The most expensive part of going to Glastonbury is going there and buying a ticket. This can be easily eliminated by not going to Glastonbury and not buying a ticket. Once these piffling inconsequences are out of the way, you too can experience all the unity, all the magical uniqueness of the greatest festival on earth from the comfort of your own home. How so? Simply do like we say and recreate all its pleasures from stuff you can easily find around the house. Your mind is Glastonbury. Glastonbury is only ever in your mind. Never forget that.
• Get an eighth of a teaspoon of coffee, mix with some soapy lukewarm milk in a Styrofoam cup. Now throw £2.50 down the nearest drain.
• Get a hamburger patty. Jump on it. Throw it in last week’s chip oil. Heat the oil gradually until the burger is entirely marinated. Grill until burnt. Now jump on it. Harder, man! Really put your back into it! Take two bites and throw £6 down the nearest drain.
• Go to your local post office at 11 AM on a Saturday morning. Queue for an hour, then when you get to the front, reward yourself with some warm lager, before returning to the back for another intense queuing session.
• Put your TV inside a triangular plinth at the bottom of your garden. Tune it to the Glastonbury coverage. Now turn the sound down to approximately the volume of a mouse coughing and stand about 800m back from it. Remember to give the thumbs up and cheer a lot when Tom Jones comes on, to show that you appreciate irony. For Amadou & Mariam: nod earnestly to show you’re in touch with world music.
• Fill your bed with biscuit crumbs, chip packets, plastic bags, beer cans and a young alcoholic of the same gender who thinks it’s their bed and is too drunk to be told otherwise.
• Grind your teeth for nine hours until they’re little more than a clammy paste and your mouth feels like it’s been gang-raped by giant lizard people. Now throw £20 down the drain.
• Invite Nick Grimshaw and Annie Mac round to talk about how much they really really love Glastonbury and how everything’s so special and amazing and all that, and how they really love new bands and how they’ve just seen this amazing new band called White Lies and they’re really gonna be big and it’s just a coming together of so many different people, that’s what makes it so unique. Annie may have something to say about a new underground scene she’s discovered called “doohbstep” at this point.
• Invite your neighbour round to shag his missus three feet away from you on the other side of a narrow nylon partition. Things she might like to cry out: “Harder!” “Faster!” “Slower!” “Not in there!” “Hurry up, The Prodigy are on in twenty minutes!”
• Complain that your home is “too white”.
• Complain that your home is “too middle class”.
• Complain that your home “isn’t as good as last year”.
GAVIN HAYNES
Some of us idiots are actually going to Glastonbury to try and make out with Bruce Springsteen. Keep your eyes on Viceland over the weekend for our impeccable coverage.
For more on festivals, check out out Festival ‘channel’.
Reader Comments
June 23rd, 2009
So i take it that Gavin wasn’t one of the lucky few to get free tickets to go report on Glasto huh?
June 24th, 2009
one good thing about seeing amadou and miriam other than them being great musicians is no one in front of you ever blocks you sightline with a sign like the old scorpions videos.
June 24th, 2009
take heed the advice of hippies and never forget that woodstock and the 60s were a state of mind, man.
June 24th, 2009
let’s make it easy. avoid festivals at all cost. even the good ones. at best you’re going to get a short set by a band you like that sounds like ass with 100,000 of your closest friends. yuck.
June 24th, 2009
True, really hits all the negatives of the festival experience
June 24th, 2009
My friend tried to get tickets last year, said online ticketing was fucked and she wound up not being to get them…guess she was lucky.
June 24th, 2009
nasty. flooded portapotties are fucking disgusting.
June 24th, 2009
Whoever had the great idea of putting all the portolets in the ditch in an area where it rains 250 days a year is a fucking genius.
June 24th, 2009
Go to Roskilde Festival next week. Weather forecast looks promising.
June 24th, 2009
Skol Bats man!
June 25th, 2009
i heard annie mac invented drum and bass?
June 25th, 2009
cynical fuck!
June 25th, 2009
yeah, right on, liking stuff isn’t cool.
going to stuff anyway and taking the piss out of everything is cool
June 25th, 2009
Glade looks good this year
June 25th, 2009
glade might look good, but the fucking sound is worse than glastonfuckery..went last year =, never fucking again.
June 25th, 2009
Oh, dry your eyes!
June 25th, 2009
RUNNY PAINT —-> Glade has moved to a new site this year! No more noise restrictions from grumpy neighbors!
June 25th, 2009
nothing can be as bad as Glade - endless fucking shite trance and all the tent have the volume so low because of noise restrictions you have to stand feet away from he speakers to hear them. and full of cunts.
June 25th, 2009
i don’t like waking up at 8am due to the cold (even on the hottests day), desperate for a pee but have to hold it until you can be bothered to walk all the way to the plastic toilet hole thingy. that really makes me sad. i don’t think even girls aloud are worth doing that for.
June 25th, 2009
Better than waking up at noon with your tent peaking at 100 degrees, after two hours sleep, following a 48 hour bender and some fucking earnest student outside squeeling that the first band is about to start and you’re over it already.
June 25th, 2009
Ahahahahaha. aces.
June 25th, 2009
Biggest festival article cliche of ever - shame on you for being so predictable…
June 25th, 2009
i would get one of those portaloos and put it on its back and live in it as a houseboat. it would be a great babe puller ‘wanna come back to my place i brought my own houseboat.’
June 25th, 2009
Ha HA HA - have you seen the weather forecast for tonight and tomorrow over Glasto? TORRENTIAL DOWNPOURS!!! At least it’ll feel familiar to the poor sods.
June 25th, 2009
Cant wait till global gathering … iz ferkin mental enit.
June 25th, 2009
one of my reprehensible shitcake workmates went to the infamous flooded glastonbury. never have i rejoiced in another mans suffering so much.
June 25th, 2009
Tucker - Roskilde Festival Sucks!
June 25th, 2009
Its a shit festival theres no way aroud that. Want a decent one? Go to WOMAD or Offset!
June 25th, 2009
WOMAD at least has cool music.
Glasto is becoming a pop bopper hang out for z- listed celebrities pretending to be uber cool 1960 hippies.
Stopped going the year Eavis invited Kylie Minogue..shit asking her says it ALL.
June 26th, 2009
oh please, not womad. Went last year and it had no atmosphere. No spontaneity. Full of yummy mummys and their posh brats. We got bored and left early.
June 26th, 2009
Hahaha amazing. You missed out dousing all of your clothes in a light spray of watery mud and not changing them for four days, and/or standing under a tanning bed for four days whilst avoiding all fluids and shade. HELLO sunstroke.
June 26th, 2009
What’s this dude’s problem?! Glasto is awesome. Most of these problems are bullshit - earplugs let you get a good nights kip, the food and drink available are miles ahead of most festivals - Ice cold brothers bar peach cider - a tenner for 2 litres is not bad goin. Why so bitter Gavin??
June 26th, 2009
hahahahah thanks gavin you just made me feel much better, and yeah a lot of that stuff is actually pretty spot on and apt! i particularly like the last 3 lines and the bit about world music.
June 26th, 2009
they will probably turn it into a tribute to michael jackson now. where were you when you heard the news. i was having a shit. how did he die-cardiac arrest-oh really, better than paedo arrest i suppose.
June 26th, 2009
I am so glad I am not going this year…It has to be the worst line-up of any large festival - outside Christian Rock Festival - period.
I could not believe they could have picked such lame-arse oldies and boring middle-of-the-road retards - it’s like Radio 2 made into a three-day horror!
I can’t imagine what the crowd is like, it would cause me nightmares…
June 27th, 2009
Believe it or not, there are more than 3 performers at Glastonbury.
June 30th, 2009
isn’t this sort of the same article printed every summer by all music magazines since the early 1980s?
June 30th, 2009
no, but you were posting comments about it on the weekend it was on - does that mean you were hunting out coverage?
glasto, as ever, was awesome. sod the boss, sod wanky white lies, sod all the cool kids who had too much attitude, sod the tiny bit of rain that came…big love to everyone that doesn’t get involved in things just because it is cool, thanks to the free booze givers and thanks to those that generally know why people go to festivals.
June 30th, 2009
Annie Mac iss one of those name dropping please love me twats that the BBC seems to have a few of.
July 1st, 2009
you are gay
the food is good
July 1st, 2009
THIS GUY MUST HAVE SPENT THE ENTIRE WEEKEND AND THE DAYS BEFORE AND THE MONDAY AFTER FUCKIN HIS OWN FAMILY!
MISSED IT ON TV SO GOT SO BITTER HE THEN BRUTALLY MURDERED THEM ALL FUCKING THE WOUNDS BECAUSE HE THINKS HE IS FAR SUPERIOR THAN ANYONE ELSE!
VICE SUCKS, HOW HAVE YOU NOT BEEN SHUT DOWN?
July 2nd, 2009
I take it you’ve never actually been to Glastonbury then, Gavin?
July 9th, 2009
this article pretty much summed up glasto for me this year. everyone spent their time complaining and we were so far away from good stages we just didnt bother. i felt sick and over heated, had my wallet stolen too… what a waste of money. Although one redeemable quality, animal collective sounded amazing at the park stage
July 9th, 2009
also why does it have so many fan boys bumming it to death? if anyone can explain the great qualities i am yet to see and what i did wrong the whole weekend ill shut up
July 9th, 2009
OKAY!! we get it, we get it. Vice doesn’t like festivals. Stop writing about them then
July 9th, 2009
This is, literally, the laziest article I have ever read. Did you copy the bit about putting your TV inside a pyramid from another website then add something about Tom Jones to disguise it?
July 16th, 2009
What’s an Annie Mac? Can you buy them in Camden?
July 25th, 2009
just go to benicassim- its the nuts, plus ya get to see 10,000 pairs of boobs on the beach
September 4th, 2009
or to primavera sound festival, tried to break in for free this year, just ran thru the gates!
September 9th, 2009
http://www.secretgardenparty.com
The festival supreme
October 2nd, 2009
i don’t care Glastonbury is the best
October 6th, 2009
your clearly an absolute tool.