Glade 2006

United Kingdom | by Tom Fair | 16 July 2006

Late Sunday afternoon, my stomach hurts from laughing too much, and I feel like I my cheeks are about to split from the idiot’s grin that’s been plastered across my face for most of the day. The sun is leisurely beginning its journey to the antipodes, casting a golden glow over the site. As nature plays its beautiful game I find myself in the Rabbit Hole, a stage devoted to anyone who wants to come and have a jam. Right now the guitarist from the Gaudi Dub Laboratory is alternately playing a trumpet and keyboard, while Ned and Maff Scott, from The Egg, bang away on a dilapidated piano and drums respectively. Joining them are various other characters, saxophones, harmonicas, Jewish harps, all combining to create the most outrageously divine feel good funk. It’s so good I almost feel like crying with joy. There aren’t many here to witness this moment of spontaneous wizardry, but I don’t care. If any one performance captures the essence of the third Glade festival this is surely it, pure spur-of-the-moment distilled magic.

Discovering the Rabbit Hole had been a happy accident, much as it was in 'Alice in Wonderland'; I was actually on my way to church to book a slot for my lady and myself to join hands in holy matrimony. In an inflatable church. With a PA system banging out some heady cocktail of 50s rock’n’roll and disco music. Fortunately I was distracted, its not that I don’t want to get married, its just that I don’t want to get… married. Yet. But it is easy to get taken by the moment at this party, like the chap who decided to go to sleep naked on the dance floor in the Pussy Parlure while it was in full swing. Before this sudden and impulsive urge to get married I had been embroiled in a very deep conversation in an incredible self-inverting yurt belonging to another friend of mine. No metaphysics, divine moments of truth, or quests for enlightenment were discussed here; instead the debate focused on the merits of daytime TV, Trisha, Doctors and the ilk, the general consensus being: you know you’re at a good festival when such conversation can be both so riveting, baffling, utterly hilarious and terrifying at the same time.

The Glade festival, mmm. Where to begin indeed. In keeping with the spirit of this Bacchanalian debacle I shall make no attempt at chronological order, there was no logic so why bother? It was certainly fun, wild, depraved even, as I can barely remember it, so I will only attempt to disclose certain pivotal moments that may shed some light on what the hell actually happened.

Well, firstly, or lastly (it’s Sunday evening now), I seem to be sporting a pair of tweed plus fours and a bright yellow smock adorned with musical motifs. It is the sort of garish combination that would induce psychosis on those of a more delicate disposition; a sort of clown-meets-country-gent nuclear mutation. If my dear parents could see me now. I look to my friend Fred who is wearing a floor length blue kilt. Neither of us arrived with these peculiar items, but at some point something compelled us both, independently of one another, to abandon our tried and tested wardrobes in favour of the more bizarre costumes we have on now. It seems we’ve been Oxfamed. This is on Sunday evening, and all the sound sytems have been shut down, although this hasn’t deterred various punters from having a good time and a boogy as various groups pop up like stray fungi, having it to their ghetto blasters. Nobody is going to stop their party, even if you can hear a mouse fart over their stereos. One particular faction seems to be winding its way through the site like some multi-limbed communal Pied Piper rat race, picking up stragglers as they go along, bopping their way merrily to some undisclosed destination.

Sunday morning now; I am standing in my recently acquired and supremely itchy tweed plus fours in the main marquee. Sweating like a whore in a church. On stage a funny little Italian man is playing havoc with his theremin while the rest of the band dish out the finest dub known to mankind. This then is the Gaudi Dub Laboratory and the crowd are loving it, the groove is infectious, the only problem being: why are they not playing outside? This is sunshine music if ever there was. This also applies to The Egg who played on Saturday at the same stage; they played a wonderful set as well but if only they had been put on outside. They did however play a secret gig the night before, again highlighting the “no rules” ethos attached to this happening. These are minor complaints really; at least we are protected from the sun, which in the mid afternoon is merciless. Even if you were to make it the whole way through the Glade teetotal, very unlikely, the weather would surely have bought on some altered state of consciousness. Sunstroke for all? Well, if you insist.