Some notes about the music, I suppose.
Guy Garvey is a class act, and one of the best frontmen going, but he’s a hard man to track down. Security tend not to accept a 6-pint jug of cider as valid identification. Should have gone with the pints, obviously, or pulled some Manchester variant of the potato man routine… the plotting continues.
Going into this thing I had resigned myself to missing out on my usual Sunday evening fix of balding middle-aged men with mullets and walrus moustaches wearing suits and doing karate kicks, so imagine my delight when Grinderman turned up. As a bonus, there was a sentient beard flinging percussion instruments around the place and playing a tiny, tiny guitar. Mortal men would have just looked silly.
Much as The Sex Pistols did… either they’re hell-bent on becoming the most nonsense thing in human history or they’re just acting out Primary School: The Musical. In whatever case, when you come in from a day spent with Henry Rollins and Nick Cave – men with actual testicles – John Lydon gets pretty old pretty quick.
You know you’re there when you pass by a stall selling kangaroo burgers and into a gauntlet of strange men peddling novel ways to urinate. It’s a boom market, because no one seems in any hurry to make festival bathrooms any more pleasant.
This year they’ve graduated into the realms of cruel social experiment. Portaloos have a bad reputation but at least they leave you to your own misery… as opposed to this metal-shack-over-festering-pit configuration they’ve plumped for in our campsite. It’s like looking into the mouth of hell. You expect to see faces forming in it. It’s hard to look away.
Someone must be paying attention, because some proper jacks sprout up during the night. Not that this stops us just using the wall, which is right there and frankly asking for it… but the gesture is appreciated.
I have had an idea. It’s a dangerous one but what the fuck. See, I have two 750ml bottles emptied out and ready to go for transporting booze to Electric Picnic. My original idea was to fill them with sweet dependable Buckfast… but here we go: what if I loaded one with Jaegermeister and the other with Red Bull, stuck some duct tape around them and lashed in two straws? What we have there is an improvised explosive, a jaegerpipebomb…
The consequences, of course, would be bleak and horrible and I would never forgive myself, but the fact is I’ve had the idea now, it’s out in the open. The choice is no longer mine. There’s a historical imperative in play… simply put, now that this has been posited, someone at some point in human history has to do or have done it. I am merely an agent of destiny.
Who’s going? We are, and we’re towing the monstrosity that is Wayne Manor.
You wouldn’t know it from the camera trickery in his films, but Christian Bale is actually 70 feet tall. Also, there’s an entire wing of the tent cut out of the picture. It’s seriously massive. We reckon it’ll hold in the region of 500 people but obviously we’ll need to run stress tests, so feel free to shanghai some friends and head along of an evening. (If you’re on Facebook, you can even make it official.)
There will be signposts.
Other late-night entertainment includes Antics in the Fosset’s Circus tent, which will be a good old dose of sweaty indie choonage guaranteed to get your gizzards in a right dancy funk. The silent disco is always a laff riot too, if for no other reason than it’s great fun trying to figure out what channel everyone’s on. What else? Oh I don’t know, but one thing about EP is that you’re never more than five feet away from an intriguing mash-up of fire, juggling, jazz, citrus fruits, unitards, flare guns, sparklers, swizzle sticks and drug-crazed Hungarians. Good times are rolling.
I saw the marvellous and wonderful Elbow in Vicar Street last night. They were marvellous, and wonderful. Guy Garvey is so charismatic that it’s pretty much impossible not to have a good time at one of their shows. Another reason to buy an Electic Picnic ticket, yes?
Strictly speaking no, since I just looked at the lineup and they’re not on it. I’m not sure why I thought they were… but what the hell, Grinderman, a flaming jazz bar* and the best pies in the world will be there, so buy a ticket anyway.
*May be a composite of several blurry memories.
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