Who would you recommend I see at Glastonbury? (other than the Wombles, obv)

Worst. Festival guide. Ever/

Wow you're not wrong

DON’T bring wellies

DO bring a hat

First, it will protect your face from the sun. Second, it will keep your head warm at night. And third, provided it is silly enough, your friends will be able to pick you out of a crowd. Oh, and if someone steels it off your head, it’s because they fancy you…

Get one copy editor guys!

It's so obviously written by someone who has never actually been to a festival.

With the driest May in living memory, with any luck mud will not be an issue this summer. So leave the Wellington boots on the farm and try espadrilles, flip-flops or deck shoes. That said, this is England, so perhaps pack a waterproof just in case.

Wait what if the festival is ON a farm?

Actually, forget festivals, I'm wondering if they've ever been to:

- Britain
- An environment with more than 5,000 people
- The modern world

DON'T forget to take your ticket. If you forget it, you will be unable to gain access to the festival.

That's actually good advice

better than the Telegraph's, and I'm not even a professional journalist!!!

So leave the Wellington boots on the farm and try espadrilles, flip-flops or deck shoes.

As hilarious as the farm bit is, unfortunately you don't have to tell a lot of festival-goers to wear deck shoes. Watch out for fucking Crocs as well.

I've just downloaded it and The Guide iphone app is actually pretty decent although will be completely fucking redundant by 4pm on the Friday when your battery dies.

are the wombles really embarrassing in the context of the average Glastonbury lineup

The Wombles are the ones that should be embarrassed to be appearing at the same festival as, for instance, Noah + the Whale. Not sure how many of the other bands on the bill have produced albums as good as...

http://www.tidybag.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/lp-keep-on-wombling.jpg

Picking through:

DON’T take a phone
Wha? You dumb? Take it, don't necessarily depend on it, but hey: How bad will the reception be? It's fairly open air at Glasto, it's not like being stuck down on the circle line.

DO take a pen and paper
Yeah, That's OK, leave a note at some noticeboard. Still, the mobile has more chance of finding a signal than your mates finding your note that fell off the board and is being trod into the ground.

DON'T forget swimming trunks
Um, wha? This means swimming, right? because if it gets so sunny that you want to go around in trunks you are going to get so burned...

DO wear fancy dress with caution
No. Do not wear fancy dress. Period.

DON’T try and see everything
Well, try and see everywhere.

DO see something new
Nooh, stick to exactly what you know and don't venture away from the main stage. C'mon, do people need to be told this stuff?

DON’T bring wellies
No, tell you what, bring espedrilles! They're great. And leave the wellies for mooching around farms. OK, being silly now, I'll go and check what the guide actually said.

DO bring a hat
Fuck bringing a hat. OK, yeah, actually, do.

DON’T go without the kids
Like the kids would let you go without them!

DO get some sleep
Um, better advice would be to forget the idea of getting a good night/day's sleep at all.

fucking hell that guide. plus it kind of tries to conflate tips for Edinburgh and Glastonbury... I almost want to go to Glasto now so I can point and laugh at anyone who thought turning up to a festival without a phone or wellies and instead going round wearing swimming trunks and clutching a bunch of pens would be a good idea.

Actually, re: sleep.

It doesn't matter where, or when. Nodding off at the jazz stage, or during Coldplay, or back at yr tent at 03:15, you will be zedding away and someone wearing dem wellies will walk/fall over you carrying a tray and go "oh sorry I didn't see you there"

Actually, come to think, they seem to have made the same mistake my mother made when I first went, and got it confused with Glyndebourne.

Telegraph guide to Woodstock

DO eat the brown acid.
DON'T say what F-U-C-K spells.
DON'T remember that the man next to you is your brother.
DO blow the whole thing.

Stages are usually full of sleeping bodies before 4 or 5.

DO remember you're a Womble

twitter reveals the truth.

Alexis Petridis HOLD UP EVERYONE, IT WAS AN INCREDIBLE PIECE OF SATIRE RT @guystagg: next time I will write the ironic bits in bold for you

They don't do Screamadelica in order. They cunningly move the slowies to the middle so they can have Loaded and Come Together as the full-blast finale.

also both Higher Than The Sun and Come Together are medleys of various recorded versions of the songs. this is also awesome.

Wombles should do Screamadelica

"Don't throw it, bin it"

DO piss in the stream

I've just downloaded it and The Guide iphone app is actually pretty decent although will be completely fucking redundant by 4pm on the Friday when your battery dies.

Not if you've bought one of these:

Just Mobile Gum Plus Universal Charger for iPhone and iPod

I seem to be able to get three almost complete recharges out of it.

That looks pretty useful actually, although I'm just bringing an old phone for which I have two spare batteries. Should be enough to get through.

My old phone used to last almost the whole weekend. I hope I don't spend the whole weekend on stupid apps. Kick me if I do.

Twitter was the battery killer for me last year. If I only used my phone for calls and texts I wouldn't have had to recharge it at all.

Yeah I think if I was going I'd take my non-smartphone Nokia, it has WAP or GPRS or whatever on it if I *really need* to get online and the battery lasts like 4 days

surely there's a java twitter app for nokia/ericsson/dumbphones now?

Oh, there is - I used to use something called Twim on my old Sony Ericsson. It was pretty rubbish, mind - better off on the website.

Do you remember us using Twitter at 2007 Glastonbury, Matt, and thinking it was well cool for ... arranging things?

Wombles should do Screamadelica

http://yfrog.com/khhpyp

They will 'slip inside this house' if those wombles don't tidy some of those cables away.

I made several very ill advised tweets at Glastonbury 2007 thinking it was just going out to six friends and not being published on the internet under my full name. Lol naivety.

I know it's misanthropy, but the way the papers seize on FESTIVAL SEASON every summer, and have so many aspirational articles about where you should go to be more "in the know" than whoever else, despite the fact these articles are blatantly targeted at people who still somehow seek cultural guidance from the last remaining dinosaurs, just sickens me. A friend of mine from work asked me last year if I was going to any festivals and I said "no, I am a big music fan."

Which was being a dick, I just feel like they've become like an extended travel section or something, not that it's really a reflection on the events themselves, just sort of ostentatious consumerism.

Having said all that I should say I'd LOVE to be going to Glastonbury, it is totally irrelevant who's playing. But the prospect of rain there is pretty awful. It's not really that much fun if it rains, at all.

I kind of see what you mean Local Garda - festivals have slowly but surely gone from being events attended by the hardcore contingent of music, culture and party-goers to an alternative holiday destination for part-timers and dilletantes. Fair enough if that's the way things are going it would be bad form to dismiss it. But festival season's seeing an increased transition between "We hitched down to Glastonbury in a camper-van and jumped over the fence" to "Couldn't afford the Seychelles this year, so we booked a day off work, loaded the Land Rover with camping gear, pens and swimming trunks and headed down to Glasto. The kids love the new Coldplay BTW".

If you're genuinely worried about that you're going through some Reynoldsesque mid-life crisis. I mean, complaining about gentrificiation is one thing but does anyone above a certain age really want to go to Reading or Leeds or one of those other festivals full of 18-year olds getting trashed and throwing gas canisters on bonfires?

umm... wat? no

It's not really the age profile that worries me, and actually I'm not really sure what DL says is what I mean. I think it's more the accompanying idea that loving music necessitates going to festivals, when actually I know some people who go to like 3/4 festivals a summer whom I wouldn't really consider major music fans. But actually I feel a sort of shammed up concept of "loving music" is kind of used as part of the bombardment to sell people festival tickets. I'm trying to say this without actually creating straw men...

I know what you mean - it's because festivals are embedded in the marketing process for bands these days, far more than they used to be.

xpost That is, i'm not necessarily opposed or worried about it - it's just something that happens when good things get popular. Admittedly, i do find it annoying having to camp next to a family of screaming children who'd rather not be there while their parents seem to do nothing but scream back at them from under the world's biggest fucking gazebo. Take them camping FFS, or leave them with the grandparents or whatever. I know I shouldn't complain as everyone's entitled to attend a festival, but it is a factor that put me off last time I went to Glasto and one of the reasons I sought alternatives.

If you're not going to complain, dog latin, then I will. For years, festival-goers have been told "It's not really about the music", the idea being that you should be too busy getting up to all kinds of great stuff with hash brownies in the stone circle to worry about seeing boring old bands, but now the average festival (Glastonbury is too big and varied to qualify) teems with people who think it's not about the music and they're not crazy psychedelic adventurers, they're fucking awful, because they're only interested in setting up gazebos and taking picnic hampers and being a part of the festival "experience" and not getting excited about any music except Kings of Leon and Groove Armada. Which is fine if that's the festival's whole deal - Camp Bestival, say - but it's infected almost all of them.

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oh dear

that was supposed to be the video to Adam Buxton's Festival Song and be terrible witty but instead it just ended up a massive embarrassment

someone posted this on another thread, last word in festival line-ups imo:

http://recordpreserveshare.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/the_standard_festival_line-up_template.jpg

No comedian?

I agree

Ronan, stop harshing my buzz re: the weather.

sorry Nick, just trying to improve my own buzz as regards not going. god knows it's hard to keep our own personal buzzes unharshened in the current climate.