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Music

We Spent a Weekend in Paris Eating Quinoa, Climbing Fences, and Crying to LCD Soundsystem.

A wet weekend at eco-friendly We Love Green festival was enough to get one of our writer's hugging trees.
Photos by Julien Mignot

The first time I went to Paris I bought a keyring. The second time I sold t-shirts at a mate's gig. The last time I went to Paris I ended up wrapping my trainers in plastic bags in order to splash about in the mud like the barely concealed child that I am, and will always remain, for I was in town for the We Love Green festival, and that's what you do at festivals, isn't it? You stand around in the mud listening to bands who sound better on CD.

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Now, there's something inherently disconcerting that comes with being a Brit at a non-camping festival. Where, I demanded to know, where the tents doused in lighter fluid? Where were the baying hordes? The packs of feral post-exam teenagers teetering on the verge of committing unspeakable crimes? Where were the burger vans and 20 euro cans of Fanta?

Well, we're not at Reading anymore Dorothy, so you can take the padlock off your bumbag. This was a different breed of festival, in the sense that it was less about frenzied, foaming-mouthed hedonism and more about supping a plastic cup of larger and nodding your head almost imperceptibly, in time to Air's back catalogue, or losing your shit to Hudson Mohwake in the mildest way imaginable.

We Love Green was also, as the name suggests, one of the most environmentally friendly festivals taking place in Europe this summer. Huge solar panels that looked like the haunting eyes of utterly demonic flies from a grimly high-budget sci-fi flick were there—or so I hope—to partially power the main stages, rather than staging a coup against the blissed-out revellers who'd made the trip to the outer reaches of south east Paris. There were tree hugging stations: trees literally there for the more loved up, or furiously pissed, festival goers to embrace in lieu of finding an actual human being willing to make physical contact with them. And you'd have been hard pressed to find one of those grizzled, grey and rancid discs of mechanically covered slurry that masquerade as a £7 burger at We Love Green, for this was the kind of festival where reasonably priced, and delicious quinoa salad made from old lentils and kindness was the order of the day.

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It has the feel of a relatively new festival, all optimism and determination, even in the face of the weekend's endless gloom. By the end of Saturday night the entire park was a a basin of thick, creamy, shit-smelling mud. But the remarkable thing is that no-one seemed to succumb to the usual moans and complaints. They just got on with it. It being a decent night out in a highly civilised, incredibly moderate, French manner.

There was, however, one fleeing moment of proper festival terror that presented itself at the end of the first night. After LCD Soundsystem's gargantuan set—which made me shed big, silly tears—we found ourselves sprinting through what felt like the set of Deliverance in an attempt to find the exit. We clambered over fences, stumbled into severed logs, helped our fallen, muddied comrades, and all in all it was the most exhilarated I've felt since my eighth birthday.

It wasn't just fell running and giant couscous: there was music too! LCD were the undoubted highlight. It's futile trying to explain the way that live music made you feel at any particular juncture of time, in particular conditions, in a particular country, with particular people, but fuck me: it was like being enveloped in the Gods own hairy forearms. I'm not much of a dancer—anything other than a solo stationary trot is beyond me—but for two and a bit hours I was a flailing, lagered-up mess of limbs and gormless finger pointing. It was one of those exceptionally rare moments of unabashed enjoyment that you worry have become obsolete, discarded somewhere in the slipstream of your early 20's.

Nothing came close to topping that, in all honesty. The aforementioned Hudson Mohawke laid out a punchy, suprisingly heavy set as dusk fell on the Saturday night, and I caught 20 minutes of Diplo's multi-coloured clown act on Sunday. There were a profusion of DJ's I'd half-heard of in various areas and I particularly enjoyed a steaming Sunday night session bobbing along to some big tent techno, rubbing my plastic bag covered feet along boglike ground.

Look, there's no real downside to spending the weekend in a major European capital, listening to good music, with decent company, escaping the tangled web of shit comprising your 'real life' and feeling quietly smug because the main power source is the actual sun. Not one single downside.

But maybe, just maybe, it could have done with a flaming tent. Or two.

Francisco is on Twitter