I get triaged by a lovely nurse who writes my name down as Natan.
The doctor calls me Martin and tells me I’ll be fine onstage cause adrenalin is a wonder drug, but prescribes me some antibiotics for the yellow phlegm I’ve been coughing up all week.
The pharmacist hesitantly calls out Martha Power, and when no-one goes up to the window I wander up to see if it’s me she’s waiting on.
Oh, is that what it says? She asks, and then hands me a couple of packet of horse pills. They’re absurdly large, so much bigger than the pills I’m used to taking in Australia, but they do the job and in a couple of days I’m fighting fit again.
It’s been a week of highs and lows. No mud, but a couple of days of heat in a field with no shade has turned the band into a sweaty mess, not to mention the hours of walking between stages.
The festival is mammoth. A much larger scale than anything I’ve ever experienced. I guess there’s a reason everyone keeps saying it’s the biggest festival in the world.
We were lucky to get into the festival two days early. We had early access passes, which wound up being a little more annoying than we expected. Each checkpoint wed have to explain who we were, what we were doing, why we were two days early. Someone would radio ahead to someone else to check someones list, a supervisor would walk down, wed re-explain the situation, get another couple of hundred meters into the festival and start the process again.
The festival officially kicks off on Wednesday, but we arrived on Monday to what I thought was a packed farm. Turns out the 35,000 volunteers swarming the festival are only 15% of the final capacity. When it fills out on the Friday night transit becomes impossible. The crowd is a river that streams between the main stages, and going anywhere is impossible. You’re sucked along with the current.
It gets worse when you’re carrying instruments.
We spend the first couple of days lazily exploring the site. Most of the big infrastructure is in place, but theres gaps in the paintwork, lighting strips missing, whole sections of the festival fenced off with workers in fluoro vests hammering together the finishing touches. We walk through giant empty fields, marvelling over the empty space.
Ive picked up a cold on the flight over and theres heavy dust in the air. My hayfever has kicked in and Im feeling a little miserable, but I find my way up to the top of the hill on the second night to look out across the site. Its stunning. Green rolling hills, a sea of tents, lights everywhere you can see. A gentle hum.
The next morning some 200,000 punters arrive. The farm becomes a city, complete with a traffic management system, entertainment precincts and a medical centre complete with an x-ray machine that has been brought in on the back of a flat-bed truck. When I arrive at the medical centre theres a line of people out the front, waiting for the x-ray machine to be re-calibrated.
We play our first set on opening night, on the Lizard Stage in the Green Fields area, a sprawling hippie influenced commune familiar to Australian festivals.
We sit around the ‘green room’ which is just a handful of bench seats out the back of the tent. There’s a commotion behind us and I turn to see our sound guy, a giant bearded man, performing the Heimlich maneuver. A couple of abdominal thrusts there’s a stream of vomit on the grass and everyone is smiling and slapping each other on the back.
The sound guy turns to us and asks us if we’re ready to play. How can we argue with someone who’s just saved a life?
The set is raucous from the get go. The DJ before us has set the scene with a remix of Land Down Under, and the crowd stuck around to dance.
Were all a little jet-lagged, half the band is snotty and Im coughing my lungs out. Not an auspicious start, but the audience is there for us, packing out the dance floor. Theyre excited that were there, excited that we came from Australia to play for them, excited to be at Glastonbury.
We havent played together for a couple of weeks so the set starts a little sloppy. The stage is tiny, so were splayed out in a straight line with me on the far end. I cant see most of the band, even though I can hear them. A guy in the front row hands out glow sticks.
Halfway through the crowd theres a series of loud bangs. Our set has neatly lined up with the festivals official opening ceremony fireworks. We pause the set for the band and audience to step out of the tent to watch the fireworks show, and then everyone trounces back inside to finish the set.
We play our last song, the crowd calls for an encore.
Im glad were here.