Belated thoughts on my second trip to Glastonbury
Sunday, July 1, 2007Comment, or trackback from your own site.
What’s brown and sticky? A stick. Oh, and also British music festivals in the summer. Aah Glastonbury and the British weather. You can’t beat it.
So some aspects of this year’s festival were no better than my last experience: planning and successfully executing toilet trips was a thankless task; the food ranged from the sublime to the revolting (never again shall I have a yorkshire pudding at a festival - it’ll be made of discarded flip-flop); the crowd was fairly homogenous despite the “multi-cultural” vibe; good music was plentiful yet people still insisted on playing Zombie Nation at 4am on ghetto blasters; and the mud - which oddly was at its worst and welly-stealingly gloopy when the rain stopped which made me secretly glad of extra rain.
But there was so much good stuff - art for art’s sake, impromptu jam sessions, random acts of generosity, a sense of suspended reality, random encounters with long-lost friends.
And then there’s the music - the sweet music! We tried to avoid the main stages a bit so as not to miss the dodgem diner, the space bar, the rabbit hole and all manner of weird and wonderful tiny things. We saw and heard, in rough order, and with fairly meaningless marks out of 10: Rod Thomas (7), Lana (4), Modest Mouse (4), !!!, Bloc Party (6), Rufus Wainwright (9), Arcade Fire (9), Bjork (8), Andi Neate, Guillemots (4), CSS (7), New Pornographers (8), Calvin Harris (6), The Maccabees, Patrick Wolf (10), Rodrigo y Gabriela (4), David Saw (6), Andy Parsons (9), Bill Bailey (8), Dame Shirley Bassey (10), Manic Street Preachers (6), The Go! Team (9), Radio Luxembourg (9), Gruff Rhys (9).
Two other things I should mention: firstly the guy in the next tent who snored ferociously in a slightly tuneful way (other tenty neighbours referred to him as Dinasour Man), and secondly Giles’ storming impression of the Bassey in a pink blanket when we were in the never-ending queue to leave the site in sideways sheets of rain. Priceless.
