Saturday: Monkey Heaven

We had a relaxed start to the weekend with a cooked breakfast before we started the drive north. Leeds is about 360 kms north of where we live, which means we drove most of the way up the country. The only thing that changes as you go all that way up the motorway is that the overpasses look even uglier. It is still rolling grassy hills, with estates of identical houses. And of course the cheaper housing is near the motorway.

Adam elected not to come to the festival, so Alex, Steve & I got ourselves all dressed up (dressed down?) and headed off to the bush on the outskirts of the city. We hadn't printed off maps for the festival site layout, or the program, of which there wasn't an official one on the web anyway. We decided that experienced festival goers like ourselves could manage without preparations. Ooops. The drop off point was reasonably well signposted, and we even found the first gate in quite easily, but the inside was different from Oz festivals. There were tents as far as the eye could see (all dome tents, 3 colours was the limit of variation), and roads going off in several directions, but finally we found where to get our wristbands and the gate to the inner sanctum, and cruised past the smaller stages to stake our claim to a patch of grass at the main stage. We gave up on finding a map and program eventually, and just made friends with people who already had them, one of whom went to school with Adam. Such a small world.

The music was awesome. The rain held off, although the wind chill wasn't pleasant. And I discovered that I knew more of the bands than I had expected thanks to the radio in the lab. The final band for the night was the Pixies, the reason we were there, so we pushed forward to find that the English are apparently too polite to mosh, giving us plenty of room to dance. The Pixies were a band that, despite breaking up at around the time I first started having my own opinions about music, defined our subbaculture, were listened to ad infinitum and became the basis of some of our slang. It was pretty exciting to see them live for the first time, if somewhat aging when your idols are middle aged, and the kids who I misspent my youth with have mostly married/mortgaged/sprogged. Not to mention your wearied ankles/knees/ears which won't let you enjoy the gig as much as you want to. In fact the whole audience seemed a bit subdued.

Leaving the park without a map was also a problem, especially when there were 45,000 people heading to the campsites and the information tent was on the other side of their route. But luckily they are English, and ever so polite and patient when queuing and queuing and queuing.