Glastonbury (part 3) I am drinking gin and kombucha from a straw wheat cup. I am floating in a hammock in a forest glade near Totnes. I am feeling calm and clear and happy. We have reached the ‘hippie commune’ part of our UK tour. I am eating a giant bowl of vegan mac and cheese, deliciously irreverent mac and cheese accompanied by a side of crispy onions and garnished with a handful of brilliant orange flowers picked from the hedge behind the tent. The meal is served by a giant Italian man who appears to be mostly naked. He scampers over to deposit the food on the table in front of me and bold curls of chest hair erupt around the top and sides of the skimpy apron he wears. When he turns to walk back to the kitchen his bare arses winks at me in the British sunshine. I’m tempted to ask if he was wearing pants when he prepared the food, but hygiene standards be damned, this food is delicious and its got veggies in it, unlike any of the food I’ve eaten in the past week. … We left Glastonbury in a rush, up at 7 am to disassemble our tents and roll up the hill to the carpark in stages. Each person is overloaded, carrying gear first from the tent to the inside of Pedestrian Gate B, then carrying the gear out through the gate and dropping it on the other side of security, getting a pass back into the festival to pick up a second round of gear. It takes us over an hour to get from the campsite to the gate, then another hour to get from the gate to the car park. When I finally sit down in the car I’m a sweaty sodden mess, ready for a break, ready for tour to be over, ready for anything really, except another day of festival. The festival was grand. More people than you could ever imagine, crammed into a farm, forced to battle the elements, the sound, the dust, the sun. I had a great time, but it was a lot. We sit in the car with the airconditioning running and agree that it’s quite nice to be out of there, but then we have to navigate British country lanes. Most of the roads within ten miles of the festival have been blocked off for the weekend. It’s a complex network of one lane roads, where no-one is really sure who has right of way. Someone at the festival drunkenly walked us through the etiquette, ‘if you have a bigger car you have right of way, but if you’re going down a hill you should concede, that said always make space for the milkman, and tractors…’ This all goes out the window when we’re actually driving, because it turns out no-one else knows the rules either. The sides of the lane are giant hedges, stretching up above the height of the car, and every mile or so there is a little slip lane cut out to let people pass. You can reach out either window and drag your hand along the hedges as you pass. We manage to get caught in the middle of a section, headbutting up against a car coming the other way until eventually they conceded and reverse, pulling backwards down a country lane for five minutes while we ashamedly give them thumbs up through the front windscreen. We arrive at our next ‘festival’, a much smaller affair on a farm near Totnes, where a handful of people sit around on rugs in a field. It’s a stark contrast to Glastonbury. I assume everyone here knows everyone else by name. We play a loose set. A very loose set. Up until now we’ve been crafting sets, trying to figure out a flow that will catch the Glastonbury crowds walking past, draw them into our tent, keep them engaged. This festival is small enough that everyone is already in the room with us, so we pass it to Maddi our bass player and tell them to call out whatever songs they want to play. I’m finally feeling well again, after a week of battling a cough, and i’m in a silly mood, so I spontaneously shift feels in the middle of songs. Oom-pah becomes reggae. Funk becomes reggae. Rock becomes reggae. Everything becomes reggae, until the last song where I try to make the shift into reggae and Sam and Maddi side-eye me back into the original feel. The crowd is surprisingly excited for whatever we throw at them. We invite an audience member up on stage to rap over one of our songs. Meg takes a bongo solo. Everything is nice and loose, a cathartic release from the last week of shows.