When I was asked if I could write a piece on my festival experiences I was initially overwhelmed by the wealth of stories I could’ve drawn upon to contribute. I’ve been going to festivals since I was 17 way back in 2009, during those years I have been fortunate enough to attend various festivals around the UK with some of my best friends and enjoy some of the funniest moments of my entire life during those dirty weekends away. Some of my personal moments at festivals include being crowned campsite wrestling champion at Sonisphere in Knebworth, participating in a VIP focus group at Download Festival dressed as a giraffe and performing live at Y Not Festival this summer as part of the definitely legitimate band: The Steak Baguettes. But as far as complete festival experiences go, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest as simply: the most ridiculous.
When I first heard about Tywyn festival from my friend, he spoke enthusiastically about the fact his mates band were playing and that it was only an hour away on the train from us. Having come back from my first festival just weeks before, I’d got the bug for it and agreed it was a good idea that we attend, imagining something on a similar scale to Donington Park being the venue of choice.
It wasn’t.
We arrived in Tywyn around midday. For those that don’t know what or where Tywyn is, it is a small Welsh town in the middle of nowhere. We got off the train and immediately headed to the nearest shop to buy beers. With four cans each in hand, we followed the festival signs and arrived at Tywyn’s version of Donington Park. We were greeted at the entrance by an elderly gentlemen who looked a bit like Bruce Forsythe without the chin. He charged us five pounds each and then we were finally allowed into the hollowed grounds of Tywyn Secondary School.
Shortly after we arrived, our well connected friend bumped into the band that we had come to see at the festival. It’s in my nature to be wary of meeting new people but they soon bypassed my inhibitions by inviting us to the VIP buffet that only performing artists and event staff were allowed to enter. To say we took liberties with our the amenities would be an understatement. After polishing off half our body weight in bread sticks and egg cress sandwiches, we began showing off to our new friends by putting snack size sausage rolls into plastic cups of juice and drinking the contents to rapturous applause from our easily pleased audience.
By now the event staff had tired of us taking liberties with the VIP buffet. We’d pushed our luck with the complimentary silverskin onions and party rings and, not for the last time in this story, were asked to leave the vicinity. We left with minimum fuss, the request timing perfectly with us running out of beer for the first time in the day. We retreated to Co-Op to stock up, with the only member of our trio old enough to buy alcohol inconspicuously purchasing three crates of lager and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I suggested buying a ready meal for one to make the facade look more genuine but he declined and, inexplicably, bought a whole roast chicken to keep us fed for the day.
We returned to the school field, beer and chicken in hand, and settled on a nice piece of grass right in the middle of the festivities. We sat blissfully unaware of the obvious ill feelings of everyone around us, until we decided to visit the nearest stall to us that was selling second hand clothes. We browsed the terrible selection until we decided that we should all buy a dressing gown to really get into those ‘festival vibes’ and, after successfully haggling with the bemused stall owner, we retreated to our area dressed in uniformal robes to finish our impressively greasy chicken. At some point some girls also preyed upon our drunken state to sell us some straw hats but the details on this particular transaction are a little hazy.
Fortunately these were simpler times. Like carrying a bag through an airport was much simpler before 9/11, three intoxicated men wearing used dressing gowns at a school fun day barely warranted a second glance before the posthumous Jimmy Saville revelations came to light. Had Sir Jimmy died in the spring of 2009, I may be justifying this occasion in a prison shower rather than ‘confessing’ it in a guest blog slot on a community website.
We finally advanced upon the main stage which was situated in the school gymnasium. Shamelessly carrying a half drunk crate of 24 lagers and half a roast chicken, we ambled up to the entrance of the school, clad in our matching dressing gowns and hats looking like a cross between the three wise men in a low budget school nativity and Paul Gascoine going to visit a police stand off.
After having our crate of beer confiscated, we sat down at the back of the gym and waited with glazed eyes for the band to come on. After a short while, the band took to the stage. We spent the first two songs sat nodding politely to the their heavy rock music until one of my companions pointed out that there were two school pupils on the dancefloor head banging.
Without a seconds thought, we advanced to the front of the stage and began possibly the worlds most tragic mosh pit, consisting of two school kids and three pissed up teenagers dressed in bath robes. To their credit, I remember the band being pretty good, but by this point it could’ve been David Attenborough lecturing advanced mathematics and we’d still have insisted on having a lairy jump around in front of the parents and teachers in attendance. The band mercifully finished playing probably the most awkward gig they’d ever played and we retrieved our half finished crate from the entrance desk and headed back out to our spot on the school field, which was now obviously highlighted by a circle of discarded cans.
After five hours of loitering around a school fete dressed in male nightwear, covered in chicken fat and thirty cans deep into an all day session, a man in charge of the event politely asked us to vacate the premises. The request was so inevitable we offered precious little in terms of resistance and wearily evacuated the area, relocating to a bench less than a hundred yards from where we were sat before but, importantly, just outside the school boundaries where we couldn’t easily ruin their well intended fun day any longer.
As the afternoon segued into the evening, the band and assorted relatives invited us to join them in a nearby alleyway to get away from the ‘hustle and bustle’ of the festival. I was apprehensive at first and it proved to be a justified instinct as the break from the ‘carnage’ of Tywyn Festival quickly descended into a group of long haired youths passing around what I can only legally describe as an aromatic cigarette in an alleyway, just yards away from the hugely anticipated raffle results draw in the adjacent playing field.
After that it all becomes a little blurry. I remember seeing the organiser of this blog on the train home, the three of us getting back to my house and eating bolognese, one of the three of us passing out in the hallway downstairs while me and the remaining one sang AC/DC on the Xbox, and then it was all over. Without doubt the most ridiculous festival I’ve ever been to took place at Tywyn Secondary School.
To this day I don’t know what happened to the dressing gown.
By Harry Freebre
thelvecollective.wordpress.com 