Haps with the Chaps

The Hammers are back like cock-eyed fruitflies, multiple legs quivering and buckled after a whirlwind week of sun, dried mud, metal tent pegs and late night lizardry. The skies were on our side, friends, and the curtains closed around our unhappy thoughts. There were slackers and cloudwatchers that hung about the urban margins, giggling under their thumbs. I felt the fear myself, though I could not place anywhere precisely about my person. We hadn't even looked at the cultural significances that had been spelt out before us, both musical and mineral. Our eyes were locked instead on the five day forecast, on the camping itineraries, on our pharmaceutical shopping lists, on the entrails of passing rodents we had strewn under the unwavering eyes of our gods in attempt to augur our immediate futures.

Yeah, mud. Yeah, wellies. Yeah, Jay-Z and the potential death of all that's Glastonbury in the world. Yeah, lazy newspaper/NME flarn about filth. Yeah, stone circle drug drones moidering long into the night. Yeah, yeah and yeah. But is that what it was all about? Our newscub reporters were there and about, tearing up little pieces of paper and scribbling on them, chewing up leaves and twigs to mush into a delicious sticky paste, sculpting opinion in their tiny claws. And their hand-stitched reports were so luminous to behold, that the surrounding hedgerows caught alight and voles were cooked ironically by the hundredful. The jist jizzed justly.

Our Group Hug stagelet was something of a success, nested as it was at the side of the Stone Circle Highway. We honeyed in a few juicy locusts: Manc kids in animal helmets, lush-voiced youngsters in pink wellies, fiddle-playing acrobats, south London banjo troubadours, half-brained, cider-burnt, self-shouting hedgerow poetasters. We even somehow garnered the attentions of one-time Hammer-caster, Rob da Bank - see here for the beautiful glimpse behind the fiddler's head. We didn't even know he'd been there. But perhaps the bestest and most glory-soaked of all was the Boy Kane, the Diddy Russian Mafiosa - half-Thugg, half-Politburo, the OKGB. Once his dark, chubby mutterings eked across the gloam, the Green Hug space was never quite the same again. We paid tribute with plastic dollar. We were humble thanes to his bretwalda.

Soup also warped out of the Mancunian past, featuring His Lordship Ringo, Tiny Tom, Robin Big Potatoes and Rachel That Sings - the loose-limbed Prometheans. Hammers too shook their fingers in the general direction of the shimmer with a couple of punchy sets, intended to draw talent to the stage by opening our skill vacuum. When we bumped knuckles with the envelope, the results were pleasing. Moon In Aries saw another outing, ending in wine-cup-toppling guitar fury. There was an artful synthesis of the tiny chain of live jazz brain neural plosions and some spoken-word Cockery. A regular Tom Waits Scott Heron and The Blockheads we were, but with twigs for hands. The applause was audible.

So who else had started our engines over the weekend? Quite a question. By the time the bands start polishing their stances on the myriad of performing surfaces, we Hammers and our cohorts had been there the past part of a week, trying to work out which way the ground rose, congealing the good times for later use in our yurts and camper vans. Thursday night saw rains aplenty and fear tore into our intestines like hungry foxes. I sat scowling in the corner of a round smoky Mongolian space as good vibes dissolved unbroadcast about me. But not long after midnight the clouds ceased their malevolent machinations and my balls swelled with mischief. Explorations were in order. The Queens Head pulsed with live music, the mud puddled and splashed with little pleasing tinkles against my confident boots. My plastic dollar persuaded one friendly soul that I was Hova's cousin, and that she would be blessed with a royal outshout from his Holiness come Saturday at the Pyramid stage. Weed was smoked on it. We were all party to the numinous jape. Eventually the night ended with a wine-drizzled crawl back to tents. The last still-dark bedtime of the week.

Friday, the day set aside for Venus to wash her hair in readiness for a weekend of slender-boobed frolick, blowdrying it on the ardent sighs of her broken associates. Jimmy Cliff ruled the evening from his World Jazz Emporium, drooling streams of gospel into our hearts, skanking like a pensionable crane; but underneath this beautiful capstone, the day had swelled admirably in our collective breast. This was the year when the idyllic potential of the Park stage blossomed into steady reality, fanned by zephyrous sunshine and nourished by extra stages. Santogold planted her Brooklyn daisies first, and maybe set the mood. There was still the cottonwool threat of never-being-able-to-sit-down-outside-again hanging low in the sky at this point, but her self-congratulatory solar energy held off the impossible. So popular she was that the auditory hill was covered right to the crest with eager donors. We had to strain our organs for glimpses of her big shades magic, but it nuggeted out all the same, and the festive contract was stamped. The pensive puppetmaster Magic Arm, another thirsty Mancunian indrift, gradually ballooned out from his usual monocranial pedal-pushing genius into a full band before the baleful gaze of a BBC audience. This had the unexpected delight of Yours T. Ruly finding his face on the bottom corner of the screen after one of his appearances on the BBC Glastonbury iPlayer. However, I preferred it when he pluckily turned his lone trucker cap against a glowering world and did without the dirty M-word that is Musicianism.

Greater and more fiery still perhaps was the highlight that was Hip Hop Karaoke. This took place in a steamy wee tent opposite the Park stage, and your humble correspondent, the CocNoc, was first to burnish the stage with his Cymric interpretation of Rebel Without A Pause, an interpretation which was one pause short and became a little unstuck as a result, but will shit memories for decades to come. Somewhat onanastically, my greatest experience of the weekend, although precious few of the Group Hug collective were there to witness it, and I fear Dutch Lee holds the key to further informative seedcast. Petition him hard as concrete.

More news to dribble along like the poison on a ninja's string about those Days That Begin With S.

It's that third Frankenstein that I believe in.