There are many things in life I loathe, including:
Camping and the outdoors.
Being dirty.
Groups of people off their nut trying to create a communal ‘experience’.
Secret Garden Party had all these things, but I fucking loved it.
The consummate professional would have headed down on Thursday, maybe Friday morning at latest, to indulge in the opening revelry. But, with this being my first festival in a decade (the last being V2006 – I skipped Morrissey for Razorlight, after which I decided I could never be trusted in such a situation again), I can be considered very much a novice at festivalling.
My partner-in-crime/friend-with-driving license, Miss Fizz, scooped me up from drizzly Manchester and escorted me down to a rather more soggy Cambridgeshire. As soon as I saw the paintbox-coloured flags and castle turrets flapping in the distance, I felt both a flutter of sweet anticipation and a lump in my throat. All those years I’d spent smugly chuckling as I watched the mud-soaked Glasto-baters smiling through the squalor at the main stage. Karma was about to bitch-slap me. We quickly pitched our loaner tent in the rain and headed into the wild…
Entering the main Garden Party enclosure had me questioning what exactly I had inhaled in the pungently questionable porta-loos. Did I really just see a naked man on a trampoline? Was there a giant fox on the horizon? We ducked into one of the neon lit clearings to find The Lost Woods Disco, where poncho-clad rude boys swayed beneath a neon canopy to Olaf Stuut.
We continued our exploration through the labyrinth of tree lined paths, ducking into every pocket of party we found along the way. This included the magnificent Dog House, where we basked in the light of a sequin dog bone to some lovely disco. Having explored for a few hours with no real sense of geographical location and a fear of impending pneumonia, Fizz and I ducked into The Crossroads tent for some shelter.
We were greeted by the warm New Orleanaise sounds of London’s Dom & The Ikos, whose musical gris-gris was whipping the crowd into a dancing frenzy. Space was secured by the front railings as we proceeded to tear up the dance floor to Dom’s delicious beats. I do adore a horn, and that Saxophone had me all over the place. The dance floor slightly dented, we decided to stay and watch The Vagaband – a grimy ragtime outfit playing a haunting Wild-West pastiche, mirroring perfectly the rain soaked ruckus unfolding below them. They blew the roof of the sodden tent. We were now suitably dry, warm, happy, £80 short from a bum-bag malfunction and ready for bed.
Saturday morning and sore heads were quelled by the sight of a blue sky on the horizon. A celebratory morning streak was performed by a Pro-Festy (who later went on to win the mud-wrestle), indicating it was time to prepare for the revelry. This year’s fancy dress theme was ‘Childish Things’: cue loose associations in the form of Pom-Poms, Power Rangers and Fairies, lashings of cross-dressing and a bollock load of glitter. My party invoked all of the latter and, flanked with a group of gender-bending Loiners, I was on my way.
We began by soaking up the lukewarm sun on the hay bales of the Dance-Off and the Collisillyeum. I had forfeited the guidebook, so decided in a cider-fulled haze to go freestyle with the rest of the group – facing my fear of electronic music head on. We followed a swarm of paisley and glitter into the sloping hills of The Drop, where we saw the ear-bursting sounds of Crazy P, Acid Mondays and Dungeon Meat.
Swept up in the undulating throng of Unicorns and Spidermen, the top soil now a thick and sticky tar and the damp air heavy with dope, I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going. After a misguided duck into the Little Horrors tent (far too ‘ketty’), we joined the swarm to get a good position by the lake for the fireworks. As I trod a precarious rope-fenced path next to a stream, gripping tightly onto everything around me as I foresaw an image of the lads having to pull me from a bed of reefs, I felt there was a distinct lack of marshalling. The whole place had descended into a neon-lit rumour mill regarding access to the Pagoda tent.
I saw the fireworks wedged somewhere between a tree and a shrubbery, cheered and promptly made my way to a bar to wash away the irritant of the last hour with Jaegerbombs. From the peripheries of Where the Wild Things Are, I caught a suitably loud and trippy set from Crazy P again. I was tired, confused, and could no longer see my legs below the knees – time to leave the raving to the ravers.
Sunday morning. Fizz and I regained consciousness wrapped around each other in a singular sleeping bag wearing all our clothes (yet only one sock), resembling a Studio 54 homage to Scott of the Antarctic. Rain had battered our essentially collapsed tarpaulin mansion, now partially submerged at the entrance. The Pro-Festies skipped away promptly into the enclosure for the paint fight…
The ground beneath us was now a khaki slush, the only way of moving through it being to adopt the stance of speed skater. Many lost souls wandered around us, belongings held high in the direction of home. We aimed for the higher ground of the press tent; a dry, sofa-laden Bedouin, stocked up with pizza and tea. We warmly received a stunning set from The Correspondents – a London-based, genre-bending collective. A sun-drenched crowd would have gone crazy and, unfazed, they brought a splash of warmth to the Arctic valley of the Main Stage.
We left the comfort of the Bedouin to join our group in the open ground to see UK Hip Hop legends, Roots Manuva. Stage lights created patterns through the bullet-sized raindrops beating down on an entranced audience, busy winding to ‘Witness The Fitness’ and other sweet beats.
After a pit-stop into the Dance Off where wonderful Pro-Festy Emma was competing in the final, we journeyed to the Disco Picnic. SGP had adopted the atmosphere of a muddy ghost town; handfuls of people scurried by helplessly aiming for sheltered fun and more glitter. The Disco Picnic tent was perfect for this: DJs of the Kaluki Musik Takeover saturated the space with decadent and dirty beats, providing an unrelenting, soul stirring soundtrack for the feet, marred only by the intermittent cracking of balloon canisters. For the next few hours we revelled inside the wicker disco ball, their aural voodoo having taken hold of us, fascinated by the glittery beards surrounding us.
The rain finally relented and the sun began to fade. We found burritos, ditched all our belongings and made the final scramble to the car park, satisfied with our festival jollification and more than ready for a hot shower.
Kate Tittley
@LeTitts
Kate Tittley
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