Festival archives: Glastonbury

Bit of a different one today. This weekend is usually the best weekend of the whole year and if you know me, then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

This weekend, I and upwards of 180,000 people would all be on our yearly pilgrimage to Glastonbury Festival, but because of obvious reasons, and to top off probably one of the worst years I’ve ever had to live through, it was cancelled in March, and it completely took any ounce of positivity that I had left.

The thought of not being able to go and watch live music, drink endless amounts of alcohol, be with your loved ones, meet new people, see new things (even if you’ve been 11 times, you’re almost guaranteed to find something that you’ve never seen before), walk miles and miles and miles (seriously, the place is gigantic), stand in the queues, hear and feel the distant bass from all corners of the festival, sit up at the Park Stage next to the sign, overlooking the vastness of the site and watch the sunset, and, above all, lose track of time with the people around you and dance to music, whether it’s live music or a food stall playing dead loud music gives me such a sinking feeling.

Obviously, we’ll all be there again this time next year and we’ll be making up for a lost time but knowing that we’ve got to wait a whole year, pending there’s a vaccine sorted, fills me with dread. In other words, I can’t be arsed waiting a full year.

So instead of 5 new tracks that I’d normally write about on this blog, this time I’m gonna write about my favourite things to do at Glasto and my favourite sets that I’ve experienced in my 11 year’s experience.

The first thing that comes to mind of things that I love about this magical place, is getting there on the Wednesday, walking what could be between 1 mile all the way up to 7,8,9 or 10 miles from the car to the gate, plodding through the festival armed with a tent, 2 sleeping bags strapped to a bag the size of a horse along with a chair and 4 crates of beer, to the campsite and immediately feeling back at home, like you’ve never been away.

The Wednesday walk around the festival before any of the acts have started is one of the treasures of the trip. You’re under no pressure to trek from the John Peel Stage to the Park Stage to (hopefully) catch the last 2 songs of a band you heard on the radio on the way down. The Wednesday is all about getting to grips with the enormity of the place if you’re a first-timer, or, if you’ve been before, it’s about walking around, seeing your favourite places again, and walking up to the Glasto sign. You’re back, you’re home.

Next, it’s waking up on a Friday morning, having your breakfast and slathering yourself in suncream and cracking an already warm can of San Miguel open 15 minutes after a coffee and an hour before midday. It’s about circling the bands you wouldn’t mind seeing in the guide, but coming to the realisation that two of your favourite bands clash and it’s nigh-on impossible to see half of one set and the back end of the other because the respective stages they’re playing on are half a mile away from each other, added to the fact that it’s 28 degrees.

One thing I absolutely love is when they test the sound system on the Pyramid Stage before the acts start and they play this song dead loud, every year, without fail, and every time I hear it I’m taken aback to being sat at my tent, gearing myself up to leave an hour before a certain band starts on the Park Stage as it takes a good 45 minutes to get up there (depending on where you’re camping of course). The bass shakes the ground underneath and it’s and the sound of the song changes volumes because of the wind direction.

On a red hot day, the competition to find shade is something of an Olympic sport and it’s every man for themselves. If you leave your tent too late, you know you’ve already missed out on a spec in the Acoustic Stage or the John Peel Stage and are aware that you’re probably going to have to settle for half a tree’s worth of shade, 20 yards away from the long drops. Then you walk over to a sheltered stage to watch a band you’ve been waiting to see since the lineup was announced, and you’re confined to the very back, with people talking because they’re not arsed who’s on, and it’s the shade they’re after, not the glories of Fontaines D.C.

Over the course of the 11 times, I’ve been to the festival, I’ve unfortunately forgotten a lot of my first few years in 03, 04 and 05 but I’ve seen some memorable sets, and one that I won’t ever forget is The Chemical Brothers in 2019. It was majestic from the beginning to the end, and having caned their new album ‘No Geography’ since its release, getting to see it performed live, along with their old classics and the unbelievable visuals they’d curated was an unforgettable moment.

Chemical Brothers (2019)

Everyone watching them that night will agree with me when I say we were all immersed in their set and could’ve stood there all night. It was sheer joy and happiness and like I mentioned at the beginning, losing track of time was something everyone did. For those 2 hours, Tom and Ed put our worries aside, in return for a genuinely speechless set.

If you ever get the chance to go and see them, then do yourself a favour and do it, whatever the price of the ticket, because they put on a spine-tingling show. You could stand and watch the visuals and still have a good time.

Another ace set from 2019 was Foals’ (not so) secret set on the Park Stage. Absolute delirium. The secret sets on the Park always have been and always will be absolutely manic. It is in no way the biggest area at the festival, so when a huge act is scheduled to play there, you can imagine how busy it gets.

Foals (2019)

Me and my brother went up 2 hours before and stood and watched Sons of Kemet, who are a jazz, African style type band before Foals came on. In my previous experience, we’ve attempted to go and watch a Thom Yorke secret set up there and not even got within a sniff and I saw Pulp up there one year and I couldn’t get my head around how busy it was.

So we’d prepared for Foals, even though we weren’t 100% sure that they’d be the secret set but they announced it on their Instagram a little bit early. We were stood excitedly close to the front of the stage, and it was more than worth the long walk and the long wait.

Seeing a band you’ve loved for years on a stage as small as the Park Stage was a surreal moment. They’re easily one of the best live bands around at the moment, but seeing them at Glastonbury during their secret set made it a little bit special. I saw them on the Pyramid in 2017 and as good as that was, it wasn’t as good as this one, although I did manage to take the best Glasto related picture I’ve ever taken from their 2017 gig.

Yannis had the crowd in the palm of his hand from the first song to the last song. Their new album had just come out and they played all their classics from old albums and the set was intense, energetic and on a constant high (with the exception of Spanish Sahara).

Dunno what it is about secret sets. They seem more significant than a scheduled set and this was the exact same. Surreal.

Tame Impala (2011)

In 2011 I went to watch the first band on the Pyramid Stage on either the Friday or Saturday. At around half 11 in the morning, me and around 200 other people went to watch a band called Tame Impala. I’m not telling you that there were only 200 people on the field at that moment but there were definitely only around 200 people who were there to watch Tame Impala.

They’d released their first album, ‘Innerspeaker’ in 2010 and it’s still arguably their best record to date, but that’s a debate we can save for another day. They were that unheard of, that they didn’t even have their own backdrop on stage, so settled for the Glastonbury logo.

They were boss, though. The sound was spot on and everything was absolute perfection, which is what Kevin Parker is an expert at. The fella spends hours upon hours finding the perfect beat, rhythm, riff and synth sounds for 1 song so, they were always going to make it weren’t they? They also played barefoot for some reason.

I saw them for a second time on the same day when I traipsed all the way up to the Park Stage to see the secret set, to which everyone thought was going to be Arctic Monkeys but turned out, much to the disappointment of my 13-year-old self, to be Pulp, and I still can’t work out why I was disappointed because they were unbelievable.

Tame Impala (2019)

Tame Impala headlined the Other Stage in 2019 and they were quite simply faultless, and I can’t get my head around how far they’ve come. From watching them with a few hundred avid fans to being surrounded by tens of thousands of people vibing to their new groovy tunes. The visuals they produced along with The Chemical Brothers, ensured that the Other Stage headliners put the Pyramid headliners to shame in 2019, although the 2 Stormzy songs I saw went down well, especially when he got 100,000 people to shout “Fuck the Government, Fuck Boris”.

There are countless sets I could write about and even more memories I could recollect and reminisce on but this blog post would take about a week to read.

The walks through the Greenfields, sitting around the stone circle, discovering a new band because you just so happen to be sat in a stage to shield from the heat, the hundreds of food stalls I’ve bought from (I can’t wait to get my hands on one of them Afghan Bhatti wraps next year) and not forgetting the years where the storms have turned the place into a mud bath, the thunder has caused bands to cancel, and the rain enabled parents to push their kids around the floods in inflatable chairs.

The thing is with this place is that it is like no other. It’s not just a festival, it’s a movement, a way of life, a pilgrimage, where for 5 days, people from all over the country, and further afield, from different backgrounds with different stories come together, enjoy themselves and embrace each other, and forget about the outside world, because that's what this place does to you. We meet new people with close similarities yet completely different lifestyles, but at that moment, we’re all stood in the same field, watching the same band or dancing to the same DJ set, drinking the same amount of alcohol and having the same amount of fun.

If you’ve been to Glasto, you’ll understand that you can do whatever you want or wear whatever you like without feeling like anyone’s looking at you, judging you, because no one goes to do that type of thing. We’ve gone there for one thing, and one thing only; to lose track of time, and for maybe the only weekend in the calendar year, we’ve gone to forget about our anxieties, our jobs, not having to worry about chores around the house or having to meet deadlines, not worrying about money or what’s happening on social media.

No one’s got time to check the news or read The Daily Mail’s headline telling us that “Glastonbury revellers are a disgrace to the country because they sang an abhorrent lyric with Stormzy” or “Glastonbury should be shut down because of all the litter”. Nobody wants to hear about Brexit or see Jacob Rees-Mogg’s slimy grid all over the front page because he’s labelled us all as “dirty festival-goers”, because we know better.

We know that the festival stands in solidarity with the poorest communities around the world, they go above and beyond in terms of looking after the environment by not allowing any of the 800+ traders to sell a plastic bottle and introducing us all to cans of water, they’ve got a recycling centre on-site and bin lorries go around the whole festival from dawn til dusk emptying the bins and sorting the cans from the cardboard and recycling as much as possible. So not only do they look after the 180,000+ people in attendance, but they also look after the staff and above all, the planet.

It really is the greatest place on the planet and is a place that should be on everyone’s bucket list, but if you don’t fancy it then don’t bother cos it makes it a lot harder for me to get a ticket!

God bless Michael and Emily Eavis.

Foals (2016)

Above The Park

Tony Benn Tower

Glade Stage

Block 9

The xx (2017)