bookmark_borderGlasto – Friday

Friday sees the start of the music festival proper. We had a rough idea of who we’d like to see but were happy to change our plans and so it was that we ended up catching part of Beardyman’s set at Dance East, before trudging halfway across the campsite to grab lunch at West Holts and listen to a couple of songs from Gonjasufi. We then trawled back towards the Pyramid Stage, passing Mark Potter from Elbow on the way (one of those double take moments).

As we got there, the mighty Wu Tang Clan were in full flow and had the crowd in the palm of their hands. We hung about for the last couple of tracks and waited for B.B. King.

To say that B.B. King has a good band is an understatement, this was a slick, well-drilled unit who delivered solid backing whilst B.B. did his thing. Not bloody bad for an 85-year old!

However, we decided to beat a retreat towards the end of his set, hitting the nearest beer tent to avoid the first real downpour of the day.

Once the worst of the rain had passed we nipped out to catch the last few tracks from Biffy Clyro tracks before dashing up to The Park area for the ‘special guest’ slot which (thanks to a colleague we bumped into) we knew would be Radiohead.

Yup, THAT Radiohead.

Suffice to say that word had gotten out and the place was absolutely jampacked with barely room to breath. People were clambering up on of anything they could to get a better view,  culminating in one guy proclaiming his love to everyone in the crowd from atop a wooden caravan and holding forth until someone launched a (thankfully empty and plastic) bottle of cider at him from about 30 feet… SPANG, straight in the face! The round of boos the assailant received was, I thought, a little unjust.. can’t have been easy to hit the guy so accurately from that far!

We lasted a few tracks before bailing out of the madness and starting the long, slow, muddy trek through the rain back to the Pyramid stage for an Irish band you may have heard of…

We grabbed a spot, setup our recently purchased camping chairs, and huddled under a poncho to try and fend off the worst of the rain. U2 were good, slick, and looked every inch of the “we’ve been doing this for years” rock starts that they are… again, the weather forced our hand though and we left them to it and headed back up the appropriately named Muddy Lane back to the campsite.