GLADE Electronic Music Festival
from an email to my mother
Yo!
I lives!
Barely!
Haha, no, seriously, it was absolutely mental. Something might have made the news in the US about the floods in southern England...well...that's where the festival was. We stewards got there on Wednesday evening, which was beautiful, hung around on Thursday, also beautiful, and midday on Friday the public started to arrive. Still beautiful. I worked my first shift on Friday 4 to midnight...it started raining around 10pm. It DID NOT STOP for about 14 hours, absolutely pissing it down. I've hardly ever seen it rain that hard in England before. Thunder and lightning as well, which was just wonderful with all of us camping in the middle of a field full of masses of electrical equipment! There were a lot of tents that were flooded and a couple of proper wash-outs; I was lucky and my tent (borrowed from Larry Knibb) was only a bit damp on the bottom. Still too wet to sleep, so I basically didn't sleep much. Also absolutely bloody freezing cold; when I finished the shift on Friday night one of my shift partners brought over a sleeping bag to my tent so that we could be warm enough to sleep. (Worked a charm.) 1 water-soaked field + 27,000 people tramping across it = mud about 10 inches deep, and me with no wellingtons. Naturally there was some business on site selling them for the extortionate price of 15 pounds, but after I stood in queue for the cash machines for an hour with all the other poor broke bastards the damn things wouldn't read my Visa card and I had to withdraw from my HSBC account instead, which only had about 20 quid in it. So it came down to a choice between wellies or food for the weekend, and I opted for food. The trainers, impressively, are not totally destroyed and I think they'll be looking good again after a wash, but I will definitely be getting some proper footgear before going to Green Man festival in August, as the main problem with trainers was not wet feet so much as that they had ZERO traction in the mud. Like walking on soap. Major suck.
The festival was definitely not without its plusses, however; I got very lucky and ended up with three shifts near one of the stages, a very cool place called ID Spiral. There's a brief video clip of it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-69791256052530474 [poor quality and it's from 2006, but if the computer will play it then you can at least get some idea of the music.] I did have one of the dreaded midnight-8am shifts, but since my stage was the only one that had music 24 hours it wasn't tedious, and I actually dressed warmly enough for it this time (unlike at Glastonbury, when we all froze.) I worked with some cool people and spent a bit of time Saturday afternoon in the Roots tent, which played dub and reggae and funky global stuff -- it wasn't too crowded inside so the ground wasn't a total morass and I could dance until I was too exhausted to continue. Also I didn't have to deal with any incidents while on shift, which was a stroke of luck; Glade is pretty infamous for having a lot of drug and alcohol casualties. I did see plenty of people tripping, but they all seemed to be handling things well enough ;) On the whole, it was probably slightly more trouble than it was worth, but at least I can say I was there volunteering for Oxfam and therefore get points for the Good Deed -- if I'd paid for a ticket and ended up in Mud Hell for three days I'd probably be less happy!
Yo!
I lives!
Barely!
Haha, no, seriously, it was absolutely mental. Something might have made the news in the US about the floods in southern England...well...that's where the festival was. We stewards got there on Wednesday evening, which was beautiful, hung around on Thursday, also beautiful, and midday on Friday the public started to arrive. Still beautiful. I worked my first shift on Friday 4 to midnight...it started raining around 10pm. It DID NOT STOP for about 14 hours, absolutely pissing it down. I've hardly ever seen it rain that hard in England before. Thunder and lightning as well, which was just wonderful with all of us camping in the middle of a field full of masses of electrical equipment! There were a lot of tents that were flooded and a couple of proper wash-outs; I was lucky and my tent (borrowed from Larry Knibb) was only a bit damp on the bottom. Still too wet to sleep, so I basically didn't sleep much. Also absolutely bloody freezing cold; when I finished the shift on Friday night one of my shift partners brought over a sleeping bag to my tent so that we could be warm enough to sleep. (Worked a charm.) 1 water-soaked field + 27,000 people tramping across it = mud about 10 inches deep, and me with no wellingtons. Naturally there was some business on site selling them for the extortionate price of 15 pounds, but after I stood in queue for the cash machines for an hour with all the other poor broke bastards the damn things wouldn't read my Visa card and I had to withdraw from my HSBC account instead, which only had about 20 quid in it. So it came down to a choice between wellies or food for the weekend, and I opted for food. The trainers, impressively, are not totally destroyed and I think they'll be looking good again after a wash, but I will definitely be getting some proper footgear before going to Green Man festival in August, as the main problem with trainers was not wet feet so much as that they had ZERO traction in the mud. Like walking on soap. Major suck.
The festival was definitely not without its plusses, however; I got very lucky and ended up with three shifts near one of the stages, a very cool place called ID Spiral. There's a brief video clip of it here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-69791256052530474 [poor quality and it's from 2006, but if the computer will play it then you can at least get some idea of the music.] I did have one of the dreaded midnight-8am shifts, but since my stage was the only one that had music 24 hours it wasn't tedious, and I actually dressed warmly enough for it this time (unlike at Glastonbury, when we all froze.) I worked with some cool people and spent a bit of time Saturday afternoon in the Roots tent, which played dub and reggae and funky global stuff -- it wasn't too crowded inside so the ground wasn't a total morass and I could dance until I was too exhausted to continue. Also I didn't have to deal with any incidents while on shift, which was a stroke of luck; Glade is pretty infamous for having a lot of drug and alcohol casualties. I did see plenty of people tripping, but they all seemed to be handling things well enough ;) On the whole, it was probably slightly more trouble than it was worth, but at least I can say I was there volunteering for Oxfam and therefore get points for the Good Deed -- if I'd paid for a ticket and ended up in Mud Hell for three days I'd probably be less happy!