​Paradise Isn't Perfect: Why Glastonbury Is Still The World's Strangest Night Out

The sun has been up for an hour, maybe more. It's nearly 7 AM, and a skeletal man in a fur coat and a trilby is approaching me. As he gets closer I notice there is a dead ferret around his neck. Having been up for around 26 hours, I'm in no fit state to deal with this interaction, so I'm spinning my head around in every direction possible trying to avert his gaze. He's getting closer, negotiating sprawled bodies and campfires, kicking nos cannisters and crushing empty cans of stella underfoot. Then, seconds before he reaches me, he is diverted by a friend with thick matted dreads, a sheepskin waistcoat, and a fishing rod in his hand. I lie back in relief, the light morning sun catching my face as I close my eyes. This is a night out at Glastonbury festival; one moment bizarre and beautiful, the next ugly, and unending. It's a paradise, but completely on its own terms.

There are seemingly two ways of doing it. You can, of course, go for the BBC experience. Wake yourself up with the sun each day, and pad around in wellies catching the floating echoes of over-hyped bands on the Other stage, waiting in lines for burritos and head massages; or you can do Glastonbury by night. Muddle your way through the middle of the day, sleeping where you can find shade, until the evening brings back your wave of energy, and you journey out to the dance villages. We, went for the latter. Obviously the headlines will go to the Pyramid stage, but Glastonbury has one of the strongest electronic line-ups in the world. And we intended to see as much of it as possible.

Earlier that evening we had arrived on site and got our camp pitched, experiencing the unrivaled buzz of arriving and settling for our first night. The bags that had been tearing burnt-white marks into our shoulders had been dumped, the tent had been hastily assembled, and now we had the first of a supply of warm cans of beer in our hands. As we took drags from that first rollie, slumped into the green camp chair we'd just dragged across Worthy Farm, the air was full of a mood somewhere between bliss and impossible expectation. This is what Glastonbury is capable of now. More than forty years after the inaugural festival, it has now grown to such a size, both physically and in our imaginations, that it has become something far greater than any of the acts or stages that fill it. It is a wonderland to get lost in. Burning hot, or punishingly water-logged. The longest weekend of your life.

Much of this is down to the natural growth of the festival. Far from the constructed whimsy of festivals like Burning Man, the Glastonbury crowd seem caked into the landscape. Much of the time, as we weaved between lantern lit trees and elaborately themed, fire-spitting stages, the faces of men and women lost deep in bizarre fancy-dress informed characters seemed so sincere, it was hard to imagine how on earth they go back to being students, insurance brokers, or care workers on the Tuesday morning.

In terms of music we were spoilt. From Hot Chip, to Seth Troxler, to Mumdance, to Caribou, to Idris Elba (yeah, really), the DJ's and electronic artists on the bill brought their absolute A-games. There were big names in big places; starting our weekend with J.E.S.u.S. (Jackmaster, Eats Everything, Skream and Seth Troxler), or Jamie xx who pulled Friday evening into the night with a beautifully paced set on the Park Stage. Yet as is the way with Glastonbury, some of the biggest treats were in the smallest places, and this was no more true than of the Stonebridge Bar, an over-stuffed tent housing an Italo focussed set from Bicep, who gave way to a Ben UFO and Joy Orbison B2B. Moments like this are what keeps Glastonbury alive. It's not there's "something for everybody", rather that everybody is there for something. Whether we were tucking into Felix Dickinson in Block 9, or Mandidextrous' belting jungle-tek in the Unfairground, the crowd that had swamped there were devoted. With 177,000 attending, you can bet that every act will draw in a small army of heads. It's the equivalent of nearly fifty clubs popping off at the same time. On a farm.

The festival draws in the people as well though, and this is where things can get murky. Glastonbury has everything, and more. With so much on offer, and the hedonistic freedom of an anonymous five day session in the middle of the countryside, it is easy to get a little lost. As we weaved through the crowded tracks on Saturday night, a couple approached us, we assumed, to ask us something. When they arrived, the boyfriend spoke, "she's only a pea, a pea in a pod." The girlfriend giggled once, and curled up into a ball on the dusty floor. Interactions like this are of course pretty hilarious, but also incredibly frequent. What at 11PM are occasional heavy revellers, by 5AM has turned into a unanimous delirium. Cast your eyes around Shangri La as the sun is coming up and it can be hard to know whether what you are witnessing is brilliance, complete chaos, or both.

This encompassing cloud of hemp-wearing hedonism got the better of us eventually. By early Saturday morning, we ended up stuffed into a small room barely bigger than a cupboard. Tiredness, sunshine, and everything else, had left us dancing reflexively and staring long into a mirror ball speckled darkness. These moments are the other side of Glastonbury's blisses. The slips and slides into a sort of nothingness that such expansive celebration induces. Snapping out of the depths, we realised a group of men with pink wigs and dyed beards were laughing at us, they had been for some time.

Of course, we could have gone to bed, but Glastonbury doesn't want you to do that. There is always something else, another plan. A trip to the stone circle, a friend of a friend who is playing a DJ set from a fish and chip van, the Dalai Lama. At some point, we had to face the facts, that possibly, missing Ibibio Sound Machine was worth it for our mind's sake. We'd been shuffling around big tops for three long nights, and needed more than three hours to recover this time. Waking up early on Sunday afternoon, to the usual furious heat of a sun-trapped tent, we felt at least a little closer to ready for more music. Nearing the end of the weekend, the whole festival takes on the same attitude. Both the churned, littered land, and the great unwashed masses, take a deep breath, ready to stumble one more time into the trees.

Sunday, despite being the day associated with that shitty "here comes the real world" feeling as the weekend winds down, was absolute magic. Bleary eyed and fighting off pangs of hunger with the remainder of our squashed cereal bars, we enjoyed a perfectly pitched performance from FKA Twigs, before ambling over to the Wow! Stage to catch The Bug's spooky, dub-infected beats. From here, we packed the last few tinnies into a crumpled tote, and trundled across to the Genosys stage for Robert Hood.

It was here, as the sun started to turn the black night's sky a milky blue, Hood dropped Frankie Knuckles & Director's Cut's "Get Over U", and a smelly woman in a police hat and a tutu offered me an empty packet of chewing gum, that our wonderful, exhausting, weekend made sense. To properly enjoy the best of Glastonbury's nightlife, you've got to be ready for the worst. Aching joints, sunburn, sickness, funny looks and even funnier smells. If you can get past that, the best will leave you flying.

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