World Music Day special: It’s muddy good to be at Glastonbury

My sister and I, having decided to attend the Glastonbury festival, the ultimate pop music trip, decided we would be extra cautious and show up at the small English town two days in advance to find a good camping site. The festival required all attendees to camp in the fields, a price we deemed acceptable for the opportunity to watch some of our favourite bands perform in this unique setting.

So, on the bus to Glastonbury with some other early birds, we were way ahead of the official schedule and decidedly smug about it.

“Maybe we’re the first lot here,” my sister suggested hopefully.

“We’ll get the best camping spot,” I replied, and that’s when we turned a corner.

Nestled in the sunlit valley below was revealed a patchwork of colourful tents that stretched across a diameter of several kilometres. We could see milling crowds of tens of thousands bopping and moving as one through the fields, and a winding queue at the gate with at least 500 people in it. The faint boomph-boomph of a bassline floated up to us. As everyone else in the bus whipped out their digital cameras, my sister and I looked at each other and swallowed. Below us lay the Glastonbury Music Festival, already in full swing.

Town swells by 2,00,000
With more than 2,000 acts performed on four major stages and 15 smaller ones, and more than 2,00,000 people in attendance, it’s easily the biggest and brightest musical event in the world. This year’s festival, which concluded Saturday, had U2, Coldplay, Beyonce and BB King.

We knew all this. In fact, this mythologising about a music festival in serene English fields was what had attracted us. But we had been so busy ooh-ing and aah-ing over the impressive line-up, that our preparations turned out to be woefully inadequate for us, and mirth-inducing for others.

For example, Glastonbury is an incredibly muddy place. The daily rain, combined with the determined and repeated stompings of thousands of festival attendees, creates a muddy souffle that will eat normal shoes alive and jam even well-equipped limbs, leaving a layer of mud over your body that all accept cheerfully by the second day.

We were carrying two backpacks, a small rolling suitcase, and a round green tent that made the person carrying it look like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. The rolling suitcase tripled in weight when dragged through the mud, slowing us down to a crawl, as others cheerfully marched by with their belongings in sturdy wheelbarrows.

We spent the first day putting up our tent and inflating air mattresses, while the people in the tent next to ours, who had arrived a day earlier, sniggered at our ineptitude as we flopped about and fell down in the mud (sister thrice and me four times).

The silent disco
With no live music slated for the day, we met friends and went for the Silent Disco. This consists of all the dancers wearing headphones with two music channel options, as opposed to listening to music blaring from speakers. Over the two music channels, two DJs will battle it out for the dancers’ attentions. It’s ridiculously fun, perhaps because it combines dancing with friends with the joys of screaming lyrics without having to hear your own wailing. We danced determinedly till 4am, as teenagers around us snorted cocaine off their palms and downed ecstasy pills with pear-flavoured cider. On the way back, we fell down some more (sister once and me twice).

On Friday, when the actual festival began, the first act we saw was Wu Tan Clan, a hiphop band. They told us to “make some motherf***ing noise”, that they were “mistaken for the Taliban” by UK immigration and that we should “give them the energy to perform”. But they couldn’t quite cut it with the crowd, who lost interest quickly. This was followed by the BB King band, led by the blues legend himself, whose only instruction to the cheering audience was to “shake your booties”.

It was at this point — as we squelched our way to another stage — that rumours started doing the rounds. A ‘mystery guest’ slated for one of the stages was supposedly Radiohead, the edgy indie darling with hits like I’m A Creep. Radiohead being one of my favourite bands, I joined the snake of people leading to the venue. By the time Thom Yorke, the lead vocalist, took the mike, I had wrestled myself to the front. Everyone erupted with joy as the band played songs off their new album.

The day ended with a pyrotechnic, psychedelic showing by headliners U2. The band lived up to their recent claim in an interview — that they give the best live show that is possible, given the limitations of a travelling show. Bono bounced up and down a moving ramp and trippy background visuals transported a rained-on audience to a mosh-worthy energy level.

Glastonbury is not for the weak of heart. It is a music festival truly befitting the moniker of being a pilgrimage; and shows how much — rain, mud, biting cold — people will put up with to pursue their passions.