‘In the morning my contact lenses had been stolen. I would be blind for two days’
I have never fought harder with my parents than I did the summer I was 14. My need to go to Glastonbury felt physical, something heavy I wore roughly, and I have had worse festival experiences than the time they eventually let me, but this was the first. The first worst.
I was at that oily, ungrown age when my obsession with music intersected uncomfortably with an interest in love, so my friends and I were confused about whether we wanted Jarvis Cocker to be our boyfriend or our dad. Either way, we wanted to be close to him, and within the same field would do. I lost the fight, so it wasn’t until I was 16 that I made it to Glastonbury.
It started raining as we set off, and it carried on raining: a hateful rain, one I understood from learning about pathetic fallacy in English. We arrived as the fields started to shift. After pitching our tent, my two friends and I fell quite balletically into a puddle of mud, and I can still remember the taste. I was wearing what I always wore: my grandma’s old dress cut up to here, with trainers and tights. All were destroyed by nightfall, when we returned to our tent from Radiohead on the main stage, to find it wasn’t there.
We circled for a while, confused by darkness and a number of dazy variables, until we realised the tent was there – it had just been sat upon. Another, larger tent had been pitched on top of it, and its red inhabitants were drinking beer and singing Oasis. We crawled in and slept in the metre square left standing. In the morning, all our bags had been stolen, including our tickets home and my contact lenses. Of course they had. I would be blind for two days. It was an experience that came back to me a decade later when I told my ninetysomething-year-old grandma that I was moving to a flat a street away from where she’d grown up, and her face fell into a silent sort of scream as she asked: “Why?” She had clawed her way out of that slum in the 1950s in order that her family would never have to experience such tsuris. Why had I chosen to live among filth?
For reasons only clear to a teenage mind, I held the theft and the mud against “music” – music in general. I stopped reading the NME. I stopped buying Radiohead albums. I remember a silent KFC on the Monday after, in a service station somewhere near the M25, a parent sitting across from me absolutely reeking with I told you so.
EW
‘We took our tent down in the mud and waited seven hours for a coach back to London’
There are sensible things to argue about at a festival with your partner: namely, where did you put the box of rioja? Arguing about whether or not you’re going to see Tony Benn get misty-eyed about socialism while smoking a pipe is not a sensible thing to argue about. However, at Glastonbury 2004, my then-boyfriend and I disagreed so vehemently on whether or not we’d be basking in Benn’s anti-capitalist glow that we actually broke up. On the Thursday. These were the days before mobile-sponsored tents and pocket chargers, so we were unable to find our respective groups of friends who had camped elsewhere; we had to spend the rest of the weekend together. My now ex proceeded to lose his cash card and I had to pay his way for the rest of the weekend. As he became increasingly arsey, I became increasingly stingy, refusing to buy his fags and always plumping for his least favourite beer on bar runs. We somehow managed to make it until Sunday, but during Muse’s headline set we both snapped, took our tent down in the mud and waited seven hours in a line for a coach to take us to the station for the first train back to London. Grim. Still love Glastonbury, though.
LC
‘The fake Issy Sampson beat me to the VIP area. I woke up in a stale-smelling tent’
I am not a natural festivalgoer; until I became a music journalist, the only camping I had done was with the Brownies. But when a new job offered me VIP tickets to the Isle of Wight festival in 2010, I thought: why not? However, when I got to the VIP area, it turned out that, er, I was already in there. Or at least, someone claiming to be Issy Sampson had already been ticked off the list. There was only one thing to do to quell the rising panic of being stuck on an island and unable to do my job: drink gin smuggled into the festival solidly for two days.
Everything went wrong. My friend Helen – dragged along on the promise of meeting bands and getting free drinks – fell off someone’s shoulders watching Friendly Fires and smashed her head on the ground, knocking herself out. Gin-induced tears during Biffy Clyro (unclear why). A stranger was sick down the back of my right leg, into my boot. I fended off angry calls from my editor asking why no interviews had been filed. We think we saw Jay-Z, but had no memory of him bringing on Kanye West and had to watch it back on YouTube.
It was a nightmare: every day, the fake Issy Sampson beat me to the VIP area and used my name while I woke up in hell (a stale-smelling tent pitched on a hill while drunk). By Sunday morning, I had to leave the site and walk to the nearest pub for a full English, a real toilet and a tearful meltdown. After Pink performed, I was done. Stay for Paul McCartney, a living legend and actual Beatle? No, thanks. Just one final triple gin and tonic in the pub next to the ferry port and a huge cry on the way home, please.
I have never found out who the fake Issy Sampson was, but I hope she had fun. Because I did not.
IS
‘My townie boyfriend retaliated with Wham!’s Club Tropicana, pulling up his white, short shorts’
Being a teenager trapped in the terrible Midlands town of Kettering, I didn’t even know that Spike Island had happened, so Reading 96 was my one chance to breathe the same air as the Stone Roses’ John Squire. Except he’d run off to invent the Seahorses. Reni had scarpered, too. Oh well, Ian Brown then. This mousey indie girl had bagged herself an exceptionally hot townie boyfriend, so we jumped into the dented Mini and hit the long, hard road out of Milton Keynes.
That Sunday had a classic mid-90s lineup, with Moby below Reef on the bill. We pushed to the front ready for Sonic Youth, but Hot Townie’s face crumbled when he realised what they sounded like. I closed my eyes and wished the ground would open up as he retaliated with Wham!’s Club Tropicana, pulling up his white, short shorts, which reached thong-like proportions as the George Michael impression became bolder.
The night reached a new low when the Roses came on. Ian Brown swaggered across the stage, tambourine in hand, and didn’t hit a single note. Like a yelping monkey in a bucket hat, he rambled through fillers from the Roses’ unloved second album, leaving us to sulk off and catch the end of Underworld. It should have been Spike Island: The Second Coming, but for me it was the day the indie-dance crossover died.
HV
