Festivals are an existential thrill, an incarnation of the art of living your life on high.
This is what festivals do: a city is built, from scratch, from the ground up, and most of the population of Galway city show up. They build it, and the people come. All 80,000 of them at Electric Picnic, a quarter of a million at Glastonbury.
And then, they knock it all down. And then, a year later, they do it all again.
If you have only ever arrived at Electric Picnic on a Thursday afternoon, then what you see and experience is the completed city. But if you had arrived several days before, what you would see is a template of a city, a sketch of the place where 80,000 people will arrive and then colonise and then abandon, in double quick time.
By late Monday afternoon, less than 12 hours after the music at EP has stopped, the city is almost completely deconstructed. The big tents are deflated, the stages are dismantled, Trailer Park is taken apart, the power generators are loaded and transported.
Or, to put it another way, Spanish Arch is on the back of a truck and headed off to Dublin; Shop Street is disassembled into a million pieces; the lights are off in the Museum and in Lynch’s Castle and the Druid Theatre as the buildings are taken apart; St Nicholas Church has already lost its spire. The streets of Galway city are empty.
Theatre of Food, where we have worked at Electric Picnic for almost two decades, will already be packed up by Monday morning, and carted away. Kitchen stuff and camping stuff comes back to a shed at our gaff in West Cork, whilst the rental gear is collected. The chairs are folded, the tables are folded, the bunting is folded. You build it, and then you fold.
As a metaphor, this might seem a little bleak. In fact, building a festival – the process is known as The Build – is a pure thrill, a vivid, sped-up demonstration of how humans behave in the world. And the way humans behave is weirdly ant-like: everyone working quietly and quickly and doing their thing.
Whilst the dismantling happens fast, the Build can be a slow process – as much as 5 months at Glasto, between a three month Build off-site followed by six weeks on site for the big stages. It’s the period of a few weeks before the festival begins, however, when the extraordinary graft of scores of men and women, working independently and assiduously, brings the concept together, stage by stage, zone by zone, tent by tent, that is truly miraculous.
Everyone does what they have to do, what they know to do, and somehow it becomes one: E pluribus unum. The guys and girls who do the Build conform to several stereotypes: people with dreads and big boots and hi viz erect the tents. People with hard hats do the tech and the electrics. People driving big 4-wheelers called Maxus or Ram drive around the place telling the others what to do.
The logistics of the operation would would melt your head. If you had the time for a bit of mental maths, then walking around the estate at Stradbally would allow you to count no fewer than 27 separate stages. 27!!
There is a moment which everyone of the Build knows well. You might have been working in relative silence, in wide open fields, for a few weeks, and then, suddenly, there it is: first Sound Check.
It’s often something from Leftfield’s classic first album, usually Release the Pressure, though Bicep have gotten very popular with the masterly Glue, and of course Kate Bush had her turn a few years back with Running Up That Hill.
It’s a signal, and the signal is: Show Time. People get ready. The Build is over. The Festival is ready.
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