The Wrong Shoes

The Story of the Earlies first Glastonbury Appearance

Oh how we laughed!

Richard and me were sat outside in the car waiting as Nicky came plodding out in his wellies, with shorts on. And a hat. “What are you wearing them for? Look at it, it’s gorgeous!”

And it was gorgeous, the kind of day where there really couldn’t be anywhere better to be than Kibble Bank, Burnley. I was wearing a pair of Adidas trainers, some Umbro shorts, a Ricky “the Hitman” Hatton t-shirt. No coat that I can remember. There just didn’t seem any point. I’m remembering all of this so I don’t need you to tell me. This was all self-inflicted.

Nicky wasn’t to be put off. “It can get pretty muddy at Glastonbury,” he said, “even if it doesn’t rain the ground can end up being a bit of a mess.” We laughed more. “Give over,” we said. He got a six man tent he’d borrowed off our friend Madge out of the shed. “Have you tried putting that up?” I asked, no cross examination here, just small talk. “I had a bit of a go yesterday,” he said. “I think I understand it.” So you see, all sorted. Ready to go. It was all self-inflicted.

This was a scorching hot Thursday afternoon in June 2005. We were setting off from Burnley to meet the rest of the Earlies and travel to our first Glastonbury appearance. Everybody was waiting at Airtight in Chorlton, we had a big splitter Mercedes. All the gear was in there, the Hammond, the Rhodes, all my monosynths, drums, cello, brass instruments and more and more. All the camping gear was piled on top of that, tents and sleeping bags, even a few air mattresses and ground mats. The bus was being driven by Mark from Oceansize, a former RAF helicopter engineer turned Progressive Metal drummer who didn’t seem to mind driving for days on end with no sleep. He was happy to be going to Glastonbury again, a confident veteran with loads of experience and stories to tell. I felt safe sat up front listening to Mark tell me how it was all going to be. By the time we set off it was nine or ten o’clock and everyone was arseholed. That’s the way everything happened back then.

We were all excited, we were heading to Britain’s most prestigious and renowned festival and it was the first time the vast majority of us had ever been anywhere near it. People had been telling us how important it might be, how transformative it could be if a band had a great Glastonbury appearance and a little bit of luck. Maybe a few different people see it, maybe the reaction is amazing, the timing is perfect. Maybe the BBC pick it up and stick it out there on TV for the world to see. Maybe your fortunes change.

We were driving overnight, down the M6 on to the M5, stopping for piss breaks as we cycled through the extended party’s extended bladders. As we we started to snake our way along the South West coast storm clouds were starting to form. I pinched my Umbros between a thumb and forefinger, vouching to myself that they were probably a sturdy enough garment. I couldn’t help but point out to Mark that there seemed to be storm clouds gathering at sea. ”Don’t worry about that,” he said. “That’s just coastal shit.” He was an old hand, he’d been to Glastonbury before and could fix helicopters. He seemed to understand weather too, who was I to argue? “That’ll just blow over,” he said.

We turned inland and the clouds followed us, they were no longer just a coastal phenomenon. It was raining heavily on the van now, drumming away with the kind of intensity that can be quite thrilling if you’re not thinking about getting out to set up a tent any minute. We rolled down country lanes for an hour until we started running into wet and dispirited stewards who took turns sending us on laps of the enormous site on our hunt for the right gate. Nobody wanted to genuinely help us, they just wanted rid of us. When we eventually made it to the gate nearest to the John Peel tent the security guards were baffled, “The Earlies? You’re playing on Saturday night at nine o’clock, it’s four in the morning on Friday. What are you doing here?”

They told us there was nowhere to park but eventually let us pull in on the road next to the stage saying we’d have to go somewhere else when the day got going. We all leapt out and started grabbing our camping equipment from the back. It was around half four now as we stumbled through tents in the dawn’s half light looking for any unoccupied patches of grass we could pitch in. All the geniuses who’d brought two-man tents sorted themselves out reasonably quickly, finding little scraps of land on the hill above the John Peel tent. Nicky, Kate, Sara, Richard and me were hunting for a good three quarters of an hour to find some space that could accommodate Nicky’s borrowed family tent. The rain was at full confidence now, a hard-stinging, pelting onslaught that made it hard to speak or raise your eyes. Mark was still assuring me it would blow over, maybe it would but my outfit choice was now officially regrettable.

We found an odd shaped strip of land that was maybe big enough and started our attempt at assembling the tent. The land in question wasn’t flat and we couldn’t quite lay the tent out to start working on it. Only Nicky had the vaguest idea of how to put it up but he hadn’t been prepared for this level of adversity. We started giggling as we stumbled around, tripping over other sleeping campers’ guy ropes. We were getting wetter and wetter, and dirtier from kneeling in the mud trying to peg the damn thing down. We achieved some sort of sagging structure before giving up, the rain had actually become physically impossible to stand around in. I had never been wetter.

Much as the Leaning Tower of Pisa was probably a source of shame for some Italian worker who forgot his spirit level but brought joy to millions of strangers, our tent would be a humiliation to climb in and out of for the next few days but was repeatedly photographed and enjoyed by countless better prepared festival goers. It would end up becoming something of a campsite celebrity but it was unlivable. We would try and make a go of it but for now we went to sit in the van which was parked in growing puddles. I reiterate, I have never been wetter. Not even when having a bath. My pathetic clothes were heavy with water, my trainers were full, my hair was dripping, my nose was running. Quite a few of us had given up and gotten in the van, it seemed the safest place to be.

The rain carried on though, the puddles around the van were growing. The dirty brown water was ten centimeters deep, then twenty. There was no sign of it stopping. People were walking past in waders, festival organisers were in something of a panic mode, wondering what to do. It turns out the festival was actually in jeopardy and the first couple of acts of the day ended up being unable to perform due to flooding. The parking spot we’d ended up in couldn’t have been worse, at the low point between a couple of hills on a track that was already mud. As we started to near 7am the water was rising up to the bottom of the van doors, if we’d have opened them it would’ve flooded in. I sat there shivering thinking about all my equipment in the back, another couple of hours of this and the back of the van would flood and it would all be destroyed.

It stopped eventually, the sky can only hold so much water and so at about 8am the weather decided to let up on Glastonbury for a while. None of us dared move for a while, we were parked in a lake. Eventually those of us in wellies went for it and jumped out, it was deep enough that they stepped in and it poured over the tops of their wellies soaking their socks. At least they were off though, I was sat in the van in my sodden trainers wondering what the hell to do. Richard, ever the solutions driven optimist, suggested that I put bin bags over my legs and tape them up at the top, a makeshift DIY wellington of sorts. I took my trainers and socks off and popped two bin bags on and off I went!

It was an ingenious yet flawed system, mainly thwarted by the lack of a sole. The water was so deep everywhere that I had no idea what I was stepping on at any point. Within a couple of hundred metres they’d both snagged on various rocks and litter and turned into a pair of flapping wet plastic flares. I simply went barefoot, I’d been all over Burnley shoeless, this would surely be fine?

It was awful, every second of it. It kept raining sporadically and we kept trying to find somewhere we could shelter our heads and stand on firm ground. We eventually found something of a haven at the Acoustic Stage, the highest point on the site we’d yet visited which also boasted a covered bar. We got on the piss, we all looked atrocious. I was coated in drying mud up to my waist, all my clothes were wet, I had mud on my face and my hair looked like it had been steeped in wet turd and ladled onto my head. Nicky’s wellies hadn’t served him that much better, he was covered in trousers of mud as was Richard. Kate and Sara, both blessed with the kind of thick, Irish hair that reacts poorly to moisture, were curling wildly with mascara streams running down their cheeks. Tom Knott seemed fine, the people of the South West are built for this shit somehow. We all started laughing hysterically. Right in each others faces, laughing till tears ran. We couldn’t get any lower and it was making us laugh uncontrollably. Quite cathartic it was that laughter, I don’t know how I’d have coped without it.

There were no wellies to be bought anywhere on site but Richard, still a solutions driven optimist, had seen a new style of shoes made of rubber with holes in them. Jacob Collier was still just a massively annoying toddler at this point so the world hadn’t been overexposed to Crocs yet. I bought a pair for a price that you could reasonably expect to spend on a skip full of them and set off feeling slightly more chipper. The weather was drying up a little bit but that meant that the mud caked to my legs was a painful crust over my leg hair. At one point I’d simply had enough and started “washing” myself in a puddle just to shift the stuff. Whilst I was doing so a man in a van shouted out of his window “Don’t do that mate, there’s a chemical toilet overturned just over there, you’re just washing yourself in sewage!” I like to think he was exaggerating. He told me to go to the John Peel stage and tell them I was an artist and needed a shower. I did just that, the staff there very helpfully told me that I could indeed use the showers at any point in the one hour slot before we played. The following night.

So I decided to make lemonade, out of turds. I set off, Crocs on my feet, effluent coating my legs and an artificial spring in my step. Kate and me walked for miles and miles. We saw the Other Stage, the Dance tent, the Green Fields, the Children’s tent and the Circus. We even wandered around Lost Vagueness, a high concept berk display populated by drama students with dreadlocks. There was half a plane there which looked sort of cool. The floor was reasonably dry which was the coolest thing about it. We walked all day, just the two of us. It started to feel like less of a disaster. Then we headed to the Pyramid Stage as headline time came around. We watched a bit of the White Stripes but the main thing I can remember is trying to walk through endless bog with legs like rubber tipped meat plungers. Every third step the mud would suck a Croc clean off my foot. By the time we’d walked across the main field, past the John Peel tent and back to our comically misshapen tent I hated mud, I hated Crocs and I hated Glastonbury.

The Earlies were waiting for us, all damaged and drunk, gathered around the now totemic knackered tent as though it were a campfire. “I fucking hate it here,” I pronounced to everyone. “Me too” said Giles, “let’s do the gig tomorrow and then fuck off immediately.” There was a spectrum of agreement, me and Giles at the one end, Gripper and Alex somewhere in the middle, but then people like Tom Knott, Semay and Mark at the other. People with wellies who’d been having a reasonably good time. Giles had come in cords and a pair of desert boots and had been having a torrid time. The day culminated in him repeatedly slipping over in a patch of mud with nothing in his vicinity to hold onto. When he landed on his arse for the third time a hi-vis vest wearing workman had leaned out of a van and shouted “Come on Bambi!” The crushing indignity of it all.

Kate, Sara and me slept in the tent, Nicky and Richard bailed and slept in the van which was now parked in simple mud rather than a lake. We slept under our sleeping bags on the floor, we were too dirty to actually get them as we’d have permanently ruined them. The tent was on a slope and there was a pool of muddy water at the lower end but the high ground was dry enough for a couple of hours of totally shit, non nourishing sleep. When I awoke I knew I had to get wellies, whatever it took. I bumped into Billy and he told me there was apparently a stall that was about to get a truckload of wellies to sell. I set off with a warm can of lager and went to find the place.

When I arrived at the stall in question there was already a predominantly male queue of hundreds waiting in grim silence. Men in trainers, men in desert boots. Shoeless men, men in sandals, men in brogues- a fashion runway for the ill-advised. We stood together in shared disgrace, not even bothering to attempt small talk. We waited for an hour before the stall even opened. At one point a woman in wellies came past and started berating us all, “Look at you men, you stupid fucking men! All of you have got wellingtons in the shed at home but no, you didn’t bring them did you? You knew better didn’t you? And now look at you, you stupid fucking men! Queuing up to buy wellies for 50 quid…” On and on she went, I think she thought it would be funny and perhaps raise a self-deprecating, comradely laugh or two but it wasn’t and it didn’t. We were all too broken for mirth, we looked at the floor. We looked at our improperly shod feet.

Eventually the queue started moving, quite quickly too. It still took another 45 minutes for me to get to the front but it was really happening. I could really see it up front like some distant mirage, people were being handed wellies. It would all be over soon. I finally made it to the front, I could hear them saying “Wellies or combat boots? Size?” They were quickly filtering people, triaging like aid workers in a disaster zone. I finally got to the front and a woman asked “Wellies or combat boots?” I let out a relieved, croaking sob of “Wellies, size eleven!” Before I knew what was happening she’d said “There are no size elevens, combat boots for you,” and had shoved me into another queue and started serving someone else. The horror! I tried pushing back into the old queue, “I don’t want combat boots, I need wellies.” She ignored me but after a while the welly storeroom guy said “Okay mate, you can have size nines or size fifteens, which do you want?”

I took the nines, I figured the fifteens would be flopping around on my feet and being sucked into the bog every third step like the crocs. I was still too dirty to actually put the wellies on so I headed to the John Peel tent which had an artists toilet I was allowed to access. It was the best toilet I’d come across on a site, an actual portacabin that was being regularly cleaned, I thought I could make my lower leg welly-ready in there. As it turned out the sinks were pathetic little things that I couldn’t clean a leg in. I looked at the toilet and it was perfectly blue, full of bleach and as spotless as anything I’d seen all weekend. I stuck my foot in, round the u-bend and flushed over and over again till each leg was clean and presumably reasonably bacteria free. I then crammed myself into the size nine wellies, they were so tight but I pushed and grunted and pushed some more. I could already feel the blisters I’d be enjoying for the next week but they were nowhere near the top of my priority list. I enjoyed the top flight toilets one last time and then skipped off into the festival a changed man.

Things really picked up then. I was away, joyously cantering through puddles of every size like Peppa Pig. Obviously I still hadn’t showered or changed since Thursday and indeed had washed in possible sewage. I remember bumping into KT Tunstall at some point in the afternoon and she came in enthusiastically for a hug before gagging and saying “Oh My God, Madden stinks!” It was fine though, I can’t smell at the best of times and I definitely couldn’t smell me then. As the day rolled on we came closer to our gig and that meant having a wash. I couldn’t wait. At some point there was a 6Music session, Brandon was in with an acoustic guitar and they asked him to play something on air. He played a song of his called the Ground We Walk On which at the time had nothing to do with the Earlies but from that day it started its journey towards a new home on our second album.

Eventually the evening came. I could never do justice to how good that shower felt, it was magical. I’d almost lost the real me, buried under that thick crust of Somerset earth. But here I was again, revived by simple hot water. I’m presuming soap was involved, I must’ve borrowed some, there’s no way I’d have thought to pack shower gel when I consider everything else I failed to bring. I did have a cleanish pair of jeans rolled up in a bag and a Brian Wilson t-shirt. I had nothing for my feet other than my new size nines but I stayed barefoot, backstage was fine- clean even. I didn’t even need to unload the van, an army of super keen stage hands in cargo shorts and combat boots with a slightly condescending know-it-all attitude had already done it for us. I set up my gear on a riser with all the time in the world, everything felt relaxed and good. I discovered in good time that the stage power generator wouldn’t be enough to power my Hammond (or more specifically keep it in tune) but it was alright, I figured this out before we went on rather than somewhere in the middle of the third tune.

It was time to play, the thing we’d actually come to do. We were on after the Longcut and before the Magic Numbers which worked well for us. This was at the stage where the music press were collectively building the Magic Numbers up with lavish praise and gleeful adulation, so that they could gleefully humiliate and destroy them a year later. This meant that the tent was packed full for our show. When you play the Pyramid Stage, as we would next time we undertook this preposterous mission, you’re offering your wares out to a kind of generalised, ambivalent cross section of mainstream society. When you play in the John Peel tent you play to 5,000 genuine and enthusiastic music fans, people who have been listening to 6music every day in the run up to the festival. People who have an itinerary of bands that they’re excited about seeing. Plus being in a tent gives it an atmosphere, we all like a roof really. Something we could theoretically tear off. Our set from the first album was always a bit quieter, audiences were studious and often a bit entranced. I wasn’t exactly sure whether it was working for a bit there. I can remember playing Wayward Song to 5,000 quietly attentive people, rapt like a Wimbledon final audience, wondering to myself “Is this actually working?” Then we got to the middle freak out section where we didn’t care. As the song was coming out the other side, floating back down to earth on a feather of piano and flute, I heard one solitary whoop from the crowd which I’m almost certain was Charlotte. Then everybody joined in, they were cheering before the song finished and it was the best feeling in the world. By the time we’d made it to Devil’s Country we had them.

We came off , Nathan and Kate were waiting at the side of the stage saying how amazing it was which I still couldn’t quite believe. Speth had apparently played a blinder out front, we were bigger and louder than everybody else. After packing up with our professional helpers we went to the backstage bar where Marc Riley was waiting for us and buying huge Earlies sized rounds. We were all giddy on success, all our plans of abandoning the festival were forgotten. We’d cleaned the mud off ourselves and bathed in public adulation, its almost embarrassing to think of how much of a change of heart we all had after a shower and a round of applause. We loved Glastonbury!

We went late into the night, just staying in that backstage bar. We stayed there for so long we ended up calling it the Talbot. We still do come to think of it. When we woke up on Sunday morning we still had another small “stripped back” gig to do in a pie shop tent that Stu had organised, I have no idea why. We were unloading a few things from the van when Tom Knott came stumbling past, I said something like “Are you ready for this gig?” To which he replied “WHAT?!?” We then had a confused conversation where Tom told me we’d already played, last night. He wasn’t aware of the pie shop show and had stayed out all night. Still, now he was on the right page he was determined to “help out” despite my repeatedly telling him he could sit this one out. We played a short set of songs that kind of worked with less gear, even with Tom playing unwanted reggae guitar over them. Sara did the tunes that we’d put out on a limited edition 7” with her singing on. Kate even got up and sang harmonies with her, although afterwards she told me the experience was up there with burying her dog the year before. It all felt like fun now that we loved Glastonbury. The tent turned into a karaoke bar after our set and we all started drinking again. Nicky and Sara got up to sing Don’t Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki Dee. Nicky only realised once the song was underway that he hadn’t the foggiest what Elton actually does on that tune, leaving it somewhat lopsided sounding as a duet. This was followed by a breathtaking performance by Giles and JM of Hungry Like the Wolf. We were all getting carried away and then somebody said “We need to get a move on, Brian Wilson is on in a minute.” JM actually said to me, “It feels so weird that we’re all singing karaoke and drinking beer and we’re just going to walk a few hundred yards and watch Brian Wilson.” When you think about it, that is weird but that’s what can be so good about a festival when it’s working out for you. So we walked a few hundred yards and parked ourselves in front of the Pyramid Stage on what was now becoming a gloriously sunny afternoon.

And that’s when it turned into the best weekend ever.