Alex Martin goes tête-à-tête with his multiply realisable self in Glade Festival 2011's psychedelic field.
Abundant salutations are in order. The organisers of the psychedelic field at Glade Festival this year were triumphant in laying the foundations for a 3-carat triumvirate of pleasures, triangularly symbiotic in their capacity to both gratify and bamboozle. King Ghidorah knocked my socks off, and then proceeded to use them as finger puppets - Punch the Polyrhythmic Pervert and Judy the Joyful Jargonatrix - which acted out every fantasy the most exotic antipodes of my consciousness were able to entertain…boom ting.
In the shady, gladey, mazy North Easterly corner of the field lay the blissed-out, chai-drenched, mysticising phenomenon of the InSpiral zone, shaded proximally by a lavish canopy of majestic oaks. Aesthetic decoration came in the form of the mind-bending artwork of Californian artist Luke Brown, while sonic décor was manifest in exultant ethno-core: deep, wise, worldly and cleansing. The highlights of these bearers of good swill were, for me, Slack Baba on the Friday night, and Gaudi’s closing set on the Sunday evening, the maximality of which affixed a glowing padlock to the door to the portal of the Pandora’s Box that had been suffused three nights past. The magnetism radiated by the area as a whole was such that by the end of Sunday night I and two friends felt as pegged to the chai servery as any tent in the camping fields over yonder was pegged to the ground. And the ground in this area of Norfolk is particularly peg-friendly - firm-yet-yielding. We were quite seriously pegged.
In the far west lay the Origin stage, resurrectional of ontologically ambiguous entities as extant in the bygone Pagan era as in cosmonaughtic future aeons. It psy-boomed from its nascence, but reached climax during the daytime on Saturday when the Sun came out to play with bucket, spade, deck chair, puddle-skipping rolled-up trousers and a folded newspaper for a hat, like a smiling grandfather on a beano to a pebbled beach. His presence was welcome indeed; solar rays were absorbed by the rave as if it were, itself, a solar panel, and the resultant surging voltage charged the beatitude and vibe to the point where one considered the possibility a fuse might blow in someone’s brain, the soundsystem or the material realm itself. As far as I could tell, it somehow didn’t.
In the near West lay a smaller, self-contained tent powered by a Bristolian Opus rig and peopled by the foremost psy-trancing tribes in the UK on consecutive nights; Illuminaughty of Manchester, Planet of Zogg of Sheffield and the infamous Tribe of Frog of Bristol. At one point I was taking a stroll outside the aperture when I was ambushed by a group of ‘wandering ents’ - crack teams of ingeniously irreverent entertainers granted entry to the festival in exchange for their bonhomie and vibe-promotive innovation.
This particular troupe must surely have been one of the most bizarre, because the experience they (quite literally) forced upon me felt like one of the strangest things that had ever happened to me in all of my score and four years. There were about five of them, one of whom was vacuuming the ground around me while the others encircled me like a whirlpool drawing me into its terrifying epicentre. A stool was placed before me, and I was instructed in Franco-Iberian patois to pull pew. The next thing I was told was “this will hurt less if you co-operate”, and, mindful of the recommended procedure for being mugged by bigger boys as a young teenager, I acquiesced as best I could. But this wasn’t made easy by the fact that there was an androgynous gimp in a gas mask staring ominously down at me.
“Ooh, so obedient” cooed a humongously breasted woman in dazzlingly erotic burlesque. The next thing I knew I was having my armpits whiffed and subsequently deodorised, my arms and face cleaned with wet wipes and moisturised with lotion. Once my hygienic ablution was complete, my face was made up so that I resembled the most ostentatious of drag queens on a night out at Spangleland’s premier gay bar. My lips were rouged, my cheeks blushed, my nails painted bright purple, my beard sprayed silver and the remainder of my confounded visage doused in glitters of every colour and hue under the burning sun. When I finally caught sight of myself in the wing mirror of a friend’s van I felt acquainted with the multiple realisability of the self - it was more like meeting another person than gazing at my reflection. I have never knowingly worn make-up before, and certainly hadn’t planned too that weekend.
But you know what? I actually quite liked the entity I was able to introduce myself too, the peacock that lies within. He looked groovy, and we both felt good, sharing a good ole belly chuckle and a knowing smile, bearing rows of glistening gnashers, shiny from the glitter that had inadvertently become dentally involved. In a while, crocodile.
Main photo by the incomparable Bartek Szadura.
Read the peerless Lowri Clarke's review of the festival as a whole here.
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