In 2007, I rashly agreed to take two of my children to Latitude. I had never attended a music festival before, and didn’t really know what to expect. We arrived in the early evening and found it almost impossible to locate a patch of unclaimed ground large enough to accommodate our family tent, which had the footprint of a bouncy castle.
It was pretty well dark by the time I got the tent floor pegged out on top of a bed of nettles. It was, as I recall, raining only lightly, but in a way that hinted at heavier rains to come. I bent over to pick up the larger tent pole and felt a sudden sharp pain in my lower back. As I tried to stand up, I put the tip of the tent pole through the fly sheet, leaving a large, L-shaped tear. By morning, I could barely walk.
I heard a lot of music that weekend, but I also spent a lot of time lying on a wet sleeping bag in agony. When I weighed the pain and the expense against the opportunity to see the New Young Pony Club live, I wasn’t sure it had been entirely worth it. I didn’t say anything to my children, but quietly decided I had been to my first and last music festival, and I was fine with that.
Two years later, I joined a band that would eventually take the name Police Dog Hogan. A year after that, I found myself at another festival – Maverick, in Suffolk – this time backstage, which is to say outside, in a state of pre-gig panic. Since that time, I have been to dozens of festivals of varying sizes; last summer, we played five. This year, we’re playing Glastonbury for the first time.
Very much against my natural inclination, I have become an unlikely connoisseur of the festival scene. Let’s just say that, over the seasons, I have learned some things. What follows is precisely all of them.
1 Be a musician. I’ve been to festivals as a punter, as a journalist and as an author, and there is no comparison. Musicians are afforded an advantage open to no other type of attendee: they let you drive all your stuff directly into the beating heart of the festival in your own car. Somewhere behind all the mud, kite stalls and metal fencing is a network of temporary roads where people in hi-vis tabards smile and wave you through. I can’t imagine needing further encouragement to start learning an instrument.
2 There is nothing like an artist’s wristband to make you feel important, even if everybody knows that if you were really important you’d be riding on the back of a chauffeur-driven golf buggy, not standing in the queue for the pasty van.
3 If you think you’re too old to go to a festival, you probably haven’t been to one lately. Everybody goes to festivals. No matter how old you are, your demographic is a well-represented part of the scene. That said, I’m always a little shocked to see so many people my age milling about. If it wasn’t raining, you’d think you were in Waitrose.
4 If you think you don’t like festivals, it might just be that you don’t like big festivals. Glastonbury might resemble a small city with major transport infrastructure issues, but I’ve been to festivals that consist of nothing more than a stage, a beer tent, a pizza oven on wheels and four loos, and everybody’s having a whale of a time. The more manageably sized events tend to cater for a specific kind of music and attract hardcore devotees, but they’re more relaxed and, at the end of the day, you’re closer to your car.
5 While each festival is possessed of its own unique character, the food tends to be pretty much the same everywhere. And not surprisingly: it’s the same people in the same vans, travelling the country all summer. If you go to a lot of festivals, what seems like infinite variety in late June begins to stale by August. But it’s also comforting to know it’s by no means your last chance for Goan fish curry.
6 No matter how large, alien and forbidding a festival site may seem, you’re still guaranteed to have an awkward encounter with somebody you know but weren’t expecting to see: a work colleague, someone you went to school with, a former neighbour whose name escapes you. The best thing to do is make an appointment to meet at a particular stage at a particular time later that day, since the chances of this actually happening are minimal. And do mention that you’ve wrecked your back putting up your tent, because sometimes people have strong painkillers in their rucksack.
7 You don’t get much time to establish a rapport with a festival audience. They’ve come to see music generally – not you specifically – and it doesn’t take them long to decide that you are not their cup of tea. At Camp Bestival, we played a gazebo in the children’s area to a crowd made up almost exclusively of under-fives wearing face paint. The ZingZillas were on after us. In retrospect, a song called Shitty White Wine was not the best choice of repertoire. By the time we finished, a fair proportion of the audience was crying, but I think a lot of them were just tired.
8 We were once told that the secret to drawing a big crowd to your festival slot is not to exhort the audience to cheer, but to ask them to boo. Once they hear the noise, people from across the site will make a special detour just to find out what’s so terrible about you. We actually tried it at Cornbury one year. It turns out that even if you’ve asked to be booed, it still hurts.
9 Don’t try to see too much. I’ve been among festival audiences where people start leaving four songs into a band’s set so as not to miss the start of something that’s happening two fields away, having left some author Q&A early in order to see the band. You need to edit your schedule ruthlessly, leaving generous gaps between each event. Otherwise, all the trudging about will break you.
10 Don’t worry that you’ve pitched your tent a bit too close to the busy double row of portable toilets in the corner of the field. In the morning, they will still seem way too far away. The next day, they’ll be too close again. You’ll be home soon.
11 Bad weather can really spoil an outdoor stage appearance, but if you’re playing in a tent, rain is your best friend. The audience will be packed with people trying to stay dry long before you go on; all you have to do is perform well enough not to drive them away. The trick is not to play too loudly, because a lot of them will be trying to nap.
12 Stage wear and festival wear are not the same thing. Bring clothes to protect you from cold and rain; more often than not there is no indoors. Two years ago, I thought I was going to die of exposure while waiting to play at Bearded Theory. Fortunately, I found a tent selling secondhand winter clothes. The audience was full of shirtless men in false beards. They’re tough in Derby.
13 Seasoned festival-goers tend to venture off site at least once. A couple of years ago, I started to notice certain campers returning to their tents on Saturday afternoon, carrying loads of supermarket shopping. One tends to think of oneself as being more or less incarcerated during a festival, but it strikes me as very sensible to spend a couple of hours of the weekend in a nice building, stocking up on crisps and boxed wine.
14 When you leave Glastonbury by train, you have to queue up outside the station to be sprayed with a power hose, otherwise they won’t let you on the platform. Once you get over how humiliating this is, it’s actually quite refreshing.
15 It’s not about which stage you’re playing, it’s about who’s on the main stage when you’re playing your stage. If it’s Ray Davies, then you can expect an audience made up of members of your own family and a few of Davies’s sworn enemies. Honestly, if I hadn’t been on stage at the time, I would have gone to see Ray Davies.
• Police Dog Hogan play Glastonbury’s Fields of Avalon stage at 12.50pm on Saturday 25 June. Adele plays the main stage, but later.
