Secret Garden Party 2011 review
- Jul 27, 2011
I have never been called a gardener before – the extent of my horticultural skills have never really amounted to much beyond growing cress in a plastic tub and seeing it rot after shameful inattention. But now I am one – officially, although as I prepared for Secret Garden Party 2011 I made the careful decision to leave my trowel at home. And also, bravely, my wellies.
Secret Garden Party has a capacity of 26,000, which is about the same number of people I queued for the toilet with after Beyonce’s sparkling, shimmering spectacular on the Pyramid Stage on Sunday at Glastonbury. In fact, take this number of people out of the population of that festival and the only way you’d notice is in the increase of your journey speed around the Other Stage by about one mud-suckered welly lunge per minute. 26,000 is intimate. It’s up close and personal. After four days 26,000 people might become your best friends. And this is exactly what Freddie Fellowes, the festival founder, is aiming for.
This is the first Secret Garden Party I’ve been to, but I’ve heard great things. From friends who fell in love there. From blogs waxing lyrical and mystical about the eclecticism and idiocy without any sense of hyperbole. Not least from the festival’s website itself – one perusal of which leaves you mindblown and exhausted, feeling you’ve spent four days at a festival already. How could one fail to be intrigued? And what would Mary Lennox, the original Secret Gardener of the eponymous classic novel, have made of it? I couldn’t wait to find out, or imagine.
Secret Garden Party is not about the bands, although they are a huge part of it, and they are on the whole fantastic and inventive and as diverse as you could hope for. But why try and compete with the kinds of line-ups boasted by the likes of Glastonbury, Latitude, and Primavera Sound this summer? Secret Garden is not about frantically traversing the stages, keeping to a tightly-planned schedule and facing the inevitable disappointment of arriving at the end of an encore. The programme – a piece of literature more headache-inducing than War and Peace in Russian – does not encourage this, its purpose is just to ‘alert you to the offerings of the garden’, not use it as a tool for planning your journey around. The Head Gardeners emphasise that the music, as omnipresent and wonderful as it is – is secondary to its true meaning, which is play, interaction and new friend finding. It’s about wandering, stumbling, rolling, space-hopping – employing whatever method of transport you see fit – and finding yourself amidst nonsense, chaos, idiocy, and music, known and unknown, in equal measure.
But music there is, and highlights there certainly were. Mystery Jets, headlining the Great Stage on Friday, kept spirits from dampening as the rain resolutely fell – nothing too heavy, but enough to make me regret the welly abstention. Their show was high on atmospherics and intimacy, making the breathtakingly beautiful lit-up lakeside surroundings even more beautiful, and finishing off with the soaring singalong of 'Flakes' before the crowd broke from their trance and dispersed into the darkness. With lily-leaves functioning as perfectly adequate umbrellas and in keeping with the garden spirit, it was off to discover what the place had to offer. The countless art installations hidden in the trees – dangling pom poms, curiously knitted trees and bird-houses suspended from branches quite alarmingly projecting pre-recorded voices was just an example of what could be found if you kept your eyes open.
Saturday saw Slow Club, a firm favourite of Lauren Laverne and a bright new hope of the British indie-folk scene, take to the twisted-branch encased treehouse that was Where the Wild Things Are stage, playing an ambitious set consisting entirely of new material to an appreciative and receptive crowd, and displaying an obvious progression from their earlier tunes despite having learned to play with two extra musicians just a few days ago. Ryan, a Slow Club enthusiast, was in favour: ‘the set really did showcase the band growing up – they’ve lost the tweeness, but still have the essence of Slow Club’, he told me afterwards. I caught up with singer Beccy over a hastily-grabbed Hog Roast before her regretful speeding away. What did she think of her second Secret Garden Party? ‘Fantastic. It’s a great festival - not pretentious, but just weird.’ And that’s in a good way. I’ll definitely look forward to their new album, due out in September.
Saturday was also a day for an impromptu knees-up, provided by The Burning Glass – a group of lyrically-witty and jauntily harmonised storytellers, discovered after ducking into The People’s Frontroom for a brief sofa-based respite. This was a welcome opportunity to flick through the Whizzer annual considerately placed on a coffee table and listen to songs about cleaning houses, snow-enforced sleepovers rhyming ‘treacherous’ and ‘lecherous’ and a subsequent semi-serious debate about the definition of rape. All this was accompanied by the inevitable but welcome ukulele, and more inventive added depth of a clarinet, and hosted by a Phil Mitchell-alike in pyjamas. Inviting the fortunate assembled punters to contribute lyrics was a nice touch – a definite, rousing highlight of this being the creative if not catchy ‘deep-sea fishing is not environmentally sustainable, but I like it!’ Then it was back to the Wild Thing Are Stage to dangle our feet over the pond before the stage on a piece of decking as dragonflies buzzed around us and lilies floated beneath, to catch the end of Cosmo Jarvis – a favourite of Stephen Fry, and definitely us too.
Headlining the Great Stage on Saturday was Blondie, providing a definite hits-laden set delivered by a bouncing Debbie Harry clearly enjoying herself – (‘she’s aged like a fine wine’, I overheard an appreciative reveller proclaim). Beyond the distinctive tree that functioned as both a place to meet up, and a market-square for balloon traders plying their wares, it was easier to hear the crowd singing along that the music itself, but those lucky and forward-planning enough to be amidst the melee at the front were treated to the innovative twists injected into the breakdowns of the classics that kept them fresh and inventive. Alongside a host of dancers the band got the crowd fully worked up and, and after closer ‘One Way or Another,’ more than ready for the Burning Man-influenced ritual of the floating Dragonfly taking its ‘final flight to a new frontier’. From the darkness emerged a ring of acrobats and performance artists entirely obscured by the shadows but for their spinning firelit hulahoops and arrows, launched, aflame, across the lake. The Dragonfly burned, the sky crackled with colour and the hairs on our necks seemed to stand so high it’s a wonder they didn’t singe. It was then up to Leftfield to fill the sky with more colour – this time in the form of beats.
The Centre Camp played host to another highlight – the London Afrobeat Collective, an eight or more piece multi-instrument band providing infectious, vibrant grooves to a crowd that literally wouldn’t let them leave the stage. The chant of ‘one more tune!’ quickly became ‘two more tunes!’ and even after two encores the applause and calls for more echoed around the tent. The night ended, somehow, in Chai Wallahs with a certain DJ Moneyshot confirming what we knew already without having ever had the need to think about it – that ‘Can’t Stop’ by Red Hot Chilli Peppers and ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ can never be mixed together with any kind of enjoyable effect. It’s clever, yes, good for a wedding, I’d imagine, but not what beat-hungry gardeners need at 4am on a Saturday. After a similarly ill-advised fusion of ‘Return of the Mac’ and The Cure’s ‘Close to Me’, it was time to repair to a nearby enchantingly-lit tent for some hazy dub to take us through to daylight.
Sunday was a day for taking it easy in the glorious sunshine, and discovering what was left to discover – a great deal, it turned out - so much more than could be really experienced even if you had a week, or two. By now stories were emerging and exchanging. I heard of people finding themselves naked in a sauna, people finding themselves naked in a disco, people just finding themselves naked. Being submerged in ballpools (health and safety considerations not withstanding, or considered), similarly over-subscribed pillow-fights, bathtubs of pillows and sea shanties from toothless mariners on a makeshift deck-chair surrounded stages, and clambering up haybales to watch mud wrestling tournaments. The stuff of myths, legends and enduring memories whatever your medication.
But Sunday night’s climax saw Jamie Jones and Lee Foss, heads of Hot Natured label, overtake, conquer and entirely lay waste to the Pagoda – testament to their popularity was the almighty queue that faced anyone hoping to get in before they took to the decks. Patience however really is the greatest of virtues, and those in it for the long haul were eventually victorious – nobody seeming to mind the queue and the crush; friends were made and names exchanged, sharing in the sheer anticipation of what was to come. It was a fitting end – the last chance to catch a serious dance as the sun faded, set and gave over to the glow of the Chinese lanterns strung in a luminous line above us. The music was as deep as the contentment and confident assurance that this really was a festival like no other. It was safe haven, sheltered from a tragic weekend in the outside world, as Monday’s papers would remind us with an unwelcome jolt back into reality, a reality that impossible to reconcile with what this community has created here. It’s hard not to resort to peace-and-love hippy clichés to describe this festival but they really do apply.
As the light melted away and time looped and stretched and became irrelevant, I began chatting to Lucy – the sister of the DJ of the Correspondents, no less, who’d earlier entertained the Great Stage with a madness described as ‘certifiable’ – and I asked her what Secret Garden had meant to her. ‘This is just a wonderful place to lose yourself for a few days,’ she answered, before nodding, smiling and dissolving back into the writhing, throbbing, euphoric mass all embracing this last opportunity for a dance. I couldn’t agree more, although I do wonder if, once you have found the pieces of yourself that have scattered across the undulating slopes and hay-filled fields of the Secret Garden, and put them back together again, you will ever really be the same again. And for the record, Michael Eavis – Martha Reeves kicks Beyonce in the proverbial.
Pamela McIntyre
Images from Secret Garden Party website
