the secret garden festival
Regular readers will be only too familiar with my shortening patience for the rash of poorly organised, brand rich, experience short festivals, so after the Lovebox / Latitude weekend I went through last weekend, I was somewhat nervy about hitting the secret garden festival in cambridge this weekend. I had actually attended before, and was astonished by just how mashed everyone was. Watching a stage crew member trying to load a bass drum into the wheel of a ford fiesta has been my ‘most mashed roadie ever’ story for a few years now, and one I hoped to top. Within 10 minutes of arriving on site, I had!
The guest list co ordinator ( I say this in the loosest possible sense of the word) had the shakes worse than Amy Winehouse after a meth binge, which we (most of the press corps attending) all guessed was the reason he couldn’t find any of us on the palm pilot he was juddering in his clammy paw. No matter, one of the upsides of this being such a charmingly scruffy festival was that the wrong pass rarely meant you couldn’t get to where you wanted to go. And go we did, in search of tents, stalls, welly chucking, cream teas, theatre, science camp, comedy, morris dancing (google it americans), sock wrestling, mud slinging, tractor tyre rolling and a few bands chucked in for good measure.
Suffice to say Grace Jones was the highlight of the weekend for many, although her smacky hi fashcamp persona and music isn’t really for me, I was certainly in the minority. It quickly became clear that this was not a festival for major labels to foist their bands upon, yet there were still some highlights. The wonderful Micachu gave, for my money, the set of the weekend which will be going in to the next show. We also grabbed some time with the up and coming Man Like Me ahead of his set promoting his spanking new single Carny before heading up to the Silent Disco (yes, it’s silent. You hear the music through headphones you are issued, and my top tip for fun is – grab some headphones then dance to a different beat to everyone else. They get very, very confused…) and finally turning in to our beach hut to sleep, which at the time seemed like a great idea, but come 7am with 27 degreee heat mercilessly beating down, seemed less so…
All in all though, an excellent alternative festival wit a high mashed up randomness rate and low score for current bands. But we soon came to realise, most of the kids had come for the giant pirate ship and cider stalls, not the breakout set from the Shortwave Set. We live and learn to fight another day.
