Haps with the Chaps

OK, OK. Enough cheese has been allowed to drip through the muslin of tardiness. It's a cockamamey season once again this year, and what better to summarize and summise than a montage of words and pixelated images of the Pilton Farm Mud Festival? Perhaps images of polar bears slowly barbecued by their own Terran sun in horrible inversion of Superman? Or Henry, the mild-mannered janitor? But I love the clack of my keyboard too much to leave it at that.

Lollipops stood in ten-stick wilted salute as the June sun boiled behind thick, choking clouds and monsoon conditions. Hammers decided to drive a stake though the heart of the entire week this year, lounging temperately at the head of the valley in the Green Fields, occasionally nipping downwind to see what the restless party navvies down below were doing about the drainage in the lower field. Initial rainbursts were laughed off topless, as we surfed the kinks in our damp chest hair and gathered free firewood for our hungry washing machine tub fire. Pedal-powered civic pride drew strangers and friends to our patch o'fun. "Stretch out your crisp packets and take a seat, friends!" we beckoned; a big, tickly tribe on hand that week: "Chorlton-cum-Glastonbury" no less;  "Old Glastrafford"; "Whalleybury Range".  If it had a M at the front, it was there, blisterous crusts wobbling atop their pubic wellies. The bandages slipped from the truth and the pus ran joyfully in our veins. Zombie Manchorlton stalked us to within a millilitre of our life essences.  Stumbling about the flattened trenches, the troops were fingering where the partyholes once where and dreaming of Tahiti sunsets.  And that was only Tuesday night...

Master Egg and Coc wandered loosely around the lush, green grassy knolls before the rain assassinated the sunshine, consciously drinking in the easiness of movement.  Two luscious young earthmaids offered us fungal fun in foreign accents,  but seemed the only strangers offering enlightenment in the whole festisphere.  Goatboy and Junko The Smith and Robin Big Potatoes filled the sack of Camp Contentment, throwing up tarps when the mood caught sparks, pedalling band-saws to cut firewood with hurried teeth.  Benwise T Beard and Coc skipped their hairy fashions down to the sauna, where high hotness massaged the wrongness from their hearts and minds, and the occasional beautiful naked woman injected some tingle to the process.  Muscles resonated with a new cosmic alarm call, and the day started mightily fine in each case.  Cold pool plunges, my foot soul-jers!  Mash my molecules on command!

Toes in the grass, my friends; toes in the wrinkled grass.  Once the music got going, our forays to the underdale lengthened and intensified.  But for every successful raid on the musical farmyard, for every slaughtered sacred sheep or chicken spirited away by the hungry fox within; for each of these, there was a bunglement, a hashed confusion with a breezy hole where the occasion should have been. 

Super Furry Animals had been tagged to our masthead for some time, anticipation was steel-tipped.  We were not disappointed.  Banter was there, and "Hello Sunshine" did actually coax the burning ball from out its pluvial poke.  Gruff suggested that the next tune was "Hello Thunder & Lightning"; and perhaps it was this quip that damned us three days of sliding purgatory.  XX Teens had elicited a MES-like bewonderment with their derailed railings, wrapped up in shades and shaking like the hungoverest.  As we were assembling before the strangely day-glo Arcade Fire, complimentary text messages arrived about our collective moustaches, a heraldic precursor to a golden ticket.  Hammers were asked to accompany the man-gorgeous Paper Cinema.  We slipped the edge on Polytechnic, who were making their debut at the Queens Head the following afternoon.  A tangy ketchup passed through our veins and across our taste buds.  We seized the time, dragging a double bass down through the mud and bolting new thoughts to our fingers.

It was a bit of a challenge, we shan't try to deceive you.  We set up our stall in the Future Cinemas tent, in order to intermingle our noises and wordsies with the cut-out fairy tale terrorism of the south coast's leading Siblings Grimm.  Smouldering beermats and pieces or paper were burning carrier pigeons, relaying the news of holy war from one synapse to the next.  No backing track, an electric piano.  We crumpled ourselves into the corner of the orchestra pit and sketched like blazes.  Come the performance, our brains were as very fire; blood circulating through our matters grey with such volume that our cheeks glowed hot.  Very few details were taken in as all our Hoovers were set to blow, but snatching a gaze at one point saw a fat bearded man wobbling about to my cries for a wonderful Belgium in "Horror Hammer?"  Synchronous serendipity was the potage du jour that evening.  But we locked ourselves in miserabilist concrete.  Was it worth missing both Bjork and Hot Chip that shimmering evening?  Was it?  Well, was it?  We could not say.  Volcanic tears trickled sulphorous into our gaping maws.

Saturday began with a forcible evacuation of noisy hippies from the bench we constructed outside our camp.  Coc conducted this in his pants, which added a great deal of urgency to his request that our unwelcome guests piss themselves off.  By this time, treacle underfoot was the rule of thumb, and negotiating the mudflats was becoming tiresome.  Still, some musical meteors still managed to fall to Earth.  CSS and Klaxons had long towered over the Saturday afternoon in our preconceptions, but the reality was wet and mild.  Big stage, little cute woman, abysmal sound engineering.  What appeared to be mumbling, stumbling incoherence from Jamie Klaxon, and the usual rootless wander of instruments into the early evening, BBC3 later revealed to be rational but poorly served by electric amplification.  Holy Fuck have long been considered golden heroes in these parts, but they truly took the John Peel tent (which was generally woeful in its decisions all weekend) by the turf of the balls and shook us all a second cock. Expert, expert crunch.  The Pyramid was ignored again.  Bonde do Role was completely missed despite concentric wanderings through besludgened hours.  Iggy heroically had his stage invaded by Eastbourne Jimmy and some darkness fell sweetly over the valley.

Perhaps th e best set of the whole weekend was in The Glade - !!!.  The punk funkers of old with the punctuative name and scorched earth attitude.  Benwise and Coc bore witness to this momentum, which set a tiny crew off on an old nighter, pulling drink from dingy corners of Lost Vagueness well into mid-morning before a cooked veggie breakfast and a sauna, which was crammed with the fumes of alcohol and beautiful naked girls telling bad jokes.  Coc drunkenly stumbled up the hill to a waiting deckchair, steam pouring up off his body for a full couple of hours while he crashed, a ZX Spectrum with blackening pixels.  The song of Cu Chulainn had woven itself into his sizeable sideburns and it was time for our heroes to rest.

Sunday brought more near misses.  Or was it Saturday?  By now, Einstein would have his head scratched trying to prize space and time into its neat strands.  It all went a bit Navajo on our arses.  There was another heroic trek across the mirthless expanse from the warm belly of the Bimble Inn across lakes of mud and armies of throng to catch the luxurious Bat For Lashes, our Pharoah Queen with the foot like techno thunder and the voice like Pythagorean romance.  A fitting prize for Paper Cinema's weary trudge through human contortion beyond their Vagueness/Green imaginings, but which cost Coc a glimpse of the mighty Candylion unearthing the court of King Arthur in Avalon, and sending its round table spinning with psychic firepower.  The Young Knives were a afternoon treat, despite the watery, birdshit foulness of our Sunday pork and Yorkshire puddings, but too unmuch too far laterer.

The cloud-watching of earlier in the week was over.  The constant burble of passing punters, coaxed in by Coc's syrupy banter, had dried (ha!) to a muddy blank.  Rain was our uncle and he was staying the rest of the weekend, bringing his scary laugh and unnerving collection of Record Collector magazines with him.  He was sat up there in the sky as we made our way across to the Park to see the first of our two closing acts - Gruff Rhys aka Candylion aka Losinlew.  We took our gypsy smith neighbour with us and he was blown away in mildly spliffed pleasure by the techno-twitching, rain-ignoring, clock-V-flicking set, and truly it was wonderful.  One hairy man and a couple of small electrical boxes (and a decidedly gland-tickling Bethesdan ladysinger) took hold of a sodden Sunday evening and wrung the joy into it.

Then we picked our way through the wet, weary coach people wending their way to hours and hours of misery to the tiny patch of semi-Boho Mancunia, the Late'n'Live lounge, to see Polytechnic round off all our proceedings.  Loopol's holy electric cow stood proud as the Everglades trickled around her, standing guard as we arrived.  In the sweaty pavillion, ,The Courteeners were holding horrible court.  Gurning, sweaty, anti-thought scally fucks had scarpered out of the smouldering woodwork and were jumping up and down, laurels in their gappy, mashmatic jaws, orbs and sceptres tucked in their trackies  - they were winning!  The cunts were winning!  But soft, what feather boa-wearing gods, are these?  What steely-sinewed grip on lyre and drum?  Polytechnic arrived and with fresh oxygen in their lungs tore a lovely hole into the early hours of Monday morning, a hole through which we spied the arching stars.

All that remained amongst the slippery carcass of that languid week in the lap of the Green Goddess, and what a sweet-smelling and fecund lap it was, was a hunger for the basics - shelter and booze.  Having made our retreat back up the hill to Camp Comfort, as the hill seemingly slumped opposite and down, smoke rubbing against our eyes, Coc and a Weegie Lady ventured into the deluge with damp twenty pound notes to the Stone Circle.  It was Apocalyptic, but there were cold cans of drink to be bought, and they returned flushed with triumph.  The night drew on, jumpers were burnt, tents loomed all collapsed with drench.  Monday dawned, vans emerged from feet of mud, the motorway stretched and services were swamped with people with bands about their wrists.

It was all over.  Tears on a postcard, please.