Skip to content

Top tips for the ultimate festival field experience.

Festival fives

Short, sharp, essential lists for part-time field dwellers.

Signs that you've overdone it:

  • You're naked and body-painted from the ankles up.
  • People start calling you 'Moon of Orion', and you dig it.
  • You mix the dance tent up with your own tent and camp down for the night next to a massive speaker stack.
  • You arrange to meet friends outside the recovery tent.
  • You're in there shouting 'More maestro!' when Razorlight leave the stage.

Signs that you're under-doing it:

  • You're up at day-break, clear-headed and hungry.
  • After the final act, you head for your tent and tuck up.
  • Friends keep asking you to look after their valuables.
  • You spend more time under the showers than in front of the stage.
  • You keep phoning home just to find out how things are.

Always in the pocket:

  • Money (cold hard cash if you can. Guard credit cards with your life).
  • Sun-block (it might help urge the rain away).
  • Plastic bag (useful should rain hat/pillow/shoe protector things get muddy).
  • Condoms (useful should rain hat/pillow/shoe protector things get muddy).
  • Mobile phone.

People to avoid:

  • People who don't blink, ever.
  • People who reek of patchouli, including their children.
  •  People with dark glasses and earpieces.
  • People in Take That T-shirts.
  • People who stride about shouting: "Jesus says this is all wrong!".

People to seek out:

  • Naked mud wrestlers (because it isn't big or clever, unless someone else is doing it).
  • Your mates (six hours wandering by yourself can get lonely).
  • People who live in tepees (from a distance. Don't go in, you'll never come out).
  • Bar staff who recognise your thirst and like you.
  • Backstage security who look the other way for the price of a pint.

Ways to ensure people think you're a twat:

  • Wear a jester's hat (Do we even need to mention this?).
  • Sling handfuls of mud at passers-by.
  • Rope off a 20 metre-squared area round your tent for "privacy" reasons.
  • Smile smugly from the VIP area at the great unwashed.
  • Talk ridiculously loudly into your phone about how you've just been hanging out with your great mate  Beth Ditto/Rob da Bank/Faris Badwan etc.