got me to earshot of the Chemical Brothers on the Other stage, another 5 minutes got me round the back of the Other stage field, and another 4 got me through Silver Hayes to my destination. I mention this purely for my own future reference: in good weather, with firm ground underfoot, and no significant crowd issues, it's possible to do Avalon to John Peel in 15 minutes. Similarly, with sufficiently determined walking Other to Pyramid can be done in 7 minutes. Always assuming you don't get distracted by something on the way.
For interest, I thought I'd try to count the number of stages I heard on the route. Sadly, there are too many. The sounds blend together, and it's impossible to work out where what you can hear is coming from. (I don't know how many stages there are at the festival; I don't think anyone does. A few years ago it was advertised as 'over 100'.)
The main stages all close down a little earlier on Sunday, so we headed to the Glade - which, as you'd hope, is a stage nestled among some trees. Williams Green was also full of people, dancing, and the various bars were still roaring into the night. Back at our tent, the wind direction must have changed, as it was the first time I went to sleep without being able to hear the flame stacks above Arcadia flaring regularly.
Monday
Monday was shamelessly lazy; we walked about a bit as the site began to be dismantled, packed up our tent, and observed that both the human and avian recycling crews were moving in to deal with the shocking mess left behind. Our coach departed smartly at 4pm, but bad traffic meant it took until nearly 10pm to get back to the O2.
I really should have taken Tuesday off work :)