Festival Failings

Having recently comeback from Glastonbury a few weeks ago (and barely managing to recover). I look back at my first festivals that I went to when I was back in college.

Glasto is my 4th music festival that I've been to. I've been to Leeds 3 times and each time you go, you learn from your mistakes. I see so many festival virgins and regulars going to their first festivals and simply failing not knowing what to bring and how to survive in the wilderness that is the music festival forest!

First and most obvious one is: Clothing and footwear. Always pack for everything. come rain or shine. Literally. Even if your wellies don't match your matching orange shirt or pink hoodie. Most notable fail I saw on the first day at glasto was a girl braving the thick mud with sandals at the entrance! (Little did she know that the mud was bordering 1-2ft deep as you get further in!)

Buy a decent tent! The first year I went to Leeds Festival, my tent door broke on the last day while it was pouring down and my tent got waterlogged. I've also found out how much of a difference double layered tents are to single layered. It's sooo much nicer without all that water and sweat dripping on your head!

Transport. No, not how to travel to the site but how to carry all your booze there! It's all about the big wheels! Get a decent granny trolley. Do NOT bring a suitcase like I've seen. This ain't barbados (unless you replace sun with rain and sandy beaches for muddy fields... and even then I wouldnt bring a suitcase onto a beach!)

Okay, decide to go green this year by taking the train. When you think train vs car, you'd think trains are faster. Not this one. This one was 'low priority' which means it was the cyclists of the railway. You're on the rails but no one gives a shit about you because you're a cyclist and you're just a nuisance. Therefore, our train had to stop and start and let every other train passing come through.

Being on the long train journey, I was having conversations and asked the people next to me if I get searched for drugs or anything. Not that I was carrying anything but they somehow had the idea that I was some sort of heroin dealer :S...

Since Glasto was my first festival that wasn't Leeds, I thought I'd see what the big difference was. In fact, the difference was huge. There's so many things to see and visit. Even after the gigs have finished, there's performances, circuses, drinking, silent discos, I forgot what bands I wanted to see. I don't feel like they're trying to milk all the money i have in my wallet except for when I'm trying to buy food.

The only thing I hated about glastonbury was what I call 'QuickMud'. I'm not an expert in mud (and if I did, I probably wouldn't be a very good one). But there's 3 consistencies of mud: Hard mud that you can walk on, Liquid Mud that you can swim through (or at least still walk on and move your feet) and QuickMud where you get a perfect consistency of not being able to swim through and barely able to walk in. Glasto was the latter. I was better off travelling through hot lava on bare feet than through that guck and people who've played 'Stuck in the mud' before have no idea what it's like being literally stuck!

But yes, besides all that, the field was great, the sights were great, the music was great (even watching Beyonce was sorta great, don't ask why I went to see her instead of Queens of the stone age!)