What an experience! I would not be lying if I said that it’s right at the top with the best things I’ve done my whole life…Amazing!
On the 19th of June myself and my sound engineer teacher-person went off to Glastonbury to do sound engineering/stage managing at the Strummerville stage, which is quite a big deal to be honest. When we got to Castle Cary there was only one coach going to Glasto so we got on it and it dropped us off at Gate A, which for you who don’t know is literally on the other side of Glasto to where we were going. As no one wanted to give us a lift across the site we had to walk it, carrying all our things for 10 days and in the pouring rain. So much fun…It took us two hours through mud, rain and up a hill to get there, but we got to the campsite eventually and then we spent 24 hours in the pouring rain.
On Tuesday most of the team had arrived and the rain had stopped, which meant we were off to set the rig up. Ridiculously heavy equipment, but thankfully the Strummerville boys were kind enough to help us out! Then we had to do all the technincal stuff like connect everything, set all the extra speakers up and test the whole thing, but we took our time doing that as the first live performance wasn’t until Thursday.
When Thursday came around I had a horrible hangover from being out and about on Wednesday evening which is when the festival opened to the public and my favourite lecturer was running The Rum Shack (one of the grassroots hiphop stages) so I was there all night partying! But I was down at the site at 11am on Thursday morning to find that there had been a flood on our stage because we had this tree going through the middle of it…But once that was fixed, it was back to working mode, lifting equipment and getting everything ready to rock and roll! Will did all the sound engineering throughout the weekend and myself and Mr. Dave Danger did the stage managing. Because of my horrible hangover I decided to go to bed early on Thursday and then kick off the weekend properly on Friday.
And so I did indeed! Friday was an easy day at work because we only had one band and then DJs. Dave turned up with a horrible hangover which I found hilarious and left him to sit and try taking care of that while I did all the work and I then nagged his ear off for a while as payment haha! After everything was done I chilled with the DJs for a while, they were extremely nice so it was a lot of fun to just hang with them for a bit before I headed down to the mayhem to meet up with my friend Ellie, from Wildlife. Now, because Glasto is such a big festival and there’s a ridiculous amount of people it’s very hard to find someone but very easy to lose them. So by the time I got to where we were meeting, Ellie had lost one of her mates and it took forever, so in the end I decided I was going to go see Muse all on my own, which I enjoyed, and I made some friends there anyway. I did however have a bit of an anxiety attack in the middle of the 3rd song so I had to get out of there and before I managed to get to my tent I ran in to some other friends and partied the rest of the night!
I’d like to thank Ford and Will for bringing me along to Glasto and letting me work my ass off every day. And of course the one and only Mr. Danger who listened to me bitch about life and has taught me so many things about the thing I love to do, like I said, I’m coming for your job!
Until next year Glasto, it’s been emotional!
