The summer I turned 16, as a birthday present, I got tickets for a festival with a few friends. When I concocted this idea and managed to get my parents on board with it, the people I wanted to take and I got very excited. I’ve now got to a stage where being around a cosmic amount of inebriated people in a sweaty, muddy, loud field sounds like torture, but at the time it sounded like the height of enjoyment; the rock’n’roll lifestyle, which was apparently popular.
We then had much fun deliberating which festival we should go to, trying to plan out our enjoyment. This was a mistake as it meant that all the tickets for festivals we might actually want to go to had sold out. Glastonbury had gone, Reading had gone, V had gone; all the ones that were on TV and were dictated as ‘cool’ by infuriating people like Fern Cotten, were gone. Sold out. So, determined to go to a festival if it killed us, we got some tickets to go to Guilfest. The festival in Guildford.
I don’t know if anyone reading has been to Guildford, Surrey, but it’s a place that’s rather difficult to get excited about. It’s best known for the Guildford Spectrum; a large indoor leisure facility that has a bowling alley, ice rink, water slides, and a laser quest. Unfortunately, these are not all joined as the same activity, which would make it the most amazing place in the world. No, it’s just a collection of almost interesting things. And some fast food restaurants. But, hey, we thought, Reading’s not much cop, but it’s one of the most famous Festivals in the country.
The headline acts didn’t help convince us. Ah-ha and Billy Idol are the two I remember. And Nizlopi, an acoustic folk band that were known for five minutes for their song “JCB” which apparently caused grown men to cry. It’s okay to cry as a grown man so long as it’s about a truck. That’s fine.
Due to the lack of music to get excited by, we decided that we would go and soak up the festival experience, it would be training for following years at festivals. Learn how to cope with a few days of being dirty, learn how to survive with the food, learn how to conserve money, that sort of stuff. By day two we were rather bored and spent a large part of the afternoon sitting in front of the stage which, despite having someone on it, wasn’t really being paid attention to. One band then came on, me and my friend were barely listening, when suddenly our ears perked and we decided we quite liked the sound. We got quite enthusiastic and for the rest of the day would go on about this good band. We looked forward to getting home and finding some of their songs to play for others, to show off this good band we saw. The more I think about it, the more I realise we were just desperate to hear something slightly decent, because I don’t remember even typing their name in Google. I can’t even remember their name. I suppose I probably got home, recharged my iPod, put my earphones on, and completely forgot who they were.
Anyway, after three hours of sitting in the scorching sun, we got up to go and find some food. It was at that moment that I realised my legs smarted a bit. I was wearing three-quarter length shorts and my ankles had gone from my usual pale to bright red, burnt to tender pulp. If I had prepared them with curry spice three hours earlier, we could have just dug into my calves for dinner. No worries, I thought, they’ll be fine so long as I stay in my three-quarters so nothing rubs against them.
After a questionable chicken kebab thing that cost about £10, and after moaning about the price, taste, and size of the tiny thing, inexperienced of the crafty ways of the food vendor at festivals, we decided to queue up for a Silent Disco. A Silent Disco is a tent with the usual lighting of a disco, dark with strobe lights and so on, but with two DJ’s at the front. Everyone on the dance floor has a set of wireless headphones of which they switch to either of the DJ’s and dance. A great experience, one of which I actually didn’t mind dancing because it’s such an enclosing situation. Everyone seems to be out of time and dancing wrong because the room is split into listening to two different songs. And then, every now and then you would remove your headphones to look round a room of silent gyrating, stomping idiots. So I danced. And while I have never felt so comfortable to dance, I have never regretted it quite so much. My lower legs flared into chunky neon lightsabers, illuminating the ground below me in a soft crimson while sending excruciating stings through to my bone. Several times I opted to sit by the side of the room, hugging my knees and blowing on my ankles, suddenly realising, despite the room being full of people dancing to seemingly nothing, I was the biggest weirdo in there. I would try and pick myself up to dance – I didn’t want to leave my girlfriend in the middle of the dance floor – but it became more than just a burn, and turned into phantom pain. I could have sworn I was floating from the knees on a deep, numb puddle of fire.
That night was spent in my tent oscillating between boiling hot and freezing cold within seconds, and always on the verge of vomiting, while all my friends went off to the tents of some others we had met there for a midnight party, getting drunk and high and the like, listening to some guy strum his shitty guitar and sing huskily as the rest beat little African drums.
I got home and was told I had had a bad bout of sun stroke, and that next time, if I go to a festival, I should probably put some damn sun cream on.
I’ve only been to two festivals since. One was the Edinburgh Fringe, which was constantly overcast from the moment we arrived, and the other was a food festival, at which I stayed in a hotel.
PnL.x
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