The Bride handed us the binoculars and grinned from under his immaculately trimmed and waxed moustache…’There’s stories going on all over this place. Take a look.’
At a glance we saw the village cricket game, complete with live commentator, a group of cowboys being ushered across a zebra crossing and a man about to be catapulted off the back of a flatbed into the lake. We handed back the binoculars, this hairy bride was right. He flattened his dress a little and got back to his observations.
Three days a year the picturesque grounds of Abbots Ripton Hall offers a temporary home to over 26,000 tigers, wood nymphs, native Indians, deep water fish, post men (and women), dinosaurs and fauns each year. We are of course talking about Secret Garden Party.
Nestled in amongst the farmland of rural Cambridge S.G.P offers a calmer, quirkier alternative to people daunted by the tent burning seventeen year olds of Reading or the mega-crowds of Glastonbury. The site is relatively small and revolves around the lake at the centre of the site. A small fleet of home made boats ferry people to and from the pagoda stage, swimmers wrestle with the weeds and the resident mallards look perplexed. A raft in the middle of the lake supports the handmade sculpture, last year’s zeppelin replaced this year by an enormous dragon fly which was burned down in exceptional ephemeral style on the Saturday night amid an impressive fireworks display.
An array of winter weather including hail was predicted for the weekend of the 15th so everyone pulled their kagools from under the stairs, their wellies from the back of the shed. (Or in our case, from behind the sofa). Grimaced and braced to face what promised to be a spectacular low in what has been one of the most bi-polar summers on our own personal record. But festival-goers got lucky and apart from a little rain on Friday night the event stayed dry and on Sunday enjoyed an absolute scorcher.
This is a charming festival, which pushes silliness and creative expression to the fore. From modest beginnings in 2004 (which attracted around 2,000 gardeners) the event now attracts a crowd of more than 26,000. And just about every one of the 26,000 were exceptionally well dressed. The costumes at S.G.P this year were truly outstanding and are surely making Bestival sweat a little as the widely held ‘best-dressed’ festival.
The theme this year was ‘Origins and Frontiers’ but this was taken by most in an extremely broad sense. In fact, our personal favourite costume was a man dressed as a ‘men at work’ road sign, dressed head to toe (including the face) in a black morph suit complete with prop spade and giant white triangle attached to his back. Commendable costume commitment, sir. We tip our hat. Although not exactly an origin or frontier though unless you count it as the origin of loud noises and slow moving traffic.
In a seamless segway between dress-up critique and general festival mood; S.G.P is all about moving around slowly, about lapping up the visual treats that the organisers have laid out for you. It is a calming festival experience. No need to scale a site the size of a small city or tussle with tens of thousands of other people to get to a point in the crowd where the band do not appear the size of borrowers. Generally, people appear to be taking languid strolls around the site, not once did we see the telltale furrowed brow of a person marching to keep up with a stringent itinerary.
The whole event seemed to have an atmosphere of regression, about enjoying the things that made you happy as a child. The colli-silly-um allowed people to wear horse head masks and play games consisting of stuffing balloons down your trousers while at the same time attempting to burst everyone else’s balloons. While the Artful Badger stage, set in woodland and tucked away in the corner of the site was made up of treehouses and climbing ropes. During the day and late into the night people climbed and swung from the ropes doing their best ape impressions.
To voice qualms with Secret Garden Party seems akin to prodding a puppy in the face. But if pressed, we would take issue with the volume of the music on the main stage. Or lack thereof. If you are watching Leftfield perform a live version of ‘Phat Planet’, we do not want to be able to talk to the person next to us. We want chest-vibrating decibels, teeth wobbling amplification. Perhaps that’s just us? But the pagoda on the Sunday evening remedied this decibel deprivation with the best music heard all weekend with Pagoda DJ’s including Adam Freeland playing a blinder. Surrounded by water on three sides as the sun was setting did well to convince us that we were on some terrace bar in Ibiza, not on what was essentially a pontoon in Cambridge.
But make no mistake, music takes a back seat at this particular music festival. It is about the effort and detail that has been painstakingly stuffed into every crack and rook of the grounds. The whole event is a treat for the eyes.
The festival seems to have enchanted just about everybody including Jody Thompson, reviewer for the Daily Mail who posted a rather long and gushing review on the Daily Mail site. The article surprised us a little, not often will the Daily Mail turn their spotlight from immigration and stories about rescued animals to endorse such unabashed hedonism. Testament we suppose to the spellbinding power of the event.
With no plans to increase capacity or endorse sponsors we have faith that S.G.P will retain its charm.
Roll on next year!
WORDS BY BEN WESTLAKE
PHOTO BY ELLALA.T ON FLICKR
