The Secret Garden Party 2006 Review

United Kingdom | by Tom Fair | 18 August 2006

It’s Monday and I’m far from feeling normal yet. Actually I am a little traumatised and totally ill-equipped to deal with reality I find outside the gates of the Bacchanalian orgy that is the Secret Garden Party. My defences are so depleted that a pit stop at McDonalds on the A1 seems like a real treat, something that my sanctimonious former self would never have allowed. As I order my bacon cheeseburger the look of fear is evident in the 'burger technician’s' eyes as she takes my mumbled order. She has, after all, spent the entire morning serving wide-eyed, mud-caked individuals and I am only one of many. Next year the Garden Party crew would be well advised to provide some sort of decompression chamber whereby punters and crew alike could slowly adjust to normality before braving the big, wide world and leaving the scene of the crime.

The festival itself, as you may have already gathered, was an affair of inspired lunacy. A testament to English eccentricity. No other gathering I have attended manages to pull off this madness in such style. Not intentionally anyway. Not only was the insanity of that peculiar British kind, the weather too conspired to make the Garden Party a typical Albionesque affair, rain, some more rain, a tad more and consequently a lot of mud. Managing to stand upright at festivals can often prove to be a struggle but the addition of mud makes it damn near impossible. In fact, it is fair enough to say if you weren’t covered head to toe in mud you were not at the Secret Garden Party in 2006. Man. But adverse conditions generally have a tendency of bringing everyone, perfect stangers, friends, lovers and enemies closer together. Look at Woodstock. Of course, in some act of supreme idiocy yours truly could not be bothered to put up his tent on the first day and so spent the first night battling with the need to sleep but enduring a complete lack of anywhere to lay his weary head. Well sleep is for losers anyway.

But what of the music? Well, as already mentioned I didn’t see a lot. The Egg, seasoned veterans of the SGP, played a fantastic set on Friday night, playing old classics as well as some new material. Everyone seemed to love it. The next day I failed to see anyone play apart from breakbeat superstar Adam Freeland and the only thing which stood out for me was his amazingly blond hair. Give him a nice pair of fake boobs and he could have made a fine lifeguard on Baywatch: The Transsexual Years. Another musical “highlight” was Prince Buster’s dub version of Hot Chocolate’s 'You Sexy Thing'. Oh. My. God. Whether he was taking the piss or genuinely thinks that he’s onto a good thing I don’t know, all I can be sure of is that for the next couple of hours my sides hurt from the ensuing hysterics that resulted from this entirely wrong cover version. “I believe in miracles, jah sexy ting…ting…ting” etc. Saw a bit of Dreadzone who did a good job of working the crowd into a subdued frenzy but that really was about the sum total of my musical experience at the event. And then there was the fellow playing an acoustic version of Britney Spear’s classic 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' somewhere in the campsite. Oh yes and Money Mark. Oh, actually I missed him as he was on an hour earlier than programmed. Which was fairly typical of the shambolic nature of this happening, but that’s what's so good about it. No fascistic programmes, no corporate-glorified-advert rubbish that is so endemic of most festivals in the UK.

Naturally most of the party was spent wandering around with wholly honourable intentions only to have them dashed cruelly by chance meetings with members of the extended family. You know the sort, familiar faces, often you can’t remember their names nor they yours, but they are friends for the next three days. Distracted by these close encounters you spend the next hour chatting rubbish only to find you have either forgotten what you had originally set out to achieve or realising an objective has been wasted as Tom, Dick and Harry finished their set an hour ago. Oh well, this for me is the essence of festivals, catching up and sharing experiences. Music always plays second fiddle to the social aspect of these sorts of happenings. Perhaps the music festival is preparation for life on the wrong side of 50 when we’ll all be joining Bridge clubs or taking up golf and talking about our wayward children who think fun entails standing in a field listening to deafening music. Indeed…

Back to the question in hand. The Garden Party seems to have grown massively this year. The main stage viewed from above is a sea of people bobbing about to various strange music; there are more stages and more activities. Fancy a game of space invaders? Head to the Digital Fortress. Want to see someone suspended by 5 steel hooks piercing the flesh of his back? Turn around and look over there. Christ almighty, what the hell is going on? Perhaps my most enduring image of this party is the chap walking around with a very realistic dildo hanging out of his flies. At one point a girl rushes over to him and begins fellating his prosthetic penis as though her life depended on it. I hope it was just a dildo.

In closing, I can only think of Napoleon, or was it Hitler, who once described the English as “a nation of shopkeepers”. I think if he witnessed the Secret Garden Party he would have described us as a “nation of cross dressing, mud encrusted mad men with a penchant for weirdness.” And he wouldn’t be far from the truth.