Sunday was to be short and sweet. Loose Cannons were on their usual party-hearty form in the Breaksday tent, playing to an audience determined to squeeze every last bit out of their final day. The Breakfastaz also played an excellent bass-heavy party set to an enthused crowd before my current DJ-man of the moment, XFM’s Eddy Temple-Morris took to the decks to close the Breaksday tent for the final time last weekend. His beats and guitars set was the perfect end to a day of rocking breaks, and tracks like Killing in the Name Of and Song 2 had the entire dancefloor pogo-ing before 7pm drew the tunes to a close.
Yet again, this year’s Glade festival has been one of the highlights of my festival-ing life so far. While I did notice more attitude around this year than last, being shoulder barged a few times and also overhearing some ridiculous alcohol-fuelled confrontations, I still consider this to be the friendliest and most relaxed festival around, and everyone I spoke to agreed.
The festival’s size is what makes it; a very substantial proportion of Glade-goers attend both Glastonbury and the Glade, and so soon after the mammoth beast of a festival that Glasto is, it’s lovely to attend a smaller festival where it doesn’t take 45mins to walk back to your tent, where you can wander off from your friends and find them again without the help of mobile phones, and where there is space to walk and dance rather than just follow the steady trudge of the cattle-tight crowd. We spoke to one of the festival’s organisers on the Friday who told us that the festival intends to “grow organically,” perhaps by “a couple of thousand people per year.” I sincerely hope the organisers understand that, in the case of The Glade festival, small is most definitely beautiful.
There must have been some heavy weight of expectation on the organisers of 2005’s Glade festival this weekend. Duplicating the success of the first Glade can have been no mean feat for the festival’s organisers, but it seems they pulled it off once again. I for one cannot wait to see what 2006 will bring. Same time next year, yeah? Belter!
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