Secret Garden Party 2009

Secret Garden Party 2009

03 August, 2009
by: Lowri

We are lucky enough to exist in a time and place where the having of fun has achieved an almost sacred status. Life is to be devoured whole. Our playtime is hallowed ground. It follows that the well-practiced have become inordinately good at having a good time. The weekend I am about to describe has become a pinnacle of fun for a wide community of festival devotees. It is heralded by many as being The Best of its kind and it's called The Secret Garden Party.

For the uninitiated; SGP is a festival near Huntingdon which has grown in stature and reputation over its relatively short life to become an expansive bubble of wildly eccentric behaviour and creative freedom. It's a forum for whatever you care to imagine; a place where fantasy becomes reality and anything can happen. It is known for its wildness and spontaneity. It is not like other festivals. The production is massively, gloriously ambitious. The lines between performer and spectator are blurred, there's no distinct agenda aside from a loose programme of music. The bottom line? Anything goes.


Fancy dressed in garden finery

Twice winners of the Best Small Festival at the UK Festival Awards, SGP has expanded ambitiously over its five year progression and this year, the team have surpassed themselves. There is so much more to the site. There's an entire extra dance field with multiple venues for raving. The Rockery and King Nimrod's Palace – two tents side by side – are heaving and crammed with beats all weekend. There's the hugely successful Soul Food a la carte restaurant and World Music stage, there's Chai Wallah, Small World, The Remix Tent curated by Fabric and Ninja Tune on one night. Valley Of  The Antics, Where The Wild Things Are, The Hanging Gardens Of Babylon... It has entered the realm of a festival where it is very difficult to see everything.


Ravers in The Rockery

Last year, a galleon with a rig and a bar was adrift on the site's notorious lake. This year, they upped the ante. (Obviously). This year, the festival has two opposing halves; Eden and Babylon. Tickets bear the name of one of the two worlds and you are asked to dress according to your allegiance. Everyone I know is a Babylonian, preferring the decadence and excess of hell to the implied restraint of Eden.


Eden or Babylon?

In keeping with this theme the Tower of Babel stands, resplendent at the lakes centre. Friday afternoon and it's prime time. Gangs are being punted across the lake to the two storey tower, which is neatly skirted by a turfed garden. The histrionics of boarding boats in massive skirts and inebriated finery, balancing drinks, brollies, laughter and camera equipment must not be overestimated. The Clean Bandits - an excellent electronic string band - are playing when we arrive. They cut an upbeat line through classical to pop via 'Gangsters Paradise'. The weather swings wildly between antagonistically heavy rain, and searing blue skies.

A teetering peacock-like crew of bouncing smiles dance around barefoot on the turf. On the deck, attempting to shelter from the sporadic rain, a gang heaves and limbers up as the band play on. We're all here for the DJs. A triple bill of heavy-weights will fill the next three hours with the nuts and bolts of our day. More and more people are clambering off boats and flooding the tower. Even Bruce Parry is here.


Paradise on The Tower of Babel

Now, the tower is mostly outside - it's very much a fair weather venue. To shelter the DJs and their equipment a tent has been stretched overhead. It happens to cover some of the crowd completely by luck, but its water repelling properties result in it filling up and ballooning with water, which periodically dumps onto the dancers below. The rain is torrential, the music relentless, the mood euphoric. No one gives a damn. Garden favourites the Dirty Au Pairs materialise with an entourage and fake mink coats, looking less like Estonian Au Pairs with unexpected DJing skills and more like the madmen they really are. Head of State up next – another Garden favourite - drops Mr Fahrenheit and the tower actually explodes. 'Don't stop me now....' The problem with the Tower – the only problem – is toilet access. Most are getting round it by stripping off and diving into the lake. This lemming-like behaviour only adds to the hysterical atmosphere.


Smiles all round

The final DJ on the Tower is Your Niece. No one ever knows what to expect from this DJ. The stage is set, the crowd couldn't be more gagging for it and the as turbo-crunk specialist throws down a few heavy numbers, the tower shakes. The rain has been threatening to inhibit the fun, but then in blissful cliché, as MGMT 'Time To Pretend' starts, the sun opens its eyes and everyone collected on the tower leave the ground as one. 'This is our decision, to live fast and die young, we've had the vision, now let's have some fun.' The words could have been written for this moment. When the first few bars of 'Man In The Mirror' twinkle in to existence we all join hands. Right time, right place. On a lake in Cambridgeshire, screaming at the top of our lungs and it feels as if we're on top of the world.


Euphoria on The Tower Of Babel

Taking its cue from Burning Man festival in Nevada, on Saturday night they burn their centre piece – the tower we were dancing on just hours before. At 9pm, the entire festival is gathered, both sides of the lake, as hundreds of fire spinners whirl flaming hoops and chains around their bodies. Flames lick at the side of the tower, the masses cheer hungrily and then an explosion sets off a chorus of rockets, lighting up the thousands of excited faces and setting off a whole festival of fireworks. All around us there's sighing, cooing, cheering, a thousand 'wows', a mass exaltation of love. Everywhere you look, arms are thrown round the shoulders of friends. Chinese lanterns float serenely into the night sky and hang there, slightly uncertainly. The tower burns. It burns until all that's left is the scaffolding frame. Fireworks are still soaring skywards, snowflakes exploding in ultra-violet puffs; dandelion clocks which keep coming, like someone is blowing those clocks all over this collection of peaceful, happy people. And then, as if it couldn't get any better, Rodrigo Y Gabriela start on the main stage. These guitarists are the best I've ever seen. The noises they draw from their instruments defy reason. Their fingers a blur, they play on and on and the crowd dance and shout and bow down to their immense skill.


The Manjinga 7

The beauty of this place is wherever you walk, wherever you happen to find yourself, is where the party is. Wander around the grounds, and you see incredible things sporadically and spontaneously manifesting themselves at the hands of people like you who just happen to be there. Walk over the brow of the hill and see a band, suspended in a tree, playing their instruments to a crowd of cheering people. Step into a crowd, and at its centre is a dance-off arena, look beyond the heads of a busy tent, and there are talks going on, debates, beat poetry. It's possible that there is too much this year. That it's become slightly disparate. Crews are scattered far and wide. In the preceding years, you could rely on ending up at a focal point at dawn – along with most of your friends. This year there is so much great stuff everywhere, you have no idea where people will end up.


Sunset at the Collosillyum

The Collo'silly'um is presided over by a professionally ridiculous collective known as Bearded Kitten. It is a Roman-style amphitheatre constructed of hay bales with a mud pit at its centre and a stage with a club soundsystem at its helm. The mud pit is a recurring theme but this year it's bigger, better and more ridiculous than ever before. Sunday morning's games begin with 'two of the fittest girls on site' wrestling for each others bras in the mud pit. When faced with a mud pit and a crowd, the world can be divided thusly: either you do or you don't. Over the next five hours, we see some of the bravest and most bang-up-for-it specimens of human that walk the Earth. Eat Yourself To Death, Tug Your Decency, Wet Or Dry and Apple and Eve are just some of the games which are battled out in the pit.


A battle between 'two of the fittest girls on site'.

Wet Or Dry – my personal favourite - involves crossing a plank to safety in the most ostentatious way possible while the Kittens try and knock you off with a water canon. If you succeed in crossing, you must ingest a single, dry weetabix. The girl who steps forward for this feat is a nutter with mind-boggling ability. Back and forth she struts, water canon not even causing a stumble, spraying her audience with dry wheat. At one point, a girl behind me shouts 'I've got a tenner on you – if you eat six we split it.' Mishearing, Weetabix girl lifts her thumbs 'You're giving me a tenner? Nice One!' The compere takes this idea and runs with it. The upshot is that Weetabix girl is awarded sixteen pounds and fifty two pence for her troubles.


A game of 'Eat Yourself To Death' from Bearded Kitten

So what is the secret? What makes this place so special? So personal? It feels in some ways as if it's your own. It has become so much more than just a party to the people who go. It has become, in some small way, a part of them. It's entwined in our fabric. The time we spend together here, who we are together here; is significant. 'The Secret Garden party is YOUR PARTY. It exists because of what is inside you - imagination, freedom, curiosity, energy and irrepressible spirit' say the organisers on the website. It is still afflicted by licensing issues – which means music must stop at 2am – and it probably always will be. The thing is, once you've been a few times, you get used to it. You know the protocol, you sniff out the fun, and when you do, it simply doesn't matter. 


Festival savages

Like the all best festivals, Secret Garden Party is a return to the wilds of tribe life; freedom in the wilderness with thousands of other savages in fur and feathers all dancing, beating drums, running round fires, licking metaphorical toads. The gardeners invite their guests to do whatever they see fit. Whatever will make them smile. They are free to swim in the lake (for the first time this year), dance naked in the dawn, wrestle in the mud, roll in the hay. They are encouraged to shrug off their inhibitions, dress up, leave their phone at home and seize the day by the throat. Dwell on the perfection they find in being them. It's like being thrown back into a childhood where no one's around to say no. A childhood brimming with possibility and loads of other kids in fancy dress, all equally delighted and equally irresponsible. You can do anything. Apply these rules – or what you learn in this environment - to life and that's where it gets interesting. You can do anything – and that's the lesson or the sensation, the spark – that the gardeners want you to take away. Live to dream, live to laugh, strive to love.

Lowri Clarke

Photography - Dan J Austin

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Lowri