Flower Power

Jaysis H fucking Christ. It s fucking huge. Tents, tents and more fucking tents. You start to see them a few miles away from the festival, which is situated in the arsehole of nowhere, between Glastobury itself and Pilton. At first, you think, It s just like Feile all over again , but then you round a bend in the road and realise the initial field of tents is only one of about 15 and you start to get a sense of just how big this festival has become. Gulp!

It s Saturday, lunchtime: Wilt have been here since last night.
I m making my way through one of the many enormous car-parks and stop to ask a steward for directions when a sporty Honda with pumping techno music pulls up beside us.
Ere mate, you couldn t do us a favour, could ya? comes a cheeky Scouse accent straight out of Brookside Close. Thankfully, he s addressing the steward. But, I need to get right down to the entrance. You see I ave to pick up me mum and she s in a wheelchair.
The steward politely informs him that his request is impossible and directs him to the nearest parking lot. Thanks a lot mate, grins the Scally, before wheelspinning off into the distance.
I mosey on, eventually getting to Gate 4, where I swap my ticket for an luminous yellow armband, which allows me backstage. Hurray. Once there, those nice people from Orange allow me to use one of their phones to get in touch with Wilt, who are ensconsed in the beer-tent.
Brief introductions:
Battle / Cormac Cormac Battle, singer/guitarist
Darragh Darragh Butler, drummer
Mick Mick Murphy, bassist
Ronan Ronan McHugh, producer and sound man (in both senses of the word)
Saturday, 3:00 pm I meet Ronan, Darragh, Mick and their respective girlfriends. We chat over a pint and the conversation is kinda stilted. I m slightly worried that they re weighing me up, watching their p s and q s in front of the pressman (thankfully, it turns out I m just paranoid).
3:15 pm Enter Battle. Walshie, you finally fuckin made it, man! he hollers, animatedly shaking my hand. We ve met a couple of times before. Battle seems excited, but then, he always does buzzing around from person to person, chatting to anyone who catches his eye. A couple of beers later and it s out to the Other Stage to see David Gray.
5:30pm We move en masse up to the New Bands Tent to see My Vitriol, with whom Wilt are touring the UK at the moment. They re reasonably good, but they let themselves down with a stagey trashing of the instruments at the end.
On the way back, we have to pass the portaloos, which by this stage are a stinking mass of rancid putrification requiring all and sundry to try and hold their breath for at least 20 yards either side of them. Battle calls it the stench of stools .
7:15pm It s back to the Other Stage for Elastica, who rock, Justine gyrating like a woman possessed. Everyone agrees that Elastica are probably the best act they ve seen so far.
10:45pm Having left the band, I wander around to see The Pyramid Stage for the first time. It s fucking big, and people are millling about like the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah. I stumble through an extremely muddy patch, wondering how it could be so wet considering the weather has been so good. One glance up the hill tells me why, when I spot about 15 young men using a clump of trees as a communal bathroom. Hmmmm.
By this juncture, I have been on the go for over 17 hours and my body is starting to give up on me. I head back to the beer tent to reconvene with Wilt. I can t find them but I do find Jack L and his band, fairly chuffed after their second consecutive night playing the Acoustic Tent.
In fact, Jack and the band are making a bit of Glastonbury history, as the first band in the festival s 30-year run to play on all three days.
When the Wilt boys get back the partying starts in earnest. A DJ is pumping out old ska tunes, from The Specials to The Selector, and the place starts to hop. Brian Lynch, Jack L s keyboard player, is the main instigator of the skanking. He also stages a mock seance, which involves the whole table holding hands and chanting.
Mick stumbles across to me, looking extremely serious. John, I m fucking fluthered! he intones, and he s not wrong there. Most of the others are looking a bit worse for wear as well, but Battle is in fine fettle. After all, he s the designated driver , charged with getting us safely back to our hotels, 35 miles away in Taunton. Unfortunately, there s not going to be room in the car for all eight of us, so we have to leave someone behind.
Ronan and Mick generously volunteer to stay on site, sleep in the other car and follow us in the morning.
2:00 am As we leave the beer tent, we re greeted by a youngish guy with long hair, careering around in circles while smacking himself in the head and screaming, I ve had enough of this fucking shit. It s just not fucking funny anymore . It seems he d been badgering anyone within earshot for acid an hour before. Poor bastard.
Then it s off through the still-teeming crowds to the car. We all pile unceremoniously into the big Ford Stationwagon and Battle starts her up. Bruce Springsteen s Nebraska soothes our senses on the drive back to Taunton. I stumble into my room, turn the light on and, in true rock n roll fashion, make myself a nice cup of camomile tea and retire for the evening.

Sunday
11:00am We drive back through the thousands of tents, and already there are quite a few people up and moving about the site. Most of them are obviously still feeling the effects of the excesses of the night before, a fact borne out by the numbers who almost walk under the car before they realise it s there.
Ronan and Mick meet us at the entrance to the stage area this is where we take our leave and let the lads get on with psyching themselves up for playing their first Glastonbury.
There s also the small matter of a #50 bet. Ronan has promised to hand over a half-century of Her Majesty s Finest if Battle manages to get the crowd to jump up and down. They re due on at 1pm.
12:55pm A steady stream of people have arrived, and the crowd is quite respectable for this stage of the day.
1:00pm Wilt take to the stage. The crowd cheers. Battle reaches for the microphone, We re a bunch of Paddies from the Republic of Ireland and we re not in the European Championships, he smiles. Why don t you come down from the portaloos at the back? They launch into a blistering It s All Over Now , one of the finest Irish singles of last year. More and more people are joining the audience.
By the time they start No Worries , which is their next single, the crowd has swelled to a size that bands have no right to expect this early on a Sunday. I spot a good few Wilt t-shirts around, complete with the Discos Don t Make Much Sense legend from the Radio Disco single. Expectation is growing.
The band soak it up with ease. They re tight, taut and to the point, even Mick looking none the worse for all his alcoholic exertions of the previous night. Meanwhile, Darragh is pounding the drum kit like it just told him it was on intimate relations with his sister, and Battle is on his knees, wringing the notes from his guitar like a man possessed. Peroxatine is on fire, Battle seething, Hey, sometimes I look at myself and my reflections tell the story of a broken man .
In contrast to his serious fretwork, Cormac s between-song wordplay is a howl, his dry wit taking him from Oasis impersonations to the state of the toilet facilities on site. When he explains about his bet with Ronan, the front rows don t need any more encouragement to leap about like the young things they are: a whopping great smile on his face, Battle knows he is fifty quid richer. Ronan must be gnashing his teeth.
In fact, Wilt s set is a perfect sampler for the album, Bastinado, which is as fine a power pop collection has been wrought since Fountains Of Wayne s glorious debut. The guitars are crunchier than the famous chocolate bar from Cadbury s, the rhythm section tighter than a Cavan cow s udders at milking time and these Cats know just what a chorus should sound like. In fact, with more hooks than the Duffel factory, any of Bastinado s 11 songs could be a potential single.
Wilt s growing stature is borne out by the fact that two minutes after they leave the stage, the crowd has disappeared into the ether that is Glastonbury.
3.00pm I reconvene with Wilt, congratulate them on their gig and then, while they head off to the food tent the lucky bastards have meal tickets it s off to the Pyramid Stage to see David Gray. The news just broke that Babylon entered the UK Top 40 at number 5 and White Ladder is up to number 7, so there is a huge crowd to see him.
Unfortunately, on the way to the stage, I encounter the one and only sign of aggression in a weekend of good vibes. I m carrying a bottle of water, which I swig from intermittently, picking my footsteps in between all the people lying on the ground, when a guy walking towards me grabs my bottle and shakes it roughly, trying to take it, soaking two girls beside me in the process. When he doesn t get the bottle, he swears and walks on. It all happens so fast I m a bit bemused by the whole thing.
Unfortunately, the next guy wasn t so lucky. The thug s mates, walking behind him, deliberately walk into one young man sitting on the ground. When he turns to protest, he gets a solid right hook into the cheekbone for his troubles and promptly has all his beer stolen. Everyone else who notices is either too shocked or too stoned to do anything. The offenders simply walk off, beer in hand, leaving the poor guy nursing a sore jaw.
I mumble an apology to the young ladies inadvertently soaked by my water and head towards the stage, where Gray is already shaking his way through Sail Away .
While his performance on Saturday was good, this is something else again. Gray and band are obviously on a serious buzz over their newfound British chart success. Babylon is ecstatically received, as is anything he plays from White Ladder. Of the old songs, Wisdom has them bouncing in the aisles, but it is with the closing, brand new track that Gray & Co. excel, turning a slowish ballad on its head and rocking out with a version of Led Zeppelin s Black Dog . Excellent!
5:00pm Willie Nelson is already on stage and he s great. He looks really relaxed, waving and smiling to audience members as he and his band take us on a trip through the heartlands of America. On The Road Again gets a huge cheer, and To All The Girls I ve Loved Before is a delight, but it s Seven Spanish Angels where Nelson really shines.
Unfortunately, at this stage I notice I m a bit pink, so as soon as Willie finishes a fine set, I head back to the cover of the beer tent where the Wilt crew make immediate reference to my sunburnt demeanour.
7:45pm Battle is obviously fairly pissed and is having a great laugh with one of the disposable cameras we d brought along, sneaking up on Darragh, Mick and Ronan to take pictures, and preening for the lens himself. Good clean fun is had by all, including Muse, who are doing their thang on stage.
9:45pm When Muse leave the stage, we reconvene in the beer tent for an interview. In hindsight, this may not have been the best time to get sense from a band who have been on the piss since coming off stage at a quarter to two in the afternoon.
Mick is typically unfazed about the whole thing and was too concerned about the porcelain facilities on offer to worry about the gig: But I got a freshly cleaned portaloo first thing this morning, which was a great start to the day.
Toilets aside, everyone enjoyed their first Glastonbury experience, although Cormac isn t too enamoured with some of the so-called hippies around the site.
Hippies? Fucking bastards with their daddies credit cards, he spits, Coming down here and changing their Saville Road suits for their tie-die underpants. Fuck the lot of them.
But at least everyone here is looking at bands instead of dancing around, E d off their heads, Mick offers.
Battle will not be denied, though, and it s not just fake hippies who feel his wrath. He isn t exactly flattering about the state of popular music in the new millennium:
When Nirvana played Reading and even the whole Oasis thing, it was a movement that made people excited. At the moment there is nothing like that: it s just a backdrop to people s poxy, suburban, consumerist, materialistic fuck-off lives.
I hate every bastard who buys The Corrs album, every arsehole with the latest Nokia mobile phone and every bastard who hangs out in The Front Lounge and The Morrison. Fuck the Celtic Tiger. I hope it fucking dies, he laughs uproariously. If some fucking bollocks who hangs out in Cafi En Seine reviews our album, I m gonna personally go up and break their fucking legs, even if it s a good review.
After a good five minutes of laughter, we conclude the interview. After all, it s nearly time for Bowie.
10:30 The thin white duke is finishing off the festival on the Pyramid Stage. I m not exactly a Bowie fan but as Darragh points out, The guy s a legend. You d have to go and see him.
Bowie is amazing live, and is disarmingly chatty between songs, even confessing to a touch of nerves due to the fact that he had larangitis earlier in the week and wasn t sure if his voice would break down. So if you know the words, for Gawd s sake, please join in, he advises.
It s frightening just how many hits the man has to pick from: Changes , Absolute Beginners , All The Young Dudes , Ziggy Stardust , they re all present and correct and they are fucking amazing. When he finally exits the stage at about midnight, he s left everyone smiling. Back in the beer tent, the conversation is all about how brilliant he was.
2:00am The DJ, obviously off his box, keeps playing the same songs every half hour or so, not realising they ve been on before. Still, the beer tent is hopping as crusties and indie kids, ravers and hippies, all get it on to the sounds of The Clash s London Calling . Battle is pogoing with a huge, long-haired guy in a Wonderstuff T-shirt and the dirtiest boots I have ever seen. Everyone else lounges around in various states of disrepair. It s time to go home

Monday
6:30am after barely three hours sleep, my wake-up call arrives. I blearily dress and collapse into a taxi fifteen minutes later. The driver s attempts at conversation meet with decidedly stilted replies. One plane ride later, I m home. It s 11am and my bed has never looked so inviting. It was a great weekend but I m absolutely bollocksed. Wilt? You betcha.
Bastinado is released on Mushroom Records on July 7th