“Those are very clean wellies,” he notes suspiciously between mud-soaked sobs.
“I’ve just arrived!” I say gleefully, like a recently deployed Tommy eager to have a crack at the Hun.
“Get back in that car and go home, son,” he says. “You won’t be able to handle it.”
He underestimates me. The clouds may have opened and the mud may be five feet high and rising, but the music has started and I am well prepared for the inclement weather. Bring it on!
I make my way to the Main Stage, where the Dublin Gospel Choir have somehow managed to convince a gathering mob of bleary-eyed pleasure seekers to bop about to ‘John the Revelator’ at noon in the rain. You have to admire their spirit!
Ditto the adorable mop-haired children being pushed about in wheel-barrows by deeply enthusiastic adults, and the denizens of the Victorian pleasure-gardens of the Body and Soul area, where people are strewn around campfires, admiring sculptures and drinking smoothies. In the remarkable house that is Electric Picnic, there are indeed many mansions worth exploring.
Over at the Crawdaddy tent, The Villagers are setting out their stall. One of the most striking new Irish bands in aeons, they have an intensity made for more architecturally enclosed spaces, but they epically transcend their surroundings, as Conor croons their brooding torch songs to spine-chilling effect. Now I know why I’m here.
In the Electric Arena, The Sugarhill Gang go down the audience participation route, and have the balls to carry it off. Master Gee, Wonder Mike and MC Hendog prowl the stage with intent, cajoling the crowd into doing peace signs and call-and-response catch phrases like there was no tomorrow. The Sugar Hill boys effortlessly alternate from fluid rhyming to instrumental riffing (when Gee and Mike take to drums and bass, the whole mood kicks up), and by the time they perform the much anticipated ‘Rapper’s Delight’, the atmosphere is joyously mental.
So much so, that I feel the need for some cultcha to help me calm down! Over at the Literary Tent, Irvine Welsh is reading from his book If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work. I listen to Irvine say “cunt” many, many times in a thick Scottish dialect in front of a chaise lounge and some book shelves. It’s oddly soothing.
Inspired by this encounter with the spoken word, I slither over to the Comedy Tent – the muck is still rising! – where veteran comic Sean Hughes is complaining about being described as ‘veteran comic Sean Hughes’. “I’m not a veteran,” he says wearily. “I didn’t fight in a war.”
Getting into the Electric Arena to see Florence and the Machine, however, is like fighting in a war. She is one of the year’s surprise packages, a far bigger star now than when she was originally signed up for the Picnic. Everyone wants to see her – which means that while her beauteous music sounds amazing, it’s next to imposible to see the stage and so I don’t quite get the full Florence experience.
Things are somewhat quieter over at the Leviathan Political Cabaret tent, where Colm O’Gorman is providing actual statistical proof that the children of gay parents do just fine. Senator Ronan Mullan’s “intuitive” (read bigoted) sense that gay parents are “not ideal”, however, makes me feel angry and then gay and then broody in that order.
To calm down, I watch a stripped down Jimmy Cake synth it up with their powerful new Dario Argento movie soundtrack/Krautrock direction. Interesting. Back at the Main Stage, meanwhile, Bell X1 soldier gamely through technical issues and emerge triumphant, showing why they’re actually more than stadium-worthy.
The music is flowing and we’re getting to the stage where nothing matters any more: the home stretch beckons. I dance through the amazing Amadou and Mariam at the Crawdaddy Stage. Powerful afro-beat featuring some of the crispest guitar sounds on the planet and lovely dance-off-inclined backing singers? Yup, that’s the way to do it. And then it’s over to The Flaming Lips!
After an opening in which a video projection of a naked dancing lady seems to give birth to the various members of the band, and Wayne Coyne is flung into the crowd inside a large plastic ball like a cosmic musical hamster, it’s pretty clear that it’s not “all about the music, man” with The Flaming Lips. It is, in fact, all about the joyous spectacle, with various freaky innovations including a laser show, a camera in Coyne’s microphone which allows his massive mouth to appear on the screen behind him, streamers, glitter and massive balloons regularly fired into the crowd, and the usual bevy of furry-costumed cheer-leaders to either side of the stage adding to the effect. Yup, even the Lips haters couldn’t call this set boring and most of the audience seem keen to obey Coyne when he instructs us to “be as freaky as you can possibly be”.
Musically, of course, it’s great too – an electric piano, sing-a-long version of ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’, a relatively rare rendition of ‘Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Internal Existential Fear’ (although this rarity is, apparently, slowly becoming a staple of their festival set), and a wondrous, seemingly never-ending, finale of ‘Do You Realise’. It’s fantastic. Wayne Coyne is in his heaven, all is well on the planet, and people who don’t like The Flaming Lips have been scientifically proven in studies to have no souls.
It is a very fine way to end the day, Electric Picnic 2009 brought to a colourful and enchanting finale. Till we meet again…