Conversations from beyond the tent started seeping into my sleep. Unfamiliar voices from neighbouring camps talking about the day ahead, the orchestra of the festival warming up. I tried feeling out if sleep would welcome me back, but the sun was already up on the roof of the tent. Sweat beaded at its wicking point on my neck, and my bladder groaned as a thunderous kick-drum started its soundcheck on a stage a few hundred metres away. I grabbed my sleeping bag and flopped out onto the half-open porch next to my partner, finding relief in the cool grass and a rivulet of a breeze running closely along the ground.
After summoning the energy to head to the long-drop toilets at the edge of the campsite, weaving through day-old footpaths trodden in the grass between tents, I returned with sharper senses, assembled my camping chair, and joined my circle of friends swapping stories from the night before. Once caught up, I stood to get my bearings on the day. A three-metre boundary fence patrolled by swallows lined the edge of our campsite, running down into the tangle of stages and installations at the centre of the festival. A succession of tent-filled campsites rose behind us to a hill scattered with people taking in the view by the Glastonbury sign. High above the patchwork of tents and flags, clouds blossomed at the top of thermals, breaking into colder air above. A gang of gulls glided over. “Do you think they remember when the festival’s on each year?” someone asked. They’d not have far from the coast, following the scent of a few hundred thousand people down the low-lying valley of the Somerset Levels.
With the sun at its peak and the first act starting up on the nearby stage, people started making moves to depart for the day. After waking my partner, Steph, from a nap in the dwindling shade of a neighbouring tent, I dived back into the sweatbox of our tent and gathered what I’d need before returning later for layers on my camping mat: water flask, nuts, dried apricots, keys, earplugs, toilet roll, waterproof, hand fan.
We’d arrived the evening before and unpacked as the sun descended, casting orange-gold glimmers through the trees by the fence. A microclimate hung on to some of the warmth within the campsite, protected from the prevailing southwesterly breeze, with the tents trapping heat being released from the earth. We left camp that evening, feeling the temperature drop more keenly by comparison with the heat of the day, and joined the hive of people assembling and dispersing along the track heading down to the South East Corner. The canopy of underlit trees along the track gathered the air close with anticipation, channelling a static charge flowing into every corner of the festival.
We wandered around the South East Corner getting our bearings in the darkening terrain of fairgrounds, temples, nightclubs, stages, and art installations, cultivating anti-establishment provocation and queer liberation. We settled at an outdoor stage where a dystopian tower block rose five floors behind the DJ booth. Cold gripped the air beyond the dancefloor, but the crowd’s dancing regenerated warmth, trapping heat like human-sized hairs.
It took me a moment to relax into the festival. Those parts of myself anchored to my everyday routines and obligations hadn’t just dissolved on passing the threshold with the ID check, security search and wristband exchange. As I danced in front of that tower block in a field in the middle of Somerset, I felt those bits of me attached to home shedding, surrendering to the festival like I would being picked up off the seabed by a wave.
I started drawing a connection with what felt a truer version of myself invited out by the festival with what I’d read in Octavio Paz’s descriptions of Mexicans breaking free of class and convention through fiesta in the Labyrinth of Solitude. He’d written that during the days before and after a fiesta, “time comes to a full stop and, instead of pushing us towards a deceptive tomorrow that is always beyond our reach, offers us a complete and perfect today of dancing and revelry, of communion with the most ancient and secret Mexico… Everything is united: good and evil, day and night, the sacred and the profane. Everything merges, loses shape and individuality, and returns to the primordial mass. The fiesta is a cosmic experiment, an experiment in disorder, reuniting contradictory elements and principles in order to bring out a renascence of life.”
I can’t say it much better. Coming together in music and dancing at a festival, especially one as consuming and otherworldly as Glastonbury, is a way of reconnecting with our tribal, animal past, stripping back the veil of everyday life and finding a harmony more attuned to our basic needs and each other, coming closer to rituals we once fixed to the movements of the sun and the stars.
I left the South East Corner with some friends around midnight. We wandered through fields decorated with fairy-lit jellyfish, through woods under giant red mushrooms hung from trees, resting briefly in an undersea oasis within a maze of wooden stakes. We had a loose bearing on a field of tented and open-air stages next to our campsite dedicated to electronic music called Silver Hayes. A group called Decius who I’d heard a few good things about were playing at a new indoor venue, and I encouraged a few friends to come with me.
On entering, a nightclub within the festival revealed itself. The atmosphere was immediate, taut and electric. Red-lit through a fog of smoke, railed platforms lined the walls around a dancefloor full of silhouetted bodies in flow with the music. A complex, splintered diadem rigged low over the dancefloor was decorated from above with twisting, coloured curtains of light and intricate lasered projections. In the air, humid and vibrating, music held thick and sharp, pulsing and pounding.
I’ve no memory of being made to dance in the ways I did that night. Decius blended elements from across electronic music; grooved and psychedelic, soaked in weirdness, with Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi weaving sinister, caressing vocals through crisp electro and acid. A real and raw expression from musicians with a grasp on pulling threads out of the void. I gave up trying to make sense of it and let my body be moved how it wanted to. I looked over at Steph with her arms lifted and eyes closed, dancing in a trance.
The club closed after Decius finished and we lay on the cold grass outside, bathed in blue spotlights and charged with electricity. “I don’t need to see anything else all weekend”, said Steph, grinning and relaxed. I agreed.
It was hard drifting off to sleep that night. My heart raced as my mind tended to unravel the events of a long day, which had started at home. I lay in the tent with dawn building around the t-shirt I’d laid over my face, drifting in and out of sleep as piece by piece the festival and its orchestra fell quiet.
On Friday afternoon, after Steph roused from her nap, clouds briefly covered the sky with a calmness. The two of us drifted around some of the main stages, saving energy for later in the day. Returning to camp for layers at dusk, we tracked a path around the edge of the campsite, following the swallows diving down between the fence and tents, hunting bugs holding out in the remnants of warmth.
I met up with a friend I worked with that evening to watch Fontaines DC headline the Park Stage. A band from Dublin asserting poetry and charm into swaggering verse and guitars. Pain built in my stomach through their set, resembling tensions of anxiety, so instead of rejoining my friends for the night, I headed back to my tent for a breather as a haze settled in across the site with the darkness.
Cold gripped me tightly, tucked up in my sleeping bag, the camping mat barely insulating against the chill seeping up from the ground. The battery-powered lightbulb I’d hung from the inside of the tent cast magnified shadows of insects on the red polyester canvas. Every exhale transformed into vapours above my head, dancing briefly on delicate currents before disappearing.
While successive waves of soundclash crashed into the tent from the surrounding stages, in my mind, I went over the physical landscapes around the festival I’d mapped before leaving, with half an idea to try and write something about the interplay of terrain and atmosphere changing between day and night. A picture of the climate over the festival began to crystallise. The cold, my visible breath and the misty haze across the site were connected with air flowing down into the Somerset Levels from the coast. I imagined moisture-rich air drifting up off the sea and down into the valley over the cooling land, coalescing as droplets on a city’s worth of dust and smoke from the festival, bringing the mist and my breath into sight.
Having accepted that only sleep might bring relief, I was buoyed when the tension in my body started melting. I turned off the light and departed back into the night.
After the music finished later that morning, I walked back to camp down the track with Steph and a handful of our friends, glowing from another whirl in the maelstrom of the South East Corner. The sky, crystal blue and expansive, held cold air sunk at the bottom of the atmosphere, crisp from a stint in the shadow of the planet. The sun worked its early-morning beams through the canopy and started dismantling the nocturnal atmosphere. “I’m glad we danced through the cold”, said Steph cheerily. “It would have been awful trying to sleep through that.”
After a couple of sleeps, waking up in the greenhouse of a tent surrounded by a field of conversations feels familiar. I rolled out onto the grass Saturday morning with heat settling sensitively on my lightly fraying nerves. A massive dome of high-pressure air stretching across from the mid-Atlantic to the Baltics had settled over the British and Irish Isles. The jet stream had buckled through the night, inviting heat to bloom up from the continent. Cirrus clouds were vaulted high like stretched pieces of dough, and the ground was baked dry, cracked underneath the long dairy grass, with no coolness or breeze to be found.
After an interlude dancing at Silver Hayes that afternoon with Steph, we rested, ate, and met up with some friends early evening to watch The Streets on the Other Stage. Halfway through their set, Steph called me over and shouted through a cupped hand close to my ear: “If anyone who didn’t know British culture is here right now, they must be like, ‘what the fuck!?’”. She summed it up pretty well. Almost as well as the kid on his dad’s shoulders that the TV cameras kept panning to with ‘Who’s got the bag?’ printed on his t-shirt. The Street’s frontman, Mike Skinner, beckoned through the last few tracks in a hackneyed, pub-worn twang: “I’ll see you later down in Shangri La… I’ll see you in the Temple at four… I’ll be there. And if you see me, say hello!”. The whole field bounced, flags waving, lapping it up.
Buzzed from the antics, it was decision time on the evening. Coldplay aren’t my usual cup of tea, but I can see the appeal. I wasn’t planning on seeing a headliner on the Pyramid Stage otherwise, so I made the pilgrimage with Steph and a couple of our friends. The sun set gorgeously as we joined the swell of people heading across the site, splintering orange through the boulevard of metallic-coloured flags. We took the long route round to the Pyramid Stage, trudging up the hill on weary legs, dropping in from the back of the field, four or five hundred metres between us and the stage down in the bottom of a natural bowl.
It is truly a sight, enough people to populate a city filling a field at sundown. A generally white and middle-class city, at that. Like an army at attention, illuminated and shadowed underneath huge speaker stacks lofted in sequence from the front to the back of the field. A thousand flags fluttering at full mast. Distance blurring individuals into a pixelated pool of humans by the entrance to the open-faced pyramid.
There was enough space for our apologies to be heard in advance as we edged in through the crowd closer to the stage. We settled for a spot in front of an electricity pylon with a decent view down into the bowl and beyond out into the valley of the Somerset Levels. A yellow-purple glow lingered on the horizon behind the stage, grading up into darkening blue overhead. Thin, mid-height clouds hung out west, silvered and silhouetted out towards Devon. The festival twinkled in the valley with the night wrapping its arms around us from behind.
Without any input from the sun, the warmth that the earth had absorbed through the day was released, returning energy to the stars without a blanket of clouds holding it in. I squatted down to get a drink from my bag and felt condensation dewing the grass. As Coldplay lit up the crowd, the final crow-blue glow from the day fizzled out, the sun dragging with it a tsunami of cold air from the shadow of the planet. We departed as the headline set closed to fireworks, the remainders of the warmer daytime air lofted up above the rising cold, trapping in the smoke.
Opening the tent on the final morning of the festival, I felt relieved by the overcast sky. Flags fluttered silently over the campsite. Gulls circled overhead. Few conversations were carried on the breeze. While festivals create the possibility of returning to a liberated version of ourselves – a temporary culture prioritising art, expression, and transcendence in a space beyond the confines of everyday life – they also can’t go on forever.
In the Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz wrote that ‘by means of the fiesta, society frees itself from the norms it has established… The group emerges purified and strengthened from this plunge into chaos’. I carried this with me as I wandered around the festival Sunday afternoon, part of a community celebrating life with a renewed sense of purpose. I was at home, lying in fields with friends listening to music performed live, balancing a paper cup of cider on the grass, and grabbing glances at the sun shadowed through the clouds.
Darkness came with nightfall, and the tide of cold air followed the sun. I drifted into the music and beyond it, feeling the versions of myself within and outside the festival merging. Into the night again, through dancefloors and fairgrounds, diners and discos, woodland and fields, departing and regrouping with friends. With stiff backs, sun-kissed skin, and electricity coursing through our bodies, we started settling down towards dawn. Cross-legged and bundled into a pocket of heat on the ground, friendly chaos swirling all around us, we told stories, laughing to the sky.
We took the longer route on our last walk home past the stone circle. People were scattered in groups on the ground, spilling out from the centre of the megalith, chatting, attentive, and blissful. Smoke rose thinly from fires into a mist hovering over the field. Percussions from a couple of portable speakers underlaying the closing scene of the festival.
Above, the clouds had parted through the night to reveal a vast cathedral of a sky, bright blue against the glistening morning grass. A grand sweep of crystallised ice arced from horizon to horizon. Sunbeams tickled atoms from the top of the atmosphere down, turning the highest clouds magenta-pink and an aeroplane into a streaking comet. Breaking the horizon, gold-silver light slipped instantly down the hillside and into our eyes.
Swallows performed their acrobatics over the tent-tops as we approached camp for the final time. The earth absorbed energy from the first touch of light onwards, returning warmth to the air. Convective swirls of heat rose and strengthened, building height and breaking through into the residual layer of daytime air lofted up by the cold, disposing of a dirty breath of air from the night.
We woke Monday morning to the patter of rain on canvas. Squares of ghostly-yellow grass filled the field between the scattering of tents remaining. The gulls were descending, squabbling over piles of rubbish.