Thursday
We’re in the van on the way to Glastonbury. Glastonbury feels similar to America in the atmosphere before setting off. Everyone tells me that I won’t have expected one specific thing; the specific thing that they discovered. Here’s why it’s different. Here’s what to be prepared to be shocked by.
As with America, the main point seems to be that everything is very big.
I look to my left and see Battersea, we are still in London. It feels like we should have moved more.
I try to put Blue Planet on the TV, but there is only a David Attenborough documentary about gorillas. The documentary is a bit depressing, the gorillas are getting killed in a war. Everyone wants to play Mario kart instead, so that is wired up about 1 minute into my show. We can’t stop the audio from the documentary.
I watch Dillon play Mario Kart and listen to David Attenborough talking in the background. It seems like every time something bad happens to the gorillas Dillon gets worse at Mario; interlinked. Very sympathetic, I think.
Soon I have earplugs in and headphones on, looking out the window. Trying to dull Mario against David Attenborough against the DJ-ing from the front.
Chris told me they played techno for hours to torture people in Guantanamo bay, to make them come out of hiding or something.
3am
We’re in a car, within Glastonbury now, getting ferried from our final gig back to our tents. The drive feels much larger than the idea of the festival in my head.
When I was younger, I’d shut my eyes in the back of my mums car and try to keep track of where we were on the road home. It never worked. I’d always imagine myself further forwards than I was when I opened my eyes. You can’t remember all the details of real life to replay them, consistently ending up five minutes ahead.
In the back of this car the tiredness from the two gigs hits me, and I know I won’t do anything apart from get into my tent. I try to lean my head on a shoulder to sleep but it doesn’t work.
This drive is bumpy and strange. Two places glued together; a dirt track and what looks like a city. We drive above the city now, looking down on it from the jeep. I don’t know anything about these lights yet, I haven’t seen anything apart from our two stages. But the dirt track and the white walls dividing us from the lights makes it all seem quite pretend. As if we are driving round the backstage of a huge play, all these lights and tents part of a huge set. I’m aware once we arrive at our destination we’ll leave these backroads to sleep within the play again.
The drive feels like it goes on about 45 minutes
I watch it get light. I haven’t been out to see the sunrise in a very long time, and I probably won’t be again, so I try to take it in. This is an incorrect assumption. I will be again every night of the festival, but as someone who cares about sleep this is not something I imagine yet.
We get back to the tents at 4am and it’s starting to get light. It looks really beautiful to me, everything in long expansive horizontal strips. First the festival, then the hill, then the sky, like slabs in rock.
I go to sleep in my tent on the steep hill, sliding down towards the door every few hours and having to shimmy back up.
Friday
Friday is our day off – no gigs to play. We haven’t really seen anything yet. We wander into a place called Scissors after a drag queen from inside wishes Dillon well. I see a free haircuts sign and sign up.
The hairdresser says she only has razors so it might pull. I say that’s fine, that seems more high fashion than just using scissors. There is someone in the tent giving a talk on how writing poetry and songs about love makes you removed from it, stopping you truly experiencing it.
The tent is quite empty, the hairdresser spins my chair so I can face the talk and listen. I’d quite like to see what she is doing in the mirror but I’m holding eye contact with the speaker now. He starts reading one of his poems he has written about love (a little hypocritical if the message is not to write that kind of thing).
Sometimes when I get headaches, I pull really hard on the bit of hair directly on top of the headache feeling. It does seem to work, just for a few seconds. This haircut feels the same, pulling specific areas while she saws at it with the razor. I think of a brain scan, different areas of the brain lighting up as you think about different things.
I imagine she’s pulling the areas of my head that light up in relation to what what the speaker is saying, as if to emphasise the point while I’m strapped in this chair.
It’s a bit intense, and when she moves away I spin the chair back to face the mirror. I look into my own eyes and listen to the talk which is not necessarily better
He says by looking for a narrative in it are you stopping yourself from feeling the reality of it?
I think about some songs I have written, and now in the future after Glastonbury while I’m typing this up, I think about this diary too. I decide I don’t care what the man giving the talk says because the haircut’s done now and it looks really good.
I leave the tent.
Later I watch King Krule. He brings out his daughter, she’s about 4 years old, and gets her to play the drums. I nearly cry. I take a video and send it to my friend. A few hours later I watch the video back and feel no emotion, he probably didn’t either. I guess it wasn’t video-able.
People in King Krule’s crowd are sat on each other’s shoulders. Everyone in this crowd actually cares about the songs, it’s not just people who wandered in or stumbled past. A hidden world when you know all the words and you can watch the songs from the inside looking out.
I only know Stoned Again so I join them for that one, and then just watch the set for the rest. It’s nice to be in a crowd of people sat on each others shoulders who care.
Sunday
My friend Georgie is at Glastonbury, I didn’t realise she was here so I call her and go meet her at Blondshell. I got obsessed with the song Salad by Blondshell when we were in France around February, but ended up getting into the whole album. When I go see her I become one of the King Krule audience who cares and knows all the words.
Blondshell says ‘we’re going to do two new ones !’ At this point my bowels are feeling slightly strange after 4 days of camping. I only want to see the songs I know so I head to the toilet. As soon as I reach the toilets Olympus starts playing. That is not a new one, I think, although there is nothing I can do but sing along angrily from a distance.
I’m back in the front row now and Georgie heads for a toilet break. As soon as she leaves they start playing Salad. Blondshell doesn’t have an audience of screaming jumping people, and I find myself wanting a Fat Dog crowd. Maybe I have a warped perception of how an audience behaves because of the kind of gigs we play. It doesn’t matter once the song starts though. I am screaming and jumping around and breaking my voice. If you like a song enough you are not in an audience anymore, there are just the sounds. Georgie comes back halfway through and it’s nice.
I stick with Georgie for a bit afterwards. I like chatting with her. Her band is often at the same festivals as us. With all these people that I bump into sporadically on the circuit I forget that you can actually meet up with them by choice. They seem like coincidences; faces you welcome seeing again but could never predict when or where they might appear. She actually lives in Peckham, very near me. I wonder when I’ll next see her and in a weird way don’t want to break the spell by organising it.
We say goodbye, I go to do my gig.
the last gig
I forget Georgie said she’d come to the gig though. While I’m setting up I see her sat down below on the grass. I ring her from stage. She’s too far away for me to be able to hear anything she’s saying, but we are looking right at each other. It’s disorientating to be looking at someone in real life but hear their voice through a phone.
It reminds me of watching Little Simz on the pyramid stage. She was there in real life but so far away and my eyes kept being drawn to the screens. I tried to force myself to look at the real figure, because I was really there, but my eyes were always drawn to the huge pixels.
That projected video seemed like something from TV, prerecorded and distant. I kept switching my view; real life and screen playing simultaneously.
I decide I like ringing audience members while I’m on stage. It’s only been a few years on these bigger stages and I still like finding novel things to do. This didn’t used to be my life.
Home
As we drive out of the festival the van solidifies around us and becomes real again. Very quickly 5 things start happening at once and people are pointing at nice looking pubs, none of which we stop at.
I try to get up Shaun of the Dead but end up with Shaun the Sheep.
We settle on White Christmas, the Black Mirror episode. In the front they are playing Counting out Time by Genesis, and the squeaky bit of that song around 2:30 makes Black Mirror noticeably more unsettling. I guess clashes are always unsettling.
I look out the window, trying to distract myself from all the sounds, and enjoy the novelty of a motorway full of cars after 4 days of mud tracks by foot.
Hours later we’ve dropped off half the people and a sense of calm has settled in. Johnny is DJ-ing in the front and puts on Into My Arms. ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist god, but I know, darling, that you do’. Over time I’ve come to realise volume is the most powerful tool in music, and I sing along to the whole song only loud enough for me to hear. We drive the back way to my house, the route I’ve driven hundreds of times at 3am.