A love letter to Secret Garden Party – the UK’s wildest festival

After 15 messy, glorious years, the UK’s maddest festival is set to finish, but not until they host one final blow-out event this summer. Despite its sweetly bucolic name Secret Garden Party managed to get itself a reputation as one of the most hedonistic events on the party calendar. Think Glastonbury’s Shangri-La area crossed with a colder version of Burning Man, with select, bawdy scenes from the last days of Rome thrown in for good measure. The first time I went I ended up heroically drunk by 2pm and spent a good hour guarding a door to nowhere and then letting The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding through it. Later, I found myself making clay birds with a gaggle of five year olds, which was probably rather inadvisable. I apologise now to their parents. It won’t happen again.

Jarvis at Secret Garden Party

For many, Secret Garden Party wasn’t about the music – it was about getting mashed, but for me – and a gaggle of friends who may or may have been covered in glitter – Jarvis Cocker’s headline set in 2009 was a religious experience. I mean, he actually knighted someone in the crowd. Take that, Princess Beatrice, James Blunt and Ed Sheeran. The same year Fleetwood Mac great Peter Green was coxed out of obscurity to play a captivating set in the Cambridgeshire drizzle. Over the years everyone from the xx to Lily Allen, Grace Jones and Gorillaz played. Secret Garden Party might not have attracted the biggest names on the planet, but it definitely pulled in the ones who wanted to have the most fun.

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I DJed at the event a handful of times. I would say it was a memorable experience, but once I played two sets either side of a Mystery Jets show, but got so hammered in-between that I forgot entirely what I’d just played and repeated exactly the same set. Classic Secret Garden Party. The rest of that particular evening is a blur of clambering into giant coffins, raving in a lazer cave before ending up in a exceptionally shady tent full of screens showing hardcore pornography. I’m still not sure if that was actually part of the festival. The last time I DJed there, in 2014, an ambulance turned up halfway through proceedings to cart off a crowd member. Carnage is one word for it. All of this makes the fact that Prince Harry was once spotted at the festival somewhat strange. Whether he was one of the hundreds every year who’d jump naked into the on-site lake with no seeming care for Weil’s disease has yet to be confirmed. He was however one of the very many posh folk who were often to be found at the festival, treating the whole thing a bit like daddy’s summer garden party, but replacing champers and white linen suits with cider and fancy dress.

So farewell Secret Garden Party, I’m sad you’re leaving us, but my liver is very much relieved.

 

 

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