With three Secret Garden parties under my belt, I was looking forward to my fourth. Whilst I was lying in bed wondering what kind of curve ball the weekend would throw me, in traditional festival style, my girlfriend Louise came through to deliver a fine in-swinger. She had a bunch of tissue under her nose and was complaining about hot and cold flushes. I asked her if she wanted to call off the cavalry for the event – she vehemently shook her head. So sick girl in tow, we made our way out to our specially hired van and loaded up my obligatory five cases of tent, fridge, blanket and everything else we could possibly need for what’s been one of the best weekends the UK festival scene has to offer in the past.
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The Skinny on the Basics
One thing that’s always impressed me about SGP is the food. Whilst other festivals have a thinly disguised burger bar approach to festival sustenance, the mood here was strictly artesian. You could have artesian pizza, artesian burgers, artesian fish and chips and even artesian Chinese style slop. I don’t know whether I was a victim of a clever marketing ploy, but everything seemed to taste better than your general festival grub. If you’re a regular festival head this was much more on the Bestival style tip than Glastonbury.
We were also camped right next to the hot showers, which are a real bargain at only £3 for a wash in the morning. This might sound a little bit high if you’ve never been to a festival, but believe me there is nothing quite like it for removing every trace of dirt and sweat from the night before, to get you ready for the day in front of you – amazing. Just be sure to get up quite early or you might be waiting for some time. There was also a naked sauna with its own little lake and cold showers, which was definitely worth the money when it came to cooling down and surviving the relentless sun.
Event Strategy and General Party Tactics
The most important thing about Secret Garden Party is that you have to be wearing fancy dress from the moment you arrive. No excuses. If you don’t wear something crazy beyond the realms of the yawn-worthy leopard print onesie then you’re guaranteed to look like a dickhead. In classic comedy fashion I decided to go the bad taste cross-dresser route, wearing a bunch of awful vintage ladies fashion including a diabolically bad pair of three quarter length pink leggings. One of our group had forgotten his kit so the girls made him wear two pairs of white granny pants – one on his head and one on his body – whilst they blued him up with a hastily constructed mix of blue face paint and moisturizer and declared him a smurf for the weekend.
At the Secret Garden Party there’s a giant lake. You can take boats out into the lake if you can be bothered to queue for hours for the four boats provided by the festival. Waiting for these is an amateur mistake – however, you are allowed to bring your own boat to the event and put it out on the lake. I am not sure why I’ve never managed to do this – so if you’re reading this and you want to max out your fun here, then at least bring a lilo for that Captain Pugwash moment.
I decided to avoid the paint fight this year. Every Sunday small bags of paint balls are handed out to the revellers. Then in a single co-ordinated moment of insanity, everyone hurls this multi coloured ammunition at one another creating a giant cloud of paint. Whilst this looks pretty spectacular, I’ve found that it generally also involves inhaling a load of paint dust and whilst I love to party, I’m not hugely fond of coughing up rainbow coloured lung-nuts for weeks after a festival. But if you’ve never been to the Secret Garden Party, it’s definitely something worth checking out.
Musical Proof
I have to admit that when I’m at the Secret Garden Party I don’t really pay that much attention to the music. That’s not to say I don’t love every single bit of the sonic experience – I just don’t feel the need to worry about who I am catching or what performance I’m attending. If you must have a name I can recall someone telling me I was listening to Morcheeba, but as this isn’t the 1990s and I don’t smoke hashish, I wasn’t too bothered either way.
This year I didn’t try too hard to get onto the floating stage, mainly because I’ve been on it many times before. The problem with this part of the festival site is that you have to queue for quite a while to get out on the water, then after about ten minute spell of surreal dancing on a floating dance-floor one of your group will usually decide they need the toilet and you have to all traipse off to the porta-loos. You have to have that festival one for all spirit, don’t you?
There are at least twenty to twenty five sound systems littered around the site – this is very different from many other festivals, which usually have around five or six sound stages. Instead each sound area is cordoned off by a large wall of haystacks, which prevents musical contamination in each area. You don’t ever find yourself in a situation where you’re listening to the audio from two different sources. This has historically been a massive issue in places like Glastonbury, but it looks like the Secret Garden Party has solved the problem in elegant style allowing a multi musical style approach without the aural blur.
On the whole the quality of the sonics was first class, with Funktion One sound systems in full effect. We spent most of our time at a large disco dome called the Gay Bar where they played a huge amount of old school House and whipped up the crowd into a frenzy with a bunch of glittering transvestites regularly frequenting the stage to do their thing. The Labyrinth also rocked out, with more House music – perhaps you can see a pattern regarding my musical tastes emerging here – but every step was full of great sounds for any Dance music lover.
The Best Bits
As ever, you really had to explore the Secret Garden Party to find the best sights and sounds. In one field there was a row of porta-loos – you went through a toilet door to discover there was no back to the unit, and you were faced with a huge field of sunflowers, thick and deep with five foot tall, yellow headed stems. If you made your way through this dense flora, you could find a multicoloured ball pit in the centre of the field and a grand piano in one corner. This was a surreal and intriguing addition to the festival – a place where you could escape the churning washing machine of dance mayhem in the other areas with a sedate and calming experience.
One of the traditions at the Secret Party is the Saturday night firework display. During this visual feast the organisers usually ignite an art installation that’s kept in the middle of the lake. However this year it didn’t burn up – there were rumours abound regarding some young ne’er-do-wells that had purportedly swum onto the island and screwed around with all the remote controls and detonation devices preventing the installation from going up in flames. This little disappointment did not detract one bit from the majesty of the firework display, which was not only one of the best displays I’ve seen at the festival, but one of the best displays I’ve ever seen. I was even in Paris a few weeks ago for Bastille Day, and the pyrotechnics here blew away the paltry fire-crackers I’d seen wrapped around the Eiffel Tower.
My favourite moment of the festival was in the collo-silly-um. This is a crazy place where all many of silly events and games are held. We watched as the hosts of the tent put on an Olympic style high jump competition with a difference. The difference was that competitors had to sniff several blasts of poppers – amyl nitrate – before jumping over the bar. The higher the bar, the more amyl the competitors had to snort. In the end the event was won by a forty something year old man dressed up like an old lady from Monty Python. Superb stuff.
Conclusion
Ultimately my weekend was tempered by having to look after Louise – you’ve probably forgotten my ill girlfriend who I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this timeless review – who bless her soul, was very well behaved throughout the event. She often returned to the tent to catch up some zees leaving me to explore the party with the rest of our friends. I therefore felt it was only fair to Louise to leave without hassle on the Sunday night. We crept off the campsite at about ten in the evening leaving behind a truly memorable weekend.
As a result I felt a little guilty about getting right off my face, so I didn’t. With about ten drinks in me all weekend I had one of the best Secret Garden Parties of my life – which I think is one in the eye for all those people out there who claim that this is just another playpen for middle class Londoners who’re looking to get out of their tiny little minds.
Perhaps it’s down to lack of novelty for me, but the controls in the event seemed to be stricter than before and it wasn’t so easy to get into many areas with queues everywhere – or perhaps the event was busier than in years gone by. You had to plan a little and take things as they came if you wanted to have a good time.
Finally there also seemed to be less art installations than before. A few years ago these were everywhere, and even though there were still some very cool visuals going down with a bunch of giant crazy red and white mushrooms in a field alongside a woodland installation with loads of upside down umbrellas accompanied by cotton wool clouds, I estimate the Secret Garden Party only featured around half as many as last time out.
Still, the party was absolutely full of crazy little moments and the organisers had clearly made all the moves necessary to keep you entertained at every turn. One of the most memorable sights was seeing a chap in a power-chute chuck crazy little LED creatures over everyone, which spiralled to earth leaving a trail of letters – some kind of cool and loving message – in their wake.
This is definitely an event for the Rave and Dance music lovers who like to have that go anywhere, see anyone, and talk to everyone mentality. You’ll definitely find that indescribable force that some people call the love here and when I returned home for once I actually felt better than when I left – reinvigorated and recharged for normal nine to five life.
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Image credits: Main photo by Jenna Foxton, Fireworks by Scott Salt, Fancy Dress by SGP
