Posted by Yes, I do. Perhaps I hate life, too? Or people? Surely I must if I despise the communal joy of standing ankle deep in mud squinting through a deluge at a matchstick Bono while my ravaged bowels quiver between the ‘catering’ to my left and the ‘toilets’ to my right, both several hundred feet – and several thousand ‘revellers’ – away.
Perhaps I have indeed lost my passion for life. Or at least my passion for drunken arseholes battering sleep from my brain with blaring conversations revolving purely around how fantastic they are for having obtained tickets and how brilliant it is to be shitting in a hole barely half a mile from Biffy Clyro – and hey, who goes camping anymore? No-one goes camping right? Isn’t it incredible?! And you’ll never guess who I saw up on the fields! One of The Wombats! Yeah! He flicked me the V’s.
But then everybody’s got a Glasto story. Here’s one, plucked from a random forum:
“On the way back I was thinking about the time at Glastonbury where my friend, who had recently taken some mushrooms, decided to show us all how indestructable his brand new Casio G shock watch was by putting it in front of an oncoming tractor wheel.
Needless to say once the wheel went over the watch we all stood in amazement at the ground where the watch was positioned. Only the watch had gone. Either buried or caught in the mud of the wheel of the tractor.
Laughed for hours!
Then a few hours later found same friend still high on the mushrooms that allowed his first trick stood under a paper cup to shield himself from the rain!”
Lol. ‘Smazin’ what the human brain can do on the ‘shrooms man. But no, I can stomach the hijinks, I can bear the cod spiritualism fashionably adopted for a single weekend by the oinkspring of Capitalism, and I can even stand the music, if not love it. This year’s line-up really is a perfectly scheduled mix of the classics (Wu Tang, Paul Simon, BB King) the popularist (Elbow, Coldplay, Morrissey) and the superstars (Beyonce, U2.) But what I can’t stand is the blithe conviction that Glasto is a rite of passage – something to be survived.
It’s even on the cover of this week’s NME (“Who to see. How to survive!”) along with a pointlessly provocative angle on Bono’s appearance (“Greatest Show on Earth or Headliner from Hell?” Does anyone believe it’ll be anywhere near the latter?) Now I can understand folk tolerating the sloshpit for the sake of the music, but what self-inflated world of pseudo-suffering are Glastogoers living in to believe that the flood, the mud, the shitty facilities and pisspoor grub all somehow make for a better experience.
Glasto has pitifully become our Passchendaele, a necessary baptism of fried food & organic juice that must be borne if you’re to stand proud among the ‘enlightened’. Today’s paps are plastered with photos of mud-splattered ladies grinning like loons at God’s pathetic attempt to dampen their enthusiasm. ”Ha ha, you silly God, don’t you realise this just makes it more fun!”
Are these people deranged? What would they rather do? Lounge in a luxurious towelling robe sipping a capacious glass of Campo Viejo on a comfy sofa with a loving spouse, or wring the bumsweat from their undercrackers into a chipped mug while a hippy flails you with his dreds and kindergarten geopolitics? Well, obviously the latter. Me? I’ll be in Brighton with my darling wife, enjoying our first weekend alone together for six years, celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary in childless luxury, although when I get back I might just flip on the TV and watch – AAAAAAAAAAArrrrrrrrrrrGHHHHHHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
God I hate Fearne Cotton.
Only ever been to one music festival and I was paid to be there filming it. One morning we set out around the campsite to get some interviews and it looked like a weird, UK version of that Michael Burke report from Ethiopia out there. Tiny fires made from the rings of plastic that hold beer cans together, half-eaten tins of beans, broken, cheap, camping furniture and hungover teenagers with thousand yard stares, sat in the dirt. Carnage was the word that kept going through my mind that weekend. Fuckin carnage.
Well said sir
I’ll tell you something else I don’t like, there’s a weird, elitism or class system to them. When I was there a team of eastern european worker would clean the site every morning and look for any coins that had bounced out festival goes pockets. Unseen and ushered out before the festival goers would be let in to buy £5 burgers. One guy did the whole fleet of burger stalls for Reading and Leeds and that was 5 years ago so, he’s probably charging £8 a burger now. Anyway, the ticket holders get to eat and ride funfair rides on the site until the bands start. Who pull in backstage and sit in a huge tour bus all day, go on stage and be worshipped like gods for an hour then drive off.
Don’t think Glastonbury is run quite like that. I think you can wander about all the time.
I patronise one of those festivals where they cant do enough to keep you comfortable, well-fed and a considerable distance from the nearest mud. Its now rebranded itself as a ‘festi-holiday’, fully aware most of us do not want to vacation in expensive, vodka-sponsored versions of Sangatte. If that reveals to the observant onlooker that I am no longer 19, well, so be it.
This song was made for you: https://roomyverse.com/?p=10791
What? I dont take my own nibbles. They have a River Cottage tent, for god’s sake.
I can just picture Kirstie Allsop sashaying to ‘Size of a Cow’ before drunkenly lambasting everyone in a supremely ill-judged jamaican patois while schlopping Chardonnay all over Martin Fry from ABC.