unironedman

IN WHICH RUNNING CONTINUES TO BE SPORADIC, WE PAY HOMAGE AT THE FESTIVAL ALTAR OF ALL FESTIVALS; A PLAN BEGINS TO BE, IF NOT HATCHED, AT LEAST INCUBATED, AND WE BID A SAD FAREWELL TO A DEAR FRIEND

The weekend before last saw Gary and I saunter around the town. It’s a sort-of circumnavigational loop, really. It starts in the park (where else?) and then joins the canal (no change there, either!) before snaking along the most westerly edges of Leixlip and then darting off south to include the rather pleasant environs of Castletown Demesne and the lush banks of the Liffey. It’s exactly 18k from my front door and back again. And because Gary was there to keep me honest, we managed a decent pace of about 5:50/km.

On Friday morning, I was off to the UK with a promising new Irish band. Here’s one of their videos. Fair warning: it will probably be your ear worm for the day, if not longer.

I have never been to Glastonbury. It started in 1970 and the entry fee was one pound. That included free camping and free milk! It has grown massively over the years. The current site is about 1,100 acres – enough to encompass 500 football pitches. The steel wall that surrounds the actual music venue is 8 miles long, and beyond that, there are multiple fields for campsites and parking. It’s really hard to comprehend the size of the thing; there are over 200,000 people here, and the site stretches as far as the eye can see. Literally. We are in a valley, but when you get to a spot with a little elevation, you look up and across, and you can still see the festival, unending – seemingly – twinkling off into the distance like some vast army about to break camp and march on its enemy.

But if there was any aggravation there, I must have missed it. True, we were offsite both Saturday and Sunday nights (the younger lads camped; the older ones – tour manager/sound engineer, backline tech and I – all headed to a hotel) but I didn’t get any sense of any tension, and all the staff were very helpful and friendly. The only small altercation I witnessed was one young drunk fella trying to have a wee in the corner of some fencing and several older punters remonstrated with him for peeing al fresco. This is, I gather, a big deal at Glastonbury. You are not allowed to let fly on the ground anywhere on site. I guess 200,000 people soaking the soil with urine would rather pollute the water table and get into the stream that flows through the site. There were ample toilets in any case, and many of these were compost-based.

Clearly, environmental concerns are a priority at this festival (single-use plastics are banned, for example). That said, the crowd at Coldplay (Saturday’s headline act) were all given free wristbands which were remotely controlled to create a massive lightshow. You can judge the effect for yourself here. There were about 100,000 people watching, and it did seem like just about everyone had a wristband. Did it look good? Damn right it did. Worth the effort? In theatrical terms, yes. Single-use plastic? Also, yes. But it’s not as if some folk need any further ammunition to hate Coldplay. They seem to have a lot of detractors. The main criticism, as far as I can see, is that these people just hate their music. It’s not as if there isn’t enough music out there that you can avoid because you don’t like it or think it’s crap. It would appear, digging deeper, the ire is more centred around the fact that Coldplay are absolutely massive, with millions of fans. So it’s just good-old fashioned jealousy, I suppose.

They have a winning formula (melodic piano hooks, and ‘woo-woo-woo’ bits that everyone can sing) and whilst it’s not new or innovative, they have some certified bangers, and more than enough hits to keep the crowd bopping all night. Sadly for this festival-goer, we had to leave site for the hotel (which was an hour away) about the time they were taking to stage, so I missed them.

(That same weekend, Taylor Swift played three sell-out shows in Dublin, breaking all sorts of records in the process. If pushed, and I had to level the ‘anodyne’ tag at an artist, I would pick her before Coldplay. Seeing as I have outed myself as a bit of a Coldplay closet fan, any Swifties can feel free to come out of the woodwork and point me in the direction of some classic Swift songs. (She also has the biggest carbon footprint of any artist, if we’re being picky). And now that I think about it, possibly another factor that sets people’s teeth on edge about Chris Martin is that he’s just so damn nice. That, and he was married to Gwyneth Paltrow, who sold expensive candles with names like This Candle Smells Like My Vagina. And they sold out too, I gather. Though I am going to stick my neck out here and suggest her vagina doesn’t smell of bergamot and lemon, or whatever they mix into the candle wax. But you do you, I suppose.)

But I did make a point of seeing truly innovative Irish band, Lankum. Great set, even if the sound was a little tricky. They all play multiple instruments, sometimes swapping out during a song, and sometimes playing in ways you might not consider, such as a violin bow on an acoustic guitar. Powerful set, though.

I also saw pretty much the whole set of Avril Lavigne. Its fair to say she has made a career out of teen angst. She will be forty this year. And no, there is no age barrier to rock ‘n’ roll or pop, or indeed, any musical genre, but she has unashamedly stuck to her guns in terms of her music and her brand, all of which features those graphics you’d expect to find scribbled into the margins of young girls’ jotters and Tippexed onto cotton schoolbags. And on the big screen behind her, plenty of old videos of a youthful Avril snarling at the camera can be seen throughout her set. She still wears the heavy eye-liner. In other words, this is an Avril Lavigne tribute act. But it’s a good one, and it has caught the organisers off-guard, which seems to happen every year without fail; an act is booked, and they stick them into a side tent somewhere, and they are hugely popular and it creates panic amongst the teams of safety and event crew. I was well on the periphery of the crowd at the Other Stage when I caught the end of Nothing But Thieves, but by the time Ms Lavigne took to the stage, there were at least 70,000 people in that field (and I got the impression at least half of them trod on me in their exuberance to get nearer to the stage).

I did nearly make a faux-pas that would have stayed with me for the rest of my life. As we were offloading the lads gear at their second gig on the Sunday (in a very large marquee), I noticed a petite blonde lady strolling around backstage in a sequinned dress. Sequins are very much de rigueur at Glastonbury, so I assumed she was a festival-goer with backstage access. That said, I did think to myself that she looked a little bit like Toyah Willcox, and had we bumped into each other at the little tent set up for getting yourself a cup of tea, I probably would have said something along those lines. Good job I didn’t, of course, as it WAS Toyah Willcox, playing with her new beau, Robert Fripp and band, straight after our lads. Jaysus. Can you imagine?

The one act I did make a serious effort to see (as in, a half-hour trek across the festival site) was Ralph McTell. His classic hit, Streets of London, was recorded in 1969, two years after I was born. And he has played it at every gig since. Lovely to finally see him, though he did struggle a wee bit with the sound, mainly because of the spill of a nearby band with a rather heavy drum and bass mix. Given that we were in the dedicated acoustic tent, it’s a shame they couldn’t have found a way to isolate the acts better from the rest of the festival. Saying that, there is no escape from music at Glastonbury. It is literally everywhere. All the time. I know, a music festival. Who wouda’ thunk it…

830 miles on the clock by the time I finished that epic journey. Still, I doubt I would ever have made the trip to this festival under my own steam; a busman’s holiday was the only way.

Going full circle, Gary and I are planning to do the Slieve Bloom Way. It’s over 70k, and we would take it on in a few weeks time, in one day. It would be, assuming it goes ahead, my big adventure for the year. Stay tuned.

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Saoirse lost her best friend this morning. Emma has been battling cancer for some time now. It was relentless towards the end. She’s at peace now, though of course, she’s leaving behind a devastated family and wide group of friends. The funeral is on Monday. It’s going to be a long old week 😦