Tag: festivals

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GLASTONBURY 2019 – Day 1 (tues 25th June)

We arrived at Worthy Farm on Tuesday afternoon and sailed in. Well, we drove in actually, we weren’t in a boat. The hoards wouldn’t arrive till tomorrow so we were able to get on site easily and get our tent pitched up on the hill overlooking the Park area next to a tree. This turned out to be the greatest move we ever made as it meant we had shade every morning till midday which was a first. When its hot at a festival you normally have to vacate your tent by 8am as it becomes nuclear by then. By getting several hours kip in each night (well, each morning) meant we were able to give our bodies ‘n’ brains some rest which allowed us (just about) to get through an insanely full-on week of revelling in the biggest musical festival on the planet…

Rule No.1 – pack light.

Dr. Zoidberg warmly greeted us into the festival..

Glasto gets poolitcal. (one bad pun surely deserves another?)

Glasto tourists wait for the big crane at Arcadia to burst out its fireballs.

Clearly every crowd was catered for at Glasto…

The Unfair playground

On the first night we went to the crew bar at Shangri-la and it was going off. On a tuesday! Everyone was already flying high and raving hard. It was kicking off more than most festival at their peak. You realise that Glasto is actually a crew party, the punters are just along for the ride…and pay for it. There are around 50,000 people working at the festival and by the time the festival starts they have been going at it for about two weeks. It is their contribution and dedication to partying which makes Glasto begin in full swing at full tilt with no run up…

This guy above was jumping up and down repeatedly into a bin so that he could crush the cans inside. We never found out quite why unless he was just being duly diligent…or had a thing about cans. Or bins.

We found out on arrival that the whole of the festival was being used as a 5g testing site. No choice. No consent. This did not feel me with joy. More of that later on in week…

We saw many casualties even on the first night. At Glasto no-one knows how to hold back. It just isn’t an option.

Eco Car

This was a sculpture of a turtle that had been caught up in a ton of plastic and other human waste items. It was designed so you could hang out inside of it but highlighted the damage we are causing to the oceans and its inhabitants, which to be honest, was a bit of a buzz kill (laughing face with tears, crying face with tears)

The view from our tent

 

To be continued….

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Wot I did in my summer holidays (Pt 3)

Lost Village 18

To see the full gallery please click here: https://babycakesromero.com/photography/lost-village-18/

Lost Village 2nd time around although I was only there for one night before and so was great to go back and spend a bit more time there. Like Houghton it is also a great size and very manageable although they had upped the capacity a few thousand on last year, not that you could really notice. I’d had the good sense to bring a large umbrella. The heavens erupted at The Bureau of Lost just as we arrived on the friday, a sound system hidden in the woods. We very quickly made friends as a whole gang of guys who joined us underneath to shield from the rain. We had been there literally minutes and we were being hugged and offered all manner of stuff by this lovely lot who were clearly off their head. It was a very warm welcome and summed up how friendly everyone was (induced or otherwise) throughout the weekend.

 

What I hadn’t realised about LV last time was that a lot are there for the food and there was even a pop up Dishoom, (a very trendy restaurant in London apparently) and was slightly stunned to see a very large queue of people trying to get in. I also saw joggers for the first time at a festival (see full gallery) which left me fairly slack-jawed. They have a wide variety of stuff on offer at LV including stand-up, theatre and art installations. What sadly they don’t provide (and this was my main gripe of the weekend) is any entertainment past 1am. I couldn’t actually believe it when someone told me. A festival that finishes at 1pm? Is that even a festival? All the acts finish  at this inordinately early hour and after this moment there is only one tent open, the Hay bale tent, where you can dane to a Spotify playlist. That doesn’t sound very enticing but when there is literally nothing else on, you would be amazed what you will tolerate.

It actually sounded like it was being selected from someone’s phone as some tracks were occasionally cut short as they would be at a house party with nothing but the machinations of a wasted phone user as dj. We actually went round the tent, which was full to the brim with about 2000 people, looking for someone with a phone making the decisions on what these festival revellers should be dancing to. Whoever it was went for the big hitters, and almost everything played was a banging hit from now or yesteryear. And the crowd went suitably nuts to every cheesy tune that came their way, not caring who or how they were getting them, as you can see in this short video…

LINK: https://youtu.be/XPtxrlZT6MQ

I am not blaming the organisers as they are restricted to a curfew which just seems so sad. There is, according to a steward, very little going on in this part of the country so you would think local residents would be ok with a wee bit of noise pollution for one weekend a year. Clearly not. It just bothers me in society that ‘quiet’ always wins. Its a shame as Lost Village is a really cool little festival and would definitely be up for returning…I might just now have the foresight to bring a loaded up device with a speaker to be able to listen to some tunes in the later hours rather than crowd round a poorly connected iPhone, desperately trying to squeeze out an entire track on the streaming bandwidth available in the middle of a field whilst everyone else is trying to do the same.