A Glasto experience [Festival Fever]

A Glasto experience

Posted on July 2, 2007 3:32 PM
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paul%20weller.jpg Review by Max Hogg

So Glastonbury…mud then?!

Well, yes, but it was sooo much more. The scale, diversity and excitement of the festival are just impossible to comprehend. I remember watching the end of Paul Weller on the Pyramid stage along with a packed field of around 40,000 people on Saturday afternoon (he fully lived up to his legend status in case you were about to ask). I’d just come from a packed circus field, watching a world champion circus performer juggle flaming torches atop a 12 foot unicycle. Blindfolded. (He almost killed the audience by falling off his unicycle. Nutter.)

Anyway, once Mr Weller was finished being a legend, I ambled around to the Other Stage to find that it, too, was packed. Around 20,000 people were happily dancing away in what appeared to be a small swamp.

Finally I got to my destination – the Dance Village. Seven stages of electronic madness and, you’ve guessed it; this whole area was packed as well. 180,000 people in a field really are a sight to behold. The mud pales into insignificance in the face of such brazen revelry.

The thing about Glastonbury is (cue a big cliché) you really have to be there. I know everyone says that every year, but this year was especially true. TV viewers saw mud everywhere and by all accounts heard pretty poor sound for The Killers and the Artic Monkeys. Though quite why you’d want to watch either of these two bands escapes me.

But that’s the beauty of the festival. As The Killers were taking to the stage I was safely ensconced in the West Coast Dance tent dancing away to Hybrid and Sasha; both of them producing easily the best, most euphoric sets I’ve ever seen from them. You might never have heard of either of them, but on the strength of their performances I would’ve paid the ticket price for those two alone. That’s how good they were.

And this was just one of almost forty stages – just as Sasha was building to an exhilarating close, the Other Stage was being invaded by Iggy and the Stooges’ audience and the Killers were…well, we’d better not talk about the Killers.

But its not even as if the music is everything the festival has to offer. I’ve mentioned the circus field already, and a couple of us spent the whole of Thursday making a three-legged wooden stool using hand tools in the Green Crafts field. It took all day mostly because the owner of the stall was also the proud owner of several kegs of home-made organic cider. Needless to say my stool is a bit wobbly!

And I couldn’t write a review of Glastonbury without mentioning Lost Vagueness. I worked there as a steward this year and looked after some of the most bizarre and lovely and, well, lost and vague people that you’ll find in our modern, consumerist, New Labourite Britain. And found myself at four in the morning playing roulette alongside one of my lifelong idols (who I don’t think would have wanted to be named). You don’t get that kind of experience anywhere but Glastonbury.

Unfortunately, he beat me.

Were you there? Do you agree with Max? Tell us all about your Glastonbury experiences in the comments section.