The Electric Picnic is doing its lunges before it showers us with music, food, theatre, comedy and craic next weekend down in Stradbally.
If this is your first rock rodeo we thought we’d give you the heads up on some of the festival folks you are definitely going to stumble across (literally) over the 3 days.
The Boy Scout
Now we all know that there is a minimum amount of preparation needed to survive 3 days and nights in a large field with 50,000 other loonbags but there are some who take as much if not more pleasure from preparing as if the apocalypse was night. Their rucksack is the size and weight of a wet buffalo and is loaded with every possible gadget and gizmo. Each possible weather type and eventuality will be catered for with military precision. They will have a GPS device attached to their tent, flares in a rucksack to ensure they are visible at all times, 4 types of footwear and a look of grim determination that could carry them across the gobi desert. The Boy Scout is the most likely to get utterly wasted by 3pm on Friday, lose all his equipment and wake up in another tent on Monday morning wearing a dress.
The Rookie
First timers will move about the site in packs. They will have spent their summer job savings on the ticket and a trip to Penney’s for 5 pairs of denim shorts, oversized sunglasses, a floppy hat and unsuitable footwear. Newbies will spend most of the festival holding each other up and squealing. They will make loads of rookie errors like drinking too much too soon, not eating, packing all the wrong things, losing their friends and not bringing enough money. One will spend most of the weekend crying for no apparent reason.
The Highlighter
Declan has been to every Picnic and attends at least 2 foreign festivals a year. His Facebook updates are essentially knowledge flexing exercises and peacock displays of his in depth musical taste and knowledge. He looks at the main stage as as Dracula would garlic chips. No, Declan will be found with a laminated running order of bands OF HIS OWN DESIGN resplendent in various highlighter colour codes at all the smaller stages aggressively appreciating the Icelandic hip hop string quartet that ONLY HE KNOWS. He will spend most of the gig updating his Facebook to tell you how life changing ‘Kja hpuapua kjhaoupou’ were. Declan is alone.
The Waster
The waster doesn’t know who’s playing where and when and most importantly they quite literally don’t care. The waster is as happy is spend the entire festival not seeing a single band and will gladly spend endless hours on a fold out chair drinking cans and trying to make friends with neighbours and passers by. When eventually they do go on site they will spend all their time talking at every gig they’ve been dragged to and zig zagging the arena carrying 6 pints in each hand.
The Earth Child
There seems to be an entire community of people that seem to exist in and around music festivals. Hair in dreads and wearing pyjama like pantaloons, hemp hoodies, beads and piercings in any available space and a serene smile that causes you to wonder...HOW DO THESE PEOPLE LIVE...WHAT DO THEY DO? AND WHY AM I SHOUTING???
