Having found out that I’d won VIP tickets for the Glastonbury festival on Monday afternoon, I needed to organise myself sharpish and throw some clothes together in time for Wednesday morning. Which, of course, I did on Wednesday morning, dragging bagfulls of clothes, toiletries and sleeping mats down to Reading, via a days work at Kings Place, and onto Glastonbury with my good pal Ross. The plan being to leave around 6pm, we eventually set off at half 9, nipping in to Asda on the way to spend £80 on beer, food, lager, water, cider and disposable barbeques. We arrived at the campsite at 1am, taking a long detour around the South-West due to Ross’ lack of directions or a map to get us there, and pitched up our tent in pitch-black darkness with a can of lager permanently attached to one hand, a look we would become accustomed to over the weekend.
We woke up early on Thursday morning due to the suffocating heat of our very old, not quite waterproof tent. Our weekly shop had us penned into tight sleeping lanes and not all of it had stayed in bags. In fact, I’d already warmed up the croissants for breakfast by virtue of rolling onto them in the middle of the night. Tasty! Observing our surroundings, we decided to meet people by helping them to set up their tents and we did so by rescuing two absolutely useless dames in the form of Ali and Katherine, whose palace of a tent was proving far too complex for them to construct. In a matter of moments (ahem) we had it up and it looked a little something like this:
We spent the rest of the day celebrating this success in the VIP bar with copious amounts of cider, an area that was great for chilling out in over the weekend. It was here that Lip from Shameless came over and greeted us as though in the presence of an old friend, or someone that he wanted to meet at least. This threw us both somewhat, as we recognised him, but couldn’t work out where from. After some small talk, it began to dawn on us the reason that we recognised him and on him that we were in fact, nobodies. Both parties sharpishly headed back to their ciders, before drowning our sorrows in them when we heard the terrible news about Michael Jackson.
Friday marked the start of the music and the continuation of the rain. It had absolutely hammered down on Thursday afternoon with thunderstorms in the evening and we were glad to have bought wellies the day before. We eventually braved it out of our tents and towards the music, where our first band of the festival was The Rakes, whose lead singer professed his pleasure in Michael Jackson’s death, which was met with shock from their crowd. Next up were The Maccabees. Their show provided one of the highlights of my weekend, as the rainclouds cleared and the sun came pouring through, to be met by huge cheers from every single Glastonbury reveller. It helped that the band were bloody brilliant too.
We headed over to the Pyramid stage next for N*E*R*D who had decided that the timeslot didn’t apply to them as despite being last-minute additions, the entire 200,000 people had paid their ‘100 dollars’ to see them. Despite this misguided, arrogant attitute, the crowd got behind them when they were kicked off and it provided a bizarre moment as Pharrell Williams continued to sing defiantly despite the sound having been cut. Due to this, we missed the beginning of the White Lies and didn’t get to experience their set as we would have liked. Following them were the Friendly Fires, who were great and their lead-singer proved to be quite the dancer. He moved the way I do after ten pints of cider in a seedy nightclub. The way I do in my head at least.
We saw Lada Gaga’s toned backside stride around the stage with her fire-starting nipples before heading back to the bar to stock up on the alcohol in preparation for bloc party, who I am a massive fan of and they surpassed all expectations with a great set. Heading back to the campsite tired, drunk and happy we lit a campfire, which Ross passed out in front of while I sang very loudly and out-of-tune all the songs I had heard that day.
All of my Glastonbury photos can be found here.
Todd Nash 