Glastonbury Diary: Mark Graham of King Kong Company

We played Body & Soul on Saturday night and Glastonbury on Sunday afternoon so the last 48 hours were just hectic. Exhilaratingly so! The Body & Soul gig was fantastic. We played the Midnight Circus and it was completely rammed. They closed off the tent because there were so many people in it and then they had to get extra security to stop people from climbing in under the tent and trying to get over the barriers. So that was a result. It was brilliant!

We played on that same Body & Soul stage two years ago. We played it kind of early on a Friday so it was really great to be headlining on a Saturday now. It was kind of a big deal for us. We went on at one o’clock in the morning and did an hour-long set. We walked offstage at 2am, packed up the gear, got into the car and then went straight to the airport to get on a flight to Bristol.

Our heads were pretty scrambled. A few of us went up on Friday for Body & Soul and we said we’d have a quiet night, but of course we did the dog on it. Got into the festival mood on Friday night and then didn’t get any sleep on Saturday… and then got on a flight got to Bristol. You can imagine.

We landed in the UK at about 8 o’clock on Sunday morning. Caught a little bit of a sleep on the plane, but it’s a short flight. We were picked up at the airport and then brought to Glastonbury and then had a chance to have a can. And then we had to set up and line check, and get ready for the gig at quarter past three.

Jesus, I don’t know how other bands do, but it’s just like trying to get troops across borders! We had to hire gear for the Body & Soul gig because we had sent our own gear over in a van on Friday to Glastonbury. So thankfully our gear was waiting for us when we got here on Sunday.

The gig was great. It was a big tent and there was a few hundred there. But we had a few friendly faces in the crowd. There were a good few Irish people who have seen us before. And we had people recommended from their friends coming to see us. We had some new audience there as well who seemed to enjoy what we were doing. We were worried that sometimes some of us our stuff will get lost in translation. Some of the Irish colloquialisms that we use in some of the tracks. But it seemed to go down really well and people laughed in all the right places. And they danced their asses off! I mean, relatively early on a Sunday, especially on day three of the festival, that’s really good.

We were all exhausted after the show, but there wasn’t much point trying to get any sleep. So we did some socializing. I was up at the Underground Piano Bar, and there was a band called TPM playing there. They were really good.

Obviously, we didn’t get to see much at all between arriving and playing. But Justice was one of the headliners last night. The light show they had was amazing. It was fantastic – really good. Really, really good show there. And the Piano Bar at the stone circle was quite small quite small but it’s very atmospheric. It’s very hard to find, but it’s a cool place. Sadly, we somehow managed to miss Ed Sheeran.

A few of us have been here before, just going to see bands. So it was kind of a big deal to be here and to actually be playing at it. You know the way young fellas would be playing soccer and dreaming of playing in the World Cup? Or playing hurling and dreaming of playing in an All Ireland final? It was kind of like that for us.

The weather was great. It was a beautiful morning when we arrived. A couple of the lads who hadn’t been here before, they’ve only seen it on television, and they were just blown away. Because you don’t get an impression of the scale of the place from what you see of the festival on television.

One of the best things about festivals is the stuff that’s in the nooks and crannies, the small stuff that are in areas like Shangri-La or even up in the Piano Bar. That’s the stuff that never gets covered on television, but it’s what makes Glastonbury so special. All that extra stuff, the artistry and the craft that goes into making these different areas and these amazing different installations out here. And I think it’s 220,000 people out here this year. It’s absolutely massive. It’s just overwhelming.

We’ll sleep when we get home. For about a week.