The festival passes in a fever dream.
A literal fever dream for some of us. Sam gets heat stroke and merrily projectile vomits across the festival. The medical tent gives him some rehydration salts and we set his air mattress up in the shade of a wall of fluoro plastic tubs labelled TOILET WASTE. Someone taps on the tubs and assures everyone theyre empty.
For now.
In the process of moving Sam I stumbled into a patch of stinging nettles. The entire side of my arm goes numb and tingly. Oh yeah, it does that, our neighbour tells me, and suggests I rub yoghurt on it, but were in a field in the middle of nowhere and that sounds like a messy solution.
Our sets are fun. People have really left their inhibitions at the gate, and are ready to dance. The thing that really gets me is how each little stage is its own self-contained world. But the worlds are jammed in next to each other. At our second gig we can hear the stage across the road from us over top of our own soundcheck. Its absurdly loud, and people walking through the site are bombarded with music from three or four different areas at once. No-one seems fazed though.
Sensory overwhelm is part of the experience. Dust is part of the experience. Exhaustion is part of the experience.
The sun goes down at 10 pm. Im still on Melbourne time, so I sleep in shifts, three or four times a night, waking up early morning to bird-call.
The birds sound odd here, no magpie warbles, no butcherbird chimes. I roll off my deflating air mattress at 4 am and sit in a port-a-loo on top of the hill to watch the sun-rise. Its quiet, the calm before the storm. I take a handful of Panadol and clamber back into bed.
I wake up in a sweat. The tent is in direct sunlight. The band next to us has started practicing. This band is three trombonists and a backing track. Three trombonists. A backing track. Who dreamed this up?
I fall into a morning routine. Shower. Weetbix with milk powder in my tent. Smoothie from the shop around the corner.
On the first day I tell the lady Im feeling a bit sick, so she throws in a shot of ginger that burns down my sinuses and makes me feel alive. On the second day I have two of them. By day five she sees me coming and lines up a smoothie and ginger shot on the counter for me.
The first few days of the festival Im conserving energy, spacing my Panadol and sunscreen and spending as much time as possible lying down. By day 3 the energy is back but the hacking cough remains.
The festival is an assault on the senses. Theres so many areas, each dreamed up by someone and brought into life just for this brief period on this tiny patch of grass in the Southwest of the UK. Theres IICON, a giant head that morphs into a square TV-screen-esque stage, the infamous Pyramid stage, an Eastern Bloc where an abandoned meat factory has been created entirely for this festival, and Terminal 1, where punters have a small taster of the challenges migrants face when finding a new home, through an immersive experience with passport forms and security guards. Of course at the end of the line, the punters get to enter a raging night-club.
Theres the Green Fields area, where stages are powered by the sun, by wind-power, by an actual bicycle that is being pedalled side of stage during the sets. Theres Ancient Futures, where we play in a field of Tipis, splayed out across the side of a hill.
It’s hard to take this festival and compare it to Australian festivals. Its so far beyond the scope of what Ive seen before in ambition, in numbers, in scale.
We meet hundreds of people who become our best friends and promise to come to the next show, but we never see them again, because theres 200,000 people here and there are so many things to draw your attention away.
Theres so much to love about it an area where anyone can find a home, but I worry that the sheer scale of it kills the community vibe that festivals curate.