And then they sang...And it was AWESOME!

I am back and I feel much better (if totally wired from caffeine and lack of sleep). Thanks so much for all your well wishes, festivalling was strangely the emotional pick up I really needed which is weird because in many ways festivals should be an emotional Molotov cocktail for me (so many people, standing so close, so little sleep, so many obnoxious people alongside the very nice ones) but the key ingredient for making me a shiny happy person under these circumstance is live bands. Pretty much going to use this post to name drop all the acts we saw at the festival:

Bands and singers we saw:

Vampire Weekend
Belle and Sebastian (festival highlight, pretty much bounced the entire time)
Florence and the Machine
Mumford and Sons
Noah and the Whale
Frightened Rabbit
Paul Heaton
Laura Marling
Spoon
Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Jonsi
The Coral
Joshua Radin
Tom Jones (the super secret surprise gig on the Sunday)
Mumford and Sons

Comedians and performance shows we saw:

Rich Hall
Ardlan O’Hanlon
The Early Edition with Marcus Brigstocke
Rufus Hound
Andi Oshi
Josie Long
Kevin Eldon
Latitude’s New Act of the Year Award (and then we saw the runner up perform the second show that you win if the judges pick you)
Funny Women Awards show
Whoever the guy is who wrote the Horrid Henry books (we peeked into the lit tent on Friday and watched him perform a fight over a purple dinosaur for small children, with hand bells – I think it was probably quite surreal if you were smoking something)

Bands and singers we saw a little of:

Sweet Baboo
Angus and Julia Stone (sad we just about arrived on the first day in time to see the last four songs of their set, but I wish we’d seen it all)
Nadine Shah
Frankie and the Heartstrings

Bands or performers we heard from a spot of grass away from an arena, probably because we were too knackered to move:

Hockey
Rodrigo and Gabriella
Midlake
Temper Trap

Things we saw just wandering in general:

Rainbow coloured sheep
An Bacchanalian art installation being painted in purple paint and some kind of sandy coloured charcoal stick
The cast of the Hair musical warming up
A steward guarding an empty sphere, even though he had no idea what it was for (apparently it was for some kind of psychedelic alien landing performance piece, but we had a lot of fun imagining that some of the organisers were messing with the stewards by making them guard random objects for fun)
A light show projected on water spray at night
A lot of fancy dress and face painting – most excitingly for me a teenage guy with a unicorn head painted on his cheek

Bands we missed because we went to the wrong stage:

Only one! A miracle in my opinion. Sadly it was ‘The Quails’ we missed, but we did get a bit of a sit down in the cool forest and heard the last few songs from Nadine Shah.

Instances of bad festival planning:

Again only one! I’m not including schedule clashes here, because those happen (everything literary that I wanted to see clashed with a band I reeeeeeeeeaalllly needed to see). We wanted to see the Swan Lake act and it was on a stage in the middle of the lake – well it turned out ballet was bizarrely popular at Latitude and people worked out they could see it from the bridge. Bridge and banks around it got clogged – could not watch the ballet, could not get across the bridge to see other things. They had two performances and it was the same each time, so we mostly ate lunch at those times.

Best festival food experiences:

I ignore that everything was ridiculously over priced and we ate a lot of biscuits and Pringles in the tent, because we all know festivals gouge you for every penny (my programme was £8!). The absolute best food was vegetarian noodles with curry sauce and crisp mini spring rolls in sweet chilli sauce. But a very good food idea came right at the end of the weekend, where we back tracked and picked up milkshakes made from blended chocolate bars after Vampire Weekend to soothe our broken throats – Mint Aero, yummmmm.

Things that made paying extra for Tangerine fields well worth it:

Proper toilets that were clean all the time and never smelled
Strong tea at a cafe two minutes from our tent on the last morning
Feeling kind of smug about just having the one bag on the way back to the car
Air mattress – sleeping on the ground, ‘nuff said
Being far enough away to finish breakfast beer on the way to the arena, but not so far away we wanted to collapse every time we had to walk back to the tent

And perhaps you are thinking ‘hmm but there were things on after the headliners, did you see nothing of them?’. The answer is no, we had pretty hardcore days but then had to collapse at the end of each one – every day we would return to the tent for a little rest after the headliners, think about going back out, eat some biscuits, drink a couple of beers, then collapse. I was so tempted to stay another hour in the arena after Belle and Sebastian to see China Melville, but sleep won out.

I did get back quarter of an hour before speedway on Monday though and went right from a train to two and a half hours of speedway (tea is the magical elixir).

So, hurray well worth it and so much cheaper than every other festival I could have gone to. I was reminded that there are times when if it wasn’t for the entertainment festivals would be my idea of Hell on Earth, but since there is really no reason to go to such a crowded field without entertainment I guess I don’t have to worry about that ever.

How was everybody else’s weekend? Did you all have lovely weather like we did (yes even the people who are experiencing winter now, because maybe it was one of those perfect crisp winter days)?