All My Warriors

The Prodigy closed Glastonbury Festival by calling the crowd ‘warriors’.  Even though it was my 6th visit to Glastonbury you still have to bloody well train, gather the troops and survuve like a warrior.  It really is hard work enjoying yourself!

I was half thinking about not writing anything about Glastonbury, I can not do it justice at all.  There’s large chunks of time that are just great and provide you with moments, just because you are there with mates and enjoying the freedom of the place.  I lost count the number of times I turned around, looked at everyone and felt my eyes filling up.  If that makes me a big gay homo then so be it!

Needless to say Glastonbury just gets better every year I go.  Overall I didn’t watch as many bands as I have in previous years.  There wasn’t too much that took my fancy during the day – not enough to pull me out of my oven tent and trek down to the stages early doors anyway.

The main lot I seen: Altern-8, Mr Hudson, The Whip, N.E.R.D (amazing but got kicked off stage because they ran over time), Fleet Foxes, Lily Allen, The Specials, Doves, Hockey, Gaslight Anthem, Passion Pit, Kasabian, Springsteen, Tom Jones, Madness, Bon Iver,  Glasvegas and Prodigy.  Then loads of smaller bands on other stages – god knows who they all were.

Gaslight Anthem were very good – I think they are over there in my sidebar somewhere as a newbie band I started listening to about a month ago. 5pm Saturday afternoon in a small tent and Bruce Springsteen came on to do one song with them – which made the tent suddenly fill up beyond belief.

Prodigy stands out though, that performance was just amazing on Sunday night and we managed to get quite close to the front (as close as I’ve ever been to the stage at Glastonbury about 10-20 people back).  They had the bass so loud it was rumbling through the field and up into your body – I hadn’t heard music that loud since the last time I’d seen Prodigy in December!

This year the highlight for me was the Trash City and Shangri-la areas of the site.  These are both located in the far east corner – which can be a good 15-30 minute walk from the main stages (depending on how many people also have the same idea).  Trash City is basically just that…a field made of trash.  An old RAF helicopter lived here and bits of aeroplane were strewn about the place.  I didn’t manage to get into the bars here as it was always too busy.  Shangra-la however was a different matter – this is where the weird and wonderful was.  They had some kind of weird Thailand-esque subway alleyways in the field.  Can’t remember the amount of times I lost my bearings walking through that. But once you walked through there was all kinds of bars, small venues (holding about 10 people) with dancers, bands, singers and ‘clubs’ around every corner and in every doorway.  That then led up to a massive domed tent with a few hundred people raving away in front of a DJ and transvestite acrobats.

Next door to this little city was a massive flame thrower thing, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Mad Max.  This thing had a DJ located high up in the centre with the balls of fire and smoke coming out from lampposts located around this thing and above it – which had us all bopping away until the sun came up.  Still not ready for bed?  Then we moved onto the Silent Disco – if you’ve never been to one, then basically you can’t hear a thing outside the tent or even inside the tent without a pair of headphones – which you’re given as you go in…you can then continue moving about, like an awkward uncle at a wedding, without disturbing the neighbours.

You only see a snip of the festival on the telly.  If you’ve never been and even have an inch of thought about going – forget what every other festival is like – Glastonbury IS different.  You will not regret it.

The guy out of the Prodigy summed it up all the way through their show shouting:

“All my warriors, right here….If you aren’t here, you aren’t any-fucking-where!”.

How true he was.