Electric!

I can now say that Matt and I are big fans of the Electric Picnic festival, it was brilliant!

We arrived in Stradbally in glorious sunshine on the Thursday and had the day to explore the festival setting up for Friday. A minimal health and safety session followed that evening where we got to meet the other stewards and found out our first shifts. We were all based in the Body and Soul area, basically a mini festival within a festival – it had cool art works (some which we recognised from WOMAD), a main stage which sat in a hollow, other stages, bars, tea tents etc.


Our first shift was 10pm until 4am and involved sitting on a gate backstage with a security guard, checking passes. Mainly we were just sitting, though we had some excitement when some guys jumped the fence (where they ended up in a caged area – we looked on giggling as they tried to find an escape route – we weren’t terribly good at being stern security guards!). The other shifts were spent in the body and soul arena and we had lots of fun chatting to the many mainly drunken but very nice Irish festival-goers. Our final shift began on Sunday night at 10 pm just as the first few drops of rain started falling. The few drops turned into relentless driving rain and lasted beyond 4.30am when we reached our tent – we were soaked through! We are grateful to the Hurly Burly café for sheltering us, providing us with free tea and music to sing to.



We managed to catch a number of bands we had wanted to see – Modest Mouse, Fat Freddy’s Drop (who were absolutely brilliant), Mr Scruff, and more… Mainly we enjoyed going round the numerous smaller stages and we managed to catch Seasick Steve whose main set we had missed, also Babyhead, a funky Bristol band, Daithi O’Dronai a really lively Irish fiddler guy and Spilly Walker who were very dancy electronica. We also the met the basist of a crazy, loud, heavy rock-rap band ‘Noise Control’ who insisted we checked them out when we came off shift, which we did – the sparks were flying!


We arrived at our final Irish WWOOFing host absolutely exhausted, and promptly went to sleep! We are at an organic market garden and have been eating tonnes of delicious vegetables. 2 days in and we’ve dug up courgettes, planted long lines of lettuces and spinach and picked 8 big buckets of cherry tomatoes. We had pizza, cake, wine and beers last night too to celebrate Matt’s birthday!