Live
< Secret Garden Party, secret location, Cambridgeshire
words by Philippa Burt
Secret Garden Party will change your life. It will change the way you see the world, the people in it and more importantly all other music festivals. Because once you leave the shackles of the daily grind behind and give yourself over to a long weekend at the secret Cambridgeshire location you will be hard pushed to find an event on the music calendar that is more fittingly assigned the title ‘festival’.The medieval origins of the festival rested on a chance for society to be turned upside down, where for a short period social hierarchies were eradicated and everyday rules and conventions were pushed to one side. Festival time was one for casting aside differences replaced with, through the anonymity of masks, an equality bringing people closer together for a spot of subversive mayhem. Skip forward a couple of hundred of years and the term festival has very different connotations. Since Kate Moss stepped out in a pair of pant-resembling shorts there has been nowhere ‘cooler’ to be than a music festival. Equal amount of time is spent trying to get a glimpse of the in-crowds pratting about on the side of the stage as those entertaining on it.
The lightbulbs over the heads of big corporate fat cats have been flashing on with the realisation that here is a whole playground of potential consumers who need to have the life and soul sucked out of them in return for a few bucks. Hence the brand name saturation that has become the norm. While trilby wearing, gin-in-a-teacup drinking fools think they are the children of the revolution as they sup on their warm pints of Carling they just purchased for a tenner, until they enter the village of Huntingdon clutching in their sweaty paws a ticket for the party of the summer they don’t know the meaning of the word revolution.
Secret Garden Party is a party in every sense of the word. Capping the capacity at a mere 7000 ‘gardeners’, it has the blessing of being classified as a ‘private party’ with a personal, intimate environment where creative freedom and individuality is not only welcomed but positively encouraged. Without VIP areas and a chance to partake in a bit of celeb-spotting, equality and community reign supreme, where a girl can play a hoover on stage one night then queue up for a veggie breakfast the next morning without anyone batting an eyelid or weeing into their copy of Heat.
This really is a festival of the body rather than the mind and to gain the full experience you answer every question with the word ‘yes’. Within the first hour of our arrival in the Garden we had been almost paralysed chucking ourselves down a hill, performed an impromptu jazz piano recital and become part of the largest human pyramid (in that field at that time).
Of course this is still a music festival but rather than vying for the latest band making king of the twerp Alex Zane cream, Secret Garden Party attracts a variety of acts combining unknowns with firm favourites that bring an eclectic mix of reactions from relaxing back on a massive bail of hay to dancing so frenetically that a severe bout of heartburn is brought on.
The first night’s line up ends with a bang as new bleeping and bopping boys Metronomy get the loving hippies, usually associated with SGP, proving that they too can booty shake with the best of them. Other acts making big impressions were Micachu (and her hoover), Esser and Shout Out Louds, the latter of which make one oversized man dance so much he punches a woman in the face. Accidentally, of course.
However, there’s one name towering above the rest. Grace. Jones. Making the crowd wait to the point of exhaustion, Jones finally slithered onto the stage in an atmosphere so sexually charged that her trousers appeared to have literally fallen off. The woman who had once threw pants in the face of Roger Moore, claiming ‘This is the smell of sex’, gyrates to an audience who are at first astounded at the spectacle on stage before becoming more interested in watching the smouldering embers of the recently burnt down pirate ship.
A stark contrast with the reaction received by The Correspondents, the Wandsworth duo who wander onto the Great Stage in the middle of the hottest day of the year and through the skatting, scratching and infectious dancing of the Mask-a-like Mr Bruce, managed to persuade everyone to forget their heat induced woes and dance like they had some serious itch to scratch. Forced back on to the stage by a fiery and pumped up crowd demanding more, Mr Bruce and compatriot DJ Chuckles then do it all over again, much to the amazement of them and their newly acquired groupies. Which goes to show the wonder that is Secret Garden Party. Hierarchies are toppled and the unknown underdogs are taken into the bosoms of the crowd while the headlining 80s superstars are made to look like, well, bosoms.
By the time Sunday night comes and Late of the Pier kick off their set, which acts as the sweat inducing death throes of a plague victim, women have given up wearing clothes, children have given up using toilets and dogs have just given up altogether. Like all festivals and holidays an end point had been reached and the need to return to everyday life was felt. That is until next year when, come rain or shine, we will be there, painting faces and hula-hooping like crazy folk. And, if you take one piece of advice this year it should be this: get your ticket for 2009’s festival as soon as possible and allow the Head Gardener to change your life.
Exclusive for loudandquiet.com
