Burning Man 2013: The Drowned in Sound review

I've been feeling pretty ready for my big trip to Burning Man. We're driving thorough the Nevada desert (perfect soundtrack discovered: the Chromatics album), and I'm wowing my recently introduced campmates with some piece of Burning Man knowledge I've previously picked up. 'I'll be honest with you guys, I've already been doing a lot of reading up about this music festival', I say, allowing a smug smile to briefly dart across my face.

'Well, don't call it a music festival, for a start', snaps back the reply.

As is often quoted, 'Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind', but allow me to attempt the basics: Burning Man is a truly vast arts and community festival, a seven day experiment in radical self-reliance held on a swelteringly hot ancient lake bed in the Nevada desert.

Burning Man, or 'home', as regulars warmly refer to it, sits far apart from the rest of the US's festival scene, so amongst many attendees there's a reluctance to even call the event a festival. Europeans, however, are much more likely to find familiarity is the diverse range of art, entertainment, talks and quirky side attractions that make up Burning Man, so let's call the event what it is: a festival.

There is much to separate it from its major festival stablemates, however. Firstly, I'm not an attendee at this festival, I'm a participant. Our 13-strong group has put together the theme camp Barechested Baristas, and every afternoon we are barechested - men and women, alas - serving our delicious iced coffees to the Burning Man masses.

Significantly, all this delightful caffeine is offered free of charge. No money is permitted at Burning Man, the festival instead employing what it calls a gifting economy. It takes me a while to not get this confused with an exchange economy. In an exchange economy, I give you a delicious iced coffee (you gain something), but you give me an item or money in exchange (you lose something). It's a win-lose scenario. In a gift economy, I give you iced coffee (you gain something), and I feel a really warm glow in my heart for doing so (I gain something). It's a win-win scenario. Replicating this across seven days, and 70,000 people means you've got an awful lot of winning going on, and across the festival site people tend to exist within a permanent bubble of happiness. Certainly, long time 'Burners' I talk to throughout the week say they started enjoying the festival exponentially more once they became participants. An incomprehensible thing about Burning Man is the people who will spend all year, and significant portions of their income, on, say, the art car they're bringing to Burning Man. Or the people that design and build one of the 250+ officially recognised artworks dotted across the site. Or simply the people that will just drop a shit ton of money on running a free bar all week.

Not that a week in the desert is all love and hugs, mind. Setting up our camp (kitchen, dome lounge, giant shade structure to house all our tents) and ensuring it can withstand the harshest of desert sandstorms takes a full day of hard graft, during which I massively endear myself to my new campmates by crashing out asleep three hours before everything is finished. Throughout the day, the amount of people screaming with excitement because they've spotted friends from previous years is astounding.

The following day, I cycle out (protip: bring a bike. Light it and lock it. Two of our seven bikes get stolen over the course of the week) to the entrance gates for some further participation: I am volunteering for a four hour greeter shift in the midday heat, welcoming everybody 'home', initiating first time attendees in a way that I won't detail here (but suffice to say that we were pleasingly encouraged to make it up as we went along), and generally being the kind of cheerful irritant that would wind people up so much in London.

Ahh yes, that place. We socialise people hard in London. No talking to strangers, looking at people on public transport, being friendly in shops, or acting in any way cheerful or upbeat about the day ahead. Stepping from this into Burning Man's focus on radical inclusion and immediacy, where you welcome all strangers with a hug and your immediate trust, is a jarring gear change, and one that that I do not successfully make in just one day. It's the image people that haven't been to Glastonbury imagine for that event. Out here, it's real.

The bewildering number of side attractions across the site only adds to the overwhelming feel of the event. Amongst all the art installations, theme camps, talks, sound camps, workshops, and various unannounced oddities ('Armpit Smelling Booth', anyone?) waiting to be discovered, there's a lot of spiritual workshops, yoga classes, and quirky installations to choose from. Plenty of sex, too. BDSM in particular seems to be having a popular year, and we are camped next to the 200-person 'Poly Paradise' camp. They run the 'Human Carcass Wash', where you cup your soapy hand, and wash a load of naked bodies, before in turn getting to be the person to have a load of cupped hands wash your naked body.

I presume the 'Skyping With Grandma' event will be just as fun as any of that. Run by a "human powered internet cafe", I get condescending advice, bunion complaints, and technological incompetence from a real life grandma (20-something male in a wig, holding a cardboard cut-out of a screen). The folk running 'Write Your Future Self A Letter', meanwhile, allow you to do just that, and they promise to mail it to you 1, 2, 5 or 10 years later

Always fancying myself as the next Example, I also give Haiku Rap Battles a go. As the only person going to the effort to write down their haikus before taking to the stage, I'm confident the crowd with respond with hearty cheers and lols. What I get instead is silence, with the odd pocket of confused laughter.

All the cycling and finely spread entertainment means you never get the swirling, immovable crowds that your average Glastonbury goer regularly does battle with. It's not the only difference. Glastonbury for a few years now has tried, with little success, to impart a 'Leave No Trace' message. Here, the message gets through, and to a startling extent. Nothing - not so much as a flick of cigarette ash - is dropped on the playa floor.

Music wise, Burning Man shows signs of beginning an upward trajectory, and things have apparently improved after a couple of years of what is described to me as 'Skrillex every five minutes'. The overwhelming music trend seems to be bass music, mind, and it occasionally takes a fair effort to find a music camp that deviates from this norm.

Over the course of the week, the one DJ I make an effort to find out the name of is Stylust Beats, who plays Camp Question Mark on Friday night. Rather than a teeth grinding 60 minute set of pure trap music on offer across so much of Black Rock City, he successfully weaves the more inventive material the genre has to offer around the kind of party playlist that would set any clubnight alight. It's one of the best atmospheres all week.

I spy an afternoon talk called 'Sex, Drugs and Electronic Music', which sounds like a combination that could catch on doesn't it. Arriving late, the speaker is asking the audience 'How many people here believe we are birthing a new world?' Oh. Okay. Half the audience raise their hands. Right. Faintly hope I'm at the wrong talk? There's plenty of discussion about consent (which I am all for, incidentally. Just putting that out there), a little about sensible use of drugs, and nothing whatsoever about electronic music.

The speaker begins an exercise: we are to stand, wander around, and when she says stop, we are to immediately connect with the person nearest us. I 'connect' with another man, also as it happens, visiting from South London. We are instructed to share with each other our hope for the world. 'Creativity' he enthusiatically offers up. 'The basic goodness of the human heart', I manage to come up with, whilst successfully keeping a straight face. He seems satisfied and engaged by this answer. We are then told to share our medicine for the world with each other. 'Kindness' he quite reasonably suggests. 'Errr, the basic goodness of the human heart...?' I return with. This is deemed a satisfactory answer, although there's some acknowledgement that we're both essentially saying the same thing. He hugs me, and we're allowed to return to our places. There's some further talk about how 'we need to reclaim the solidarity of our connections', and 'let our emotions flow freely down through our bodies and into the earth', before we are finally free to go.


Not that it's all hippies at Burning Man. There's ravers, California's high fashion set, your nerdy music fan, a few jock types, loads of over 40s, and many of the greats of Silicon Valley are in attendance. You still occasionally come across the type of person you'd never want at a festival though. One member of our camp, Jessy, is walking her bike along the road one afternoon when a guy cycles past her and, with a confidence in his own hilarity sadly not matched by his material, shouts at her 'you're supposed to ride it'. Jessy somewhat understandably dislikes this. He cycles on in front of her, before suddenly losing his balance, falling off his bike, and collapsing in a heap. Jessy calmly walks her bike past him, turns around, and calls back 'you're supposed to ride it'.

Also not fitting the Burning Man stereotype are the brilliant, vicious rockers that put on the Mad Max inspired Thunderdome. Inside, they suspend two contestants in harnesses, pull them back, then fire them at each other armed with pugil sticks, whilst the baying crowd erupts. The weaponry is virtually inconsequential - the rules seem to be anything goes. On one occasion two young female festival-goers are fighting and the bout ends with one manically rallying the crowd whilst treating her opponent as a human surfboard. On several occasions battles end with blood splatted on the sand below. Throughout, the audience watch not just around the Thunderdome, but climb up the structure from all sides, in order to gain the chance of seeing each battle commence.

It's one of the things that is most remarkable about Burning Man: a pleasing disregard for health and safety legislation. Several times throughout the week you may find your group dancing late at night atop some shimmering art work, and you will think 'one wrong move here, and I am a seriously injured festival-goer'. Your safety is your own responsibility, a point somewhat hammered home by the fact that the back of your festival ticket states that ticket holders voluntarily assume all liability in the case of their own death whilst at the event.

Which, in such a harsh environment, means that every attendee must practice what the festival calls radical self-reliance. You take entire responsibility for your own well being. Everybody is more than welcome to climb that 30 foot ladder, then carefully climb up on top of the roof to be able to lie back and stare over Black Rock City, but if you put a foot wrong and fall to the ground, you've only got yourself to blame. Radical self-reliance also means that everybody must bring every single thing they may need to survive for a week in the desert environment along to the festival with them, including for example, 1.5 gallons of water per person, per day.

Feeling all too settled by midweek, I drink far too much on Wednesday night, and fail to take responsibility for my own safety. Whilst at a nearby camp to our own, I am unable to work out where I am, unable to make it home, and oddly unwilling to seek help for the matter. I wake up hours later in a separate camp, without memory of how I got there, or my bag. I have failed to practice radical self-reliance. The bag's contents include my UK passport, and five days of notes for this article. I spend 90 minutes searching nearby camps without luck. Each day I queue at Lost & Found to ask if it's been handed in. It never is.

I consider myself to be reasonably knowledgeable about dance music, but scanning the lineup before the festival, there appears to be just three DJs I have heard of: Paul Oakenfold, Seth Troxler, and Elite Force, and I'm not really sure how I've heard of Elite Force. This is perhaps unsurprising - it's down to the non-profit sound camps to try and book big names, and a couple of the major camps don't show up this year. Any veteran will tell you this is not the point of Burning Man, however. And for the kind of music fan that usually spends the whole of, say, Glastonbury darting all over the site like a headless chicken, the opportunity to spend an aimless week in the desert is an appreciated one.

There are unannounced sets, mind, and Diplo shows up as both a solo DJ ('superb', reportedly) and in his Major Lazer guise ('awful', reportedly). Paul Oakenfold is the only appointment we keep all week, though. 45 minutes into the set however, and it's all seeming a little pedestrian. It's at this point that a rumour spreads around our group that he cancelled at the last minute. We have no idea if we're dancing to a perfectly serviceable unknown trance DJ, or a somewhat unimaginative Oakenfold set. Either way, we leave. In the early hours of the morning, friends who stayed announce Oakenfold later showed up, and played a blinding set. I'm fairly gutted. They are in a jubilant mood. Later on that afternoon, I'm told that no, Oakenfold never did show up. Then I'm just confused. I still have no idea what happened.

'The only thing worse than attending a Doctor Who party at Burning Man, is publicly admitting it', a friend tells me. So I opt to only go for an hour. The tasty, strong sonic screwdriver cocktails are freeflowing. Three girls come dressed as sexy TARDISes. A guy asks one 'are you bigger on the inside?' 'Yes, and available for public use!', she cheerfully retorts. We also grab a drink at the Dead Celebrity's Champagne Disco, where you are encouraged to dress as your favourite dead celebrity, and enjoy all the drinks they can't any more. The 'Critical Tits' bikeride, meanwhile, sees a couple of thousand women take a topless cycle on mass around the playa. I think I can say with confidence that it's the most amount of topless women I've ever seen within a five minute period.

I spot a session called 'Speed Counselling', which sounds like good fun. In a speed dating format, you'll have five minutes to co-council with someone before DING!, the bell rings and you're on to the next person. What a nice afternoon activity that will be! What a fun format! I arrive, and settle in. The event is certainly busy. We are encouraged to really go for it and make the most of the opportunity, and to seek a moment of immediate resolution. I council five people, and then are counselled by five. And obviously, it is the exact fucking opposite of fun. I have to talk about emotions! For a full 25 minutes! I'm male and live in England, the most I've ever spoken about emotions is for three seconds in hospital in 2006 when a doctor asked me if my arm was still hurting. Even then three seconds seemed a little indulgent. Here though, everybody is sharing very deeply felt problems and emotions. There's one hell of a lot of people in tears (all except one guy, who spends his five minutes telling me about the psychology book he's about to have published, and is agonising over whether to put a photo of himself on the front cover or not). It's traumatic, but it's also a brilliant hour. I leave a nervous wreck.

All through the week there's a sense of escalation. The festival always feels like it's building to a climax. On Tuesday, paragliders can be seen descending on the festival, before landing amongst passers by on the wide open playa. I witness one land, and the nearest person to him immediately runs up, puts a beer in his hand, and promptly walks off again. On Wednesday and Thursday the same paragliders have grown long colourful ribbon tails as they cascade down from the sky. By Friday night their tails have become fireworks leaving a trail behind in the sky.

All this escalation is building to one thing. With no main stage to speak of, Burning Man feels like it doesn't have a focal point to concentrate your mind - or media attention - on. Instead, the festival offers a thousand different stories happening simultaneously across the site. A thousand moments of awe, pain, laughs being shared, or perhaps lives being changed. The exception to this rule is the final night. The whole festival gathers around the iconic Man that sits at the centre of the site, to watch as he is finally, spectacularly burnt. Much of what overwhelms about this experience is perhaps because, after everybody here has had such an intense, yet disparate week from each other, the whole festival is finally together as one. It certainly provides a more exciting climax to a festival then, say, Mumford & Sons headlining your final night.

Burning Man is one hell of an ordeal. There were certainly lows, but there was also countless highs. Its beauty, its weirdness, its vibrancy, and its constant, unfaltering welcome. It's truly a unique way to spend a week. Name me a better festival.

This article originally appeared on drownedinsound.com here.

India goes indie at the NH7 Weekender - Guardian article

This article was originally published on guardian.co.uk here.


  

The big Weekender … The Raghu Dixit Project perform onstage at NH7 in India. Photograph: Stephen Budd

It can be difficult when travelling by train in India to ensure you disembark at the correct city. Especially when it's 5am, and everybody around you is busy giggling at your pronunciation. We're in Pune (pronounced Poo-nay, apparently) for the second year of the NH7 Weekender. India has a smattering of music festivals, but these are mostly traditional events or trance affairs aimed at tourists unable to wait for their Ibiza kicks. NH7 is an attempt to create a Glastonbury, or perhaps more precisely, Lovebox-style event in India.

India's middle class is now estimated at more than 300 million people – that's a lot of folk with disposable income, internet access, and perhaps an interest in exploring non-traditional culture.

"There aren't any Indian festivals that concentrate on non-Bollywood music," NH7 co-organiser Stephen Budd explains. "The view was Indian audiences would never want to go." A few years ago Budd's business partner, Vijay Nair, was struggling to fill a five-band bill in Mumbai, now they're both filling festival schedules. Understandably perhaps, Budd says they faced skepticism. "The industry view was there's not enough interest in things that aren't Bollywood led. [Myself and Vijay] lamented that the only British acts visiting India then were the Stings and Simply Reds of the world, when kids wanted to see Mumford and Sons and Basement Jaxx, but no one was bringing them over."

Fans desperate to see the few western acts playing India have lately encountered a second problem: this year has been disastrous for gig cancellations, including Bryan Adams, Akon and Metallica.

This organisational chaos is something NH7 wants to put right. Arriving on site, the event feels clean and well mapped out, in a country with a reputation for the opposite. We never wait more than 60 seconds for one of the (regularly cleaned) Portaloos. There's a buzz in the air – none of the acts are received poorly. "Has anybody heard of grime music?" London's Riz MC asks the crowd. Three people cheer. But no one is standing still once introductions have been made.

The festival programme advises "getting from one stage to another will require a fair amount of walking". But it took us less than four minutes to get from one end of the site to the other. Not exactly Glastonbury, then.

There's corporate branding. For most of ex-Radio 1 DJ Bobby Friction's set, a vodka logo is dragged around the screen like a four-year-old playing Etch A Sketch. India is a fan of brash marketing, and here it is overwhelming. As are the lineup changes, which seem to occur throughout the day. Thankfully, everybody on site is tweeting so it's easy to keep them updated. And aside from the music, there's plenty going on. There's a convention of 30 tattoo artists on site. Fans can pay for food, drinks and merchandise via an impressive system of RFID cards and micropayments. With the same cards they can also choose to log performances they watch and have the story of their weekend automatically updated on Facebook. Well, that was the idea – the system collapses minutes after the gates open and stays down all weekend.

Indian acts get the biggest reception. The audience for the secret set by Mumbai rockers Zero is easily the most frenzied of the weekend. The mass singalongs when the Raghu Dixit Project play Mysore Se Aayi and Indian Ocean play Bandeh rival the most euphoric Glastonbury moments.

An almighty party closes the festival on Sunday night, as artists from across the bill collaborate on covering western hits (Blur and Metallica ) and Indian folk classics. Finishing with a rave, Indian Ocean singer Rahul Ram freestyles in Hindi over Underworld's Born Slippy. It's a brilliant set to close the festival.

Afterwards, nobody is disappointed. The festival sells all 7,000 tickets for the Saturday and Sunday, and says it has made a profit in its second year, something "unheard of in the UK festival market", claims Budd. "Next year I expect we'll get some really high-end younger artists willing to take the leap. I'd love to see Chase and Status, Dry the River, even the Vaccines come and play with their Indian counterparts." NH7 has certainly proved there is an appetite for it.

Nottingham’s new tourism campaign in London is the finest advertising I have ever seen.

Dear fellow Londoners,

I imagine, like me, you’ve already spent much of 2013 gazing at the bare summer months in your calendar app, painfully aware of how most years this season passes unfilled, each of us lonely and imprisoned in our respective dwelling-houses. Perhaps also like me then, you sensed a great weight lift from your shoulders recently, as posters went up across our city’s transport network (two spotted so far!) showcasing events forthcoming not here, but up the country a little bit, in my home county of Nottinghamshire.

Please, at this juncture, take a moment to admire the above poster. The more astute observers amongst you will by now have realised that it appears to be advertising some manner of medium sized outdoor concert. And so let us linger in order to further admire the impeccable timing of this poster campaign. For as only the canniest of Nottingham’s marketing brains will have noticed, London has been cruelly starved of medium sized music events in recent years. Quality entertainers simply don’t gravitate to this city. The situation has become quite dire, with people being spotted wandering around various London parks, listening to Smooth Radio, and trying to imagine a way of seeing such hits performed by the people that wrote them.

But puzzle no longer, wandering citizens of England’s capital! A plucky city in the North has rushed to our aid. The less cool-headed Londoner might slap their head in embarrassment, that none of their own had hit upon such a winning event formula. Although I know it will take a degree of swallowing our pride to depart our city for Nottinghamshire, I hope my fellow Londoners will be as commendably mature as I am, and join me on that journey.

If that seems impossible, and you tire of gazing North with your thinly veiled jealousy, let us instead examine our advertisement in question with the appropriately mature admiration that it deserves. Alongside the totemic headliners the London music industry have been kicking and screaming in its attempts to book for years – Blondie and Paloma Faith – we see a number of other borderline arrogant claims. Aside from the brash assertion to hold 12 of some fantastical creation called ‘music venues’ (presumably 11 now), one also notes that apparently, (and please fellow Londoner, steady yourself before reading on) Nottingham has given birth to “one top album artist”.

Well, I can only assume you are also in stunned silence. The only course of action remaining appears to be damage limitation, and so I issue a critical warning to my fellow capital dwellers, not yet versed in the beauty of England’s green and pleasant county: book those train tickets early. Once summer finally rolls around St. Pancras will verge on riotous scenes for the hordes of culture starved capital-dwellers fighting for a place on a train to get to a city where a person has produced a successful album. Let alone a person as admirably refined as Jake Bugg.

In closing, I can only enter a plea to the Gatekeepers of Nottingham: act with greater delicacy in future! Be sensitive to our already blindly jealous eyes! Did NBC advertise their US presidential election coverage across Syria? London life is a daily struggle as it is. I just ask for our plight not to be rubbed in our faces. Many, many thanks, and obviously, see you in June.

This blogpost was originally posted here.

Glastonbury 2013 review for Drowned in Sound

The full version of Drowned in Sound's Glastonbury review is here. Below are just the sections I wrote.

It’s a wonder Julio Bashmore didn’t get the guy near us to airhorn all over his original recordings as well. It could only improve the deep house pleasures of Au Seve, in my opinion. This is a real party crowd though, and otherwise they’re reacting to every well honed 2013 beat and occasional cheeky 80’s disco classic with appropriately considered joy. Apart from maybe the guy that climbs right to the top of the neighbouring Cubehenge. The group that pull off a perfectly orchestrated go-low across our part of the tent however, you’re fine. Julio laps all this up, and his spurs for getting a party started are well and truly earned.

Slightly more subdued are the crowd at Alt-J. Not a peep can be heard during acapella moments like Ripe & Ruin, which is the perfect outcome, of course. There’s a lot of mutual appreciation at play here, crowd and band willing each other on. Not that the couples near DiS need any further encouragement to slow dance during their still great Kylie/Dr. Dre mashup. On a stage where the sound had been getting blown around everywhere for the Hives earlier in the day, Alt-J’s innovative compositions are (with the exception of a limp Dissolve Me) replicated wonderfully here.

As Foals finish there’s just 15 minutes to hot foot it over to West Holts in order to see Chic ft. Nile Rogers. A perfectly reasonable task, if it wasn’t for the reported 30,000 people who have got there before you. After two songs the sound just isn’t connecting for the people only just inside the field.

Fortunately, there’s time to grab a drink and still make it up to see the whole of The Horrors set at the Park stage (or as I take to calling it, the BBC 6 Music stage). Seeing The Horrors is an idea that nobody else has pursued on site. Despite thanking the sparse crowd for showing up, they seem indifferent that we have. As the band openly acknowledge, there’s a lot of great alternatives to watching them right now. They then set about doggedly ensuring those fans that have shown up get get treated with mistrust. It’s by no means a fiasco, it could be more favourably described as a solid set. But it feels  pedestrian. There’s no effort to forge a connection.

Two new trends spotted at Glastonbury 2013. Good trend: the two guys in the West Holts field disguised as one big pile of rubbish, which spring up and chase anyone that places litter on them. Bad trend: guys urinating against the inside fence of urinals, rather than just waiting another 15 seconds for a urinal to become free. Thanks, guys. In turn you helped turn entrances to toilets into thick muddy urine puddles, that other guys would then step into in order to continue to urinate against the same fence. You are bizarre and disgusting xx

I can’t imagine there’s many people on site wrestling with whether to see Chase & Status or Fuck Buttons headline the Saturday night. In the end, career-best new single Lost & Not Found - seemingly purpose written for Glastonbury - is the deciding factor. Chase & Status’s music is brutally effective in this environment. Over 70 minutes the efficiency at which they keep achieving maximum crowd euphoria is dizzying. The stage design is slick too, one assumes they lost money on the production.

Speaking of production values, special note has to be given to the spider robot creators Arcadia this year. Promoted from the fringes of the site to an attention-grabbing spot by the Other stage, it’s a triumph of scrap metal, pyrotechnics, light projections, circus performers and big name DJs, plus considerable quantities of smoke and lasers, mean it must surely rank among the most remarkable DJ gigs in the world, yet it only stands at a few events each year.

For a certain Sunday mid-afternoon set at the John Peel tent, the chap next to us spends 70% of the performance with his fingers wedged in his ears. It’s James Blake, who this writer has recently changed his mind about because his second album is a bit less, to use the technical term, wanky, isn’t it? It isn’t even until the following afternoon when we remember the early description of him as being like Ross from Friends when he gets his keyboard out.

The tent’s bass, then, has been turned up to ‘somewhat painful’. What they lack in visual stimulus is made up for by the music, which is commanding enough. The swelling, intensifying nature of his songs, particularly during The Wilhelm Scream, overpowers the crowd. It’s a triumph. We would have liked to have heard Take A Fall For Me though, James. It is good.

Yeah so, I’m uncertain about how exciting watching The XX headline the Other stage will be. This is music at its best when you close your eyes, and whilst previous tours have proved they can replicate their recorded output live, the question remains as to why anybody would bother showing up to see/listen to it, and whether or not it is deserving of a headline slot on the Other stage.

On the other hand, maybe the sound innovation that even Jamie Smith in isolation has been responsible for since 2009 makes them more than deserving of this slot. In a summer that’s seen them tour Europe with their own music festival it’s surprising to hear them so genuinely overwhelmed by the occasion tonight. Lead single and set closer Angels, which to this writer always sounded limp and indistinctive on the record actually comes into its own in a field, and things all get a bit overwhelming during this and Shelter, meaning the set carries a genuine emotional punch.

Whilst all this is going on however, I’m getting texts from up at the Park stage. The last set of the night, Cat Power, finishes her show, but the crowd then starts to get busier. There are rumours a secret headliner will step up. Who could it be? Crowds have been showing up to TBA slots all weekend to see if the Daft Punk/Bowie/Atoms for Peace/National/Hot Chip rumours will come true. Eventually an announcement comes: there’s no gig, please leave. Admittedly this could have been communicated 20-odd minutes earlier, but the degree to which the rumour mill took power over the festival this year all started to feel faintly toxic.

This is probably in no small part due to previous years. In 2011, Glastonbury got secret gigs from Radiohead and Pulp. In 2013, it got Beady Eye. It’s understandable that this was done for reasonable health and safety concerns, but it was also bound to feel anticlimactic to those that enjoy the thrill of such chases. There’s no reason why Glastonbury can’t take its cue from Latitude 2009, and put superstars on the main stage in the middle of the afternoon where everyone can see them.