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NYLON Contributing Writer Diane Vadino went to the Glastonbury Music Festival this weekend. We were very jealous but agreed to publish her blog on it anyway. Here’s her report:

FRIDAY
10:00 a.m. Leaving for Glastonbury! Except—the photographer’s kit bag is missing, and debacle at Hertz—our rental car is going to cost $400 more than Orbitz suggested. We frantically call police officers and rental car agencies.

9:00 p.m. Leaving for Glastonbury!

12:05 a.m. Arrive Glastonbury. Hearing the last strains of Bloc Party’s “Blanket” in the parking lot means…you just missed Bloc Party—and Lady Gaga, Regina Spektor, Lily Allen, Fleet Foxes, and Animal Collective. Desire to kill photographer mitigated by the fact that he found cheaper rental car.

12:06 a.m. Swap Havaianas for $12 wellies that photographer wisely purchased at highway rest stop—which is to say: hop around barefoot while trying to extricate flip-flop from giant, sucking mud pool, give up, put on wellie, move on.

12:15 a.m. The press office is closed. Swap press tickets for “hospitality” wristbands, without any suggestion that hospitality area will be stocked, as press area so tantalizingly was, with—flush toilets! Showers! Blackberry chargers! Hospitality caravan staffers report, with clear regret, that their biggest celebrity sighting thus far is Jack Johnson.

12:30 a.m. Hospitality area is divided into two, Republican-style areas of rich (in solar-powered yurts) and poor (with our $30 Karrimor tent and best purchase of the night, $10 head-mounted flashlight). Also, no Blackberry chargers. However: flush toilets! Result!

12:50 a.m. A late-night review of the Glastonbury grounds finds: a deserted Pyramid stage following Neil Young’s headlining show; 200 people dancing to “Billie Jean” at Reggae Delights; and a food stand selling halloumi-cheese cones, which has to be the most delectable thing I have ever heard of.

SATURDAY
9:00 a.m. Wake up in disgusting tent-sweat. Venture out to hippie enclave The Glade for breakfast of pancakes swaddled in yogurt. Fall on ground when hippie-constructed bench collapses into pile of wood and ineffectively inserted screws.

11:30 a.m. Insist on procuring non-yogurt-pancake brunch at the delightfully named Sausage Fest. Delicious!

12:50 p.m. Somehow manage to miss Tinariwen, the Mali blues artists who are not Amadou and Mariam, arriving at the Pyramid Stage simultaneously with Eagles of Death Metal. Give up; sit on sweatshirt on dusty field and wait for Spinal Tap instead of running over to Other stage for second half of Metric.

3:00 p.m. Spinal Tap! They are introduced as having arrived “direct from hell.” Estimate that less than one-half of crowd recognizes that Spinal Tap is a fictional band, and less than five percent recognize Lenny from Laverne & Shirley. Incorrectly tweet that Michael McKean played Squiggy and realize have failed in one, small task remaining for weekend, which was to correctly tweet things like that.

3:45 p.m. Spinal Tap joined by Jarvis Cocker on bass (yay!) and Jamie Cullum (WTF?)

4:30 p.m. Dizzee Rascal! Bonkers! Amazing. Of course, we miss it, as we are off in search of beer.

5:25 p.m. At the John Peel Stage—typically home to the up-and-coming-type bands—Bruce Springsteen is about to join fellow New Jerseyans The Gaslight Anthem on stage, which, as a native of New Jersey, I will find heartbreaking but utterly amazing when I discover it twelve hours later, in the newspaper.

6:20 p.m. Following a sudden burst of festival-fatigue—after an absolutely disastrous and finally unsuccessful effort to get to La Roux’s set, which will later be declared one of the festival’s best—we have decided to stick by the Pyramid Stage for the rest of the day. People mill around through Crosby Stills and Nash—unfortunately not joined by Young, as the few people around us paying attention to the set had hoped. They rock admirably.

8:00 p.m. Kasabian. Possibly the most amazing thing about this festival is the fact that everyone we’re seeing is beginning on time. It is definitely the most amazing thing about Kasabian’s set. Spend several long minutes contemplating gorgeous, spectacularly rain-free weather.

8:05 p.m. Debate whether the best in the sea of flags obscuring the stage is the one that says “I Love Sausages.”

10:00 p.m. Bruce Springsteen! I can’t help it; I love him. It is hard to tell how the British audience is going to respond to the Boss’s hyper-American working-class hero stuff and all the evangelizing (“We are here! To build a house! Of luvvvvve! And sexxxxxualllll heallllinggggg!”) but everyone is hopping around happily to a very listener-friendly set of “Glory Days,” “The Rising,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and best of all, “No Surrender,” where The Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon sings along. It’s all awesome, from “Promised Land” to “Born to Run.” Decide I’m going to spend the rest of the summer following Bruce Springsteen from music festival to music festival.

12:45 a.m. Go to sleep dirty but satisfied.

SUNDAY
9:00 a.m. Wake up in disgusting tent-sweat. Blackberry is dead; contact with the outside world, impossible. Including Twitter. Have utterly failed in ambition as debut Glastonbury reporter\tweeter.

11:00 a.m. Achieve intention of spending morning at John Peel Stage. Declare opening act, Kent indie rockers Good Books, the find of the festival, only to later discover that this is their last show before disbanding.

11:50 a.m. Leave Wave Machines to find Micachu and the Shapes, stopping briefly by the Other Stage to see Art Brut, whose lead singer Eddie Argos tells a story about being asked, while sitting at Friday’s Maximo Park show, if he was Maximo Park’s lead singer.

12:30 p.m. Arrive at Park Stage to discover no evidence of Micachu and the Shapes, only LA band Chiefs—but stumble across tiny BBC Introducing stage (sponsored by the “Avon & Somerset Constabulary”) featuring unsigned Bristol band The Fuel. (Not Fuel.) It is the most energetic performance I’ve seen (except Bruce, obvs), and frontman Danny (tragically, their MySpace is first-name only) runs along the crowd barrier, slapping hands with everyone. After the show their groupies are splayed on the grass outside the tent, panting.

2:15 p.m. Efforts to secure giant Yorkshire pudding ends unhappily, as giant Yorkshire puddings are not as delicious as giant posters suggested.

2:20 p.m. Catch the end of 66-year-old Tony Christie’s set on the Pyramid Stage. Honestly—after Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby\Stills\Nash, Spinal Tap, and Tom Jones, later this afternoon—the average age of performers on the main stage has got to be, like, 57, but I have a new appreciation for showbiz veterans and their patter stylings. I have never heard of this man, but I am in the extreme minority, and everyone else is singing along to “Is This the Way to Amarillo.”

2:50 p.m. Amadou and Mariam: not quite as awesome as I’d expect, and we pass the time wondering where Damon Albarn, who produced the first single from their “Welcome to Mali” and whose Blur show tonight is the festival’s must-see, is watching.

4:00 p.m. Stay for Tom Jones and his many songs of sexual entendres. The flags flying near the stage now compete for space with the panty-shaped posters hoisted into the air by middle-aged fangirls. We spot a “Skins” star, our only celebrity crowd sighting, but can’t agree which one she is.

5:00 p.m. Head off to the Other stage for three sets in a row: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bat for Lashes (who sings in a sequined rainbow leotard beneath a giant image of a wolf baying at the moon), and Bon Iver, who we are convinced is not going to sing loudly enough for us to hear but rallies admirably. Highlights: Karen O’s Native American headdress and “Maps”; Bat for Lashes’ all-girl band; Bon Iver getting the crowd going for the batten-down-the-hatches final yowl of “The Wolves.”

8:00 p.m. Nick Cave—more sausage—and then, common sense loses out terrifically when we decide to beat the traffic home—and skip Blur! This catastrophe is further enhanced when due to shoddy navigation (mine) and even shoddier driving (photographer’s) we spend two hours driving around the countryside before desperately following any sign for comparative metropolis of Bristol.

MONDAY
2:45 a.m. Arrive London. Declare festival best-ever—best possible! Swear to make triumphant Glastonbury return in one year’s time before promptly falling asleep on a bed for the first time in three nights, fully clothed and even dirtier than yesterday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Press Play, Wanderlust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.