by Grace Dent
“So why, oh why, Daphne, don’t you go and see him and the rest of us can entertain ourselves?” suggests Claude.
“Suits me just fine,” says Fleur. Then she realizes what Claude’s suggesting and gives a small mischievous smile.
Daphne looks at us apprehensively.
She knows this wasn’t strictly what was on that contract.
“Well ... er, are you sure you’ll be okay? I mean, I won’t be long,and ...”
“We’ll be fine,” assures Claude. “I promise you, Daphne.”
Claudette Cassiera possesses these weird Jedi mind trick powers, which makes people do things they wouldn’t normally dream of.
It’s really quite remarkable.
And in this case, faster than you could say, “I’ll be two hours, max. Don’t get into any trouble. Call me if you need anything,” Daphne Swan has scooched herself with a cloud of Body Shop White Musk perfume and vanished to the Ethnic Drumming Zone, leaving the LBD alone and totally free at Astlebury Festival!
I’ve not seen Fleur look so happy since Jimi last sprained his wrist skating.
“Right, let’s go exploring!” shouts Fleur as her hippie-dippie sister becomes a patchwork dot in the distance.
“Coolio!” agrees Claudette.
“Let’s go now!” I shout.
We burst through the Magical Glade’s gates and scamper down the tiny dust track separating us from the main body of the festival, bouncing with excitement as we join the growing nighttime chaos. It feels like we’ve been transported to a different faraway galaxy. The Magical Glade is now utterly jam packed with tents, and new arrivals are spilling into the neighboring area, called the Karma Quadrant, which is also home to numerous Sioux-style teepees and a squadron of noisy folk improvising Cajun tunes on screeching banjos and tom-tom drums.
Everywhere we turn, boys, girls, young and some not-so-young folk are walking with piles of camping gear, knocking up tents, gathering bonfire kindling, or simply standing about in gangs, chattering and laughing. Lots of people, like the LBD, are out wandering, sussing out where all the zillion fantabulous, weird and wonderful Astlebury attractions will be.
The atmosphere is totally zingy!
My stomach keeps doing somersaults!
It feels like everyone has made monumental journeys to reach this place today, and now we’re all determined to let our hair down for forty-eight hours.
“Wow, what’s that?” coos Claude as we spy a humungous rhubarb-and-custard-striped big top on the horizon, with sparkly flags and streamers pouring from a spike on the top. The loud 130-bpm dance music pouring from its doors gives us a clue to the location.
“Oh my God! It’s the candy-stripe twenty-four-hour dance tent!” cheeps Fleur as we hurry past the hordes of smiling people hanging about outside. “MTV is broadcasting live from here this weekend! Let’s see if we can get on Big Beat Dance Party!”
We dance into the big top, straight into the middle of a hot, sweaty full-swing party crowd of about 1,000 people, all going totally doolally, blowing whistles, waving their arms and shaking their tushies to a storming booty-quaking track. Up in the booth, a stunning Asian female DJ dressed in a silver lame dress and diamanté tiara is cueing up her next record on a space-age telephone.
“It’s DJ Mai Tai!” shouts Claude, pointing upward with her mouth agog. In the middle of the floor, a flurry of MTV cameramen and sound crew are filming people frugging wildly. Of course Fleur can’t resist shimmying into the viewfinder for a flagrant bout of bumping and grinding.
“Oh, dear, I hope Paddy is watching James Bond and not MTV!” smiles Claude as Paddy’s daughter displays her bottom-juddering to most of Europe.
Elsewhere on the dance floor, guys in sweat suits and neon headbands have chucked down a big square of kitchen linoleum on the floor where kids are break-dancing and spinning on their heads.
“This is all too bonkers!” I say after we’ve frugged and grooved wildly for more than half an hour.
“I know,” says Claude, catching her breath. “Let’s move on and see what else is here!”
We duck out of the candy-stripe tent, dragging Fleur with us, passing a delicious-smelling Vietnamese noodles stall, and then an even more yummy-smelling Olde Cornish Pasty Shoppe that lies beside the Marmaduke Orchard Cider stall, staffed by cotton-wool-haired ladies in pink aprons selling mugs of frothing sweet cider. Here, random puddles of merry folk are lying around on increasingly dewy grass, enjoying apple beverages, while other folk peruse the adjacent Wonderland Fruit Smoothie Emporium and the Back to the Old Skool Kandy Grotto, which sells all the cool candies that we remember from when we were tiny, like Cola Cubes, Sherbet Spaceships and Crackling Space Dust.
“Thank God there are shops!” hoots Fleur, jamming a blackcurrant penny candy in her mouth. She leads us over to the Fabulous Faraway Farm Survival Shop, an incredible stall run by a man called Jet with long red dreadlocks, selling every single, itty-bitty thing you’d ever need for camping, except, of course, far groovier versions such as sequined silver sleeping bags or fabulous tents embossed with fractal patterns that make your eyes go goggly if you stare too long. Beside the Faraway Farm lies the “I Don’t Quite Feel Myself Today” Fancy Dress Boutique, hiring out and selling bonkers outfits like Spider-Man costumes, spaceman outfits and cheerleader garb, plus all lengths and styles of wigs from long spooky gothic to fluffy towering Afros. The boutique also sells goofy teeth, oversized glasses and false Spock ears if you really want to go unrecognized. Here, the LBD try on daft hats and fake stick-on face boils until we nearly pee our pants giggling at one another. My head is really spinning now!
But there’s still more to see. We carry on through the crowds, almost losing each other in the mess of bodies spilling in every direction. Fleur’s wearing her newly purchased red devil’s horns, which pulsate and sparkle, while Claude looks resplendent in a golden cardboard crown. It really rather becomes her. It’s impossible not to be intoxicated by the Astlebury atmosphere. It feels like all the sensible rules of society have vanished only to be replaced by high-quality silliness. Like all the dull, gray, snoresome bods in Britain have vamoosed and all the party animals from every town and city have converged in one place for one weekend. It’s just fantastique!
“Okay, where to now?” asks Fleur as we reach a fork in the paths.
“Well, we could go to church,” says Claude.
“What?” we say. “How?”
“Over there!” laughs Claude, pointing at probably the weirdest apparition of the festival so far ... a grand inflatable cathedral.
“Oh. My. God!” I yell.
The LBD gasp as this huge, holy, bouncing entity, with its inflatable spire and ornate stained-plastic windows, jiggles and wobbles merrily in the midnight air, tugging at the ground ropes preventing it from floating heavenward. As we draw closer, we notice the spongy spire nodding in time to some loud, joyous gospel music blaring from a righteous sound system. I run up, pressing my nose against the windows. “There’re kids inside dressed as monks and nuns! It’s a disco!” I shout.
“Let’s go inside!”
Okay, I think they’re just dressed as monks and nuns—by this point I’m not 100 percent sure.
“And you can get married here too!” shrieks Fleur, pointing at a sign informing loved-up festivalgoers how to arrange emergency wedding licenses. “Do you think I could get a wedding dress from the fancy dress stall?”
“Oh, dear,” laughs Claude as we drag her through the inflatable gates.
“Poor Spike Saunders, he doesn’t stand a chance.”
Bumph! Bumph! Bumph! Bumph! thumps the beat.
“Agggghh! I really feel like dancing now!” shouts Fleur, heading for the center of the congregation and immediately beginning to shimmy with a handsome vicar.
“So do I!” shouts Claude, jumping up on a wooden bench and waving her hands in the air, her tiny black T-shirt riding up to reveal her flat brown stomach and slightly outy belly button. “Halleluja
h!”
Ahhhh, her mother would be so proud, I think to myself as a rather good-looking fake priest with gorgeous green eyes and a cassock over his jeans and T-shirt grabs me by the waist and begins swinging me around and around until I collapse on a fake plastic pulpit in a fit of snot and giggles.
It feels like something has changed for me and the LBD tonight.
It feels like life will never be the same, ever again.
meet the neighbors
“So, is that what Gloria’s church is like, Claude?” I ask as the LBD dawdle our way exhaustedly through the Magical Glade and its numerous campfire parties, home to our tent. There are fields and fields left to explore, but we’ve decided to make an early start tomorrow when our brains can process more madness. I’m feeling particularly splendiferous on this warm summer’s evening, wearing my orange sparkly deely-boppers, a steal at only £1 a pair from a stall near the Karma Quadrant.
“Yeah, Mum’s church is exactly like that!” says Claude dryly, her golden crown perched wonkily on her head atop raggedy hair bunches.
“Sheesh, those Ghanaian Methodists sure can party hearty once they get going.”
We all dissolve into giggles, envisioning Gloria Cassiera and her holy pals having it large at the annual chicken cookout.
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much as I did tonight. My face is aching.
“Uggghh, okay, now I’ll admit I’m lost,” sighs Fleur, stumbling over her fiftieth guide rope. “Where did we leave that tent again?”
“Easy, it’s a big blue one, beside a ginormous oak tree, isn’t it?” I say, with a creeping realization that there are twelve equally impressive oaks within spitting distance of us, not to mention twenty midnight blue four-man tents that could have fallen off the same factory conveyor belt as our own.
“Don’t panic,” says Claude. “There’s the LBD flag! We’re over there.”
“Good one, Claude!” I sigh.
As we reach our tent, a huge cheer erupts from the nearby candy-stripe dance tent, accompanied by someone appearing to go buck wild with a Klaxon horn.
“Do you think the twenty-four-hour dance tent ever shuts up?” groans Fleur. “A girl like me needs her beauty sleep!”
“I think the clue is in the title,” I laugh. However, by this point I’m talking to her tangerine-sized posterior as it wriggles through our tent’s entrance.
“No Daphne yet?” asks Claude, tapping the side of Daphne’s tiny silver house. No one is home.
“Oooh, I hope she’s okay,” I say.
“Me too,” says Fleur quite genuinely from inside the tent. “That Rex better be a decent bloke, or he’ll have me to answer to!”
When you catch Fleur off guard, she’s actually quite a sweetie.
I’m just about to suggest that we call her, when suddenly, in the distance behind some camper vans, an acoustic guitar springs to life and a male voice begins belting out.
“‘I’m lost ... lost at the heart of you-hoo hoo hoo,’ ” a lad is singing. “ ‘I don’t know what I can do-hoo hoo to get through to you-hoo.’ ”
He’s quite talented, whoever he is—not that he’s getting much encouragement from his pals.
“Ooooo hoooo owwwww-ooooo bleughhh!” mimics one loud-mouth, breaking off to belch ungraciously. Soon the whole gang is howling and jeering the cabaret as Claude and I earwig furiously.
“”Cos, I’m lossssssssst, at the heaart of yoo-hooo,’ ” the lad continues, ignoring the slander.
“Oh, kum-by-yah, my Lordy,” mutters Fleur, poking her head out of the tent. “Claudette, go and have a word, will you?”
“Aw! I think he’s good!” I say, suddenly realizing why the song sounds familiar. “Hang on, isn’t that the song ‘Lost’ from the new Spike Saunders CD? You know, the new CD that you burned for me, Fleur?”
The LBD all stand very still, straining our ears.
“‘”Cos I’m looooooost,’ ” croons the lad.
“Oooh my God, now you come to mention it ... yes, it is!” gasps Fleur, her eyes lighting up. “Ronnie! Claude! You don’t think that it’s ...”
Fleur starts flapping her hands about excitedly, starting to hyperventilate.
“No, Fleur, I don’t think that’s Spike Saunders singing, you silly mare!” I say, shaking my head.
Fleur looks very disappointed.
“But he’s quite good anyhow, isn’t he?” I add.
As our neighbor struggles with the difficult key change in the third chorus, he’s drowned out completely by the growing roar of his friends.
“Regurgitate! Regurgitate! Regurgitate the beer!” the boys are yelling.
And then after an ominous silence, we hear a squishy splatter.
“Ugggggghhhh! You’re disgusting, Franny, you minger!” yells one lad.
“Stop encouraging him then, Nico;” shouts another.
“But he hasn’t re-drunk it yet, Damon!” the lad replies. “He’s not getting the five quid unless he re-drinks the vomit!”
Before I can say another word, Claude Cassiera has sprung to life and vamoosed through the maze of tents toward our neighbors.
What’s she up to? She’s not going to tell them off, is she?!
I want to follow her, but something’s holding me back. They seem a bit wild to me. What if things get nasty?
“Could you pur-lease keep the noise down!” I hear my hard-hitting bambino buddy snarl. “Some of us are trying to go to bed!”
Fleur and I wince, waiting for a tirade of abuse and beer cans.
Instead there’s a stunned silence ...
... and then a huge joyous cheer!
“Wah-hayyyyyyyy! Claudette!” erupts the bunch. “How you doing! ?”
“Helllooooooo, boys!” hoots Claude back. “Sorry, did I give you a shock?”
Eh?
I bound toward the racket, not quite believing my own ears. These guys can’t possibly be who I think they are, can they?
Surely not? Oh my God, it is!
It’s Joel, Damon, Nico and Franny! Our knights in shining armor from this afternoon, slumped around a hearty bonfire, less than twenty meters from LBD HQ, strumming guitars and regurgitating lager beer for kicks!
“Ronnie!” shouts Joel, putting down his guitar and grinning broadly. “You made it!”
“Oh, my word, Ronnie, isn’t this an incredible coincidence?” announces Claude. “I had no idea this lot were camping in the Magical Glade! Isn’t that freaky?”
Claude should never get a job in the theater.
Damon jumps up, hugging Claude warmly. For some reason he is wearing a girlie blonde bobbed wig, perched all crooked on his head.
They must have been at the fancy dress stall too.
At this point, faced by a wall of testosterone, it strikes me that not only am I covered in grass and mud stains, but I’m wearing sparkly deely-boppers and ... gnngnnnng ... a stick-on comedy fake boil on my chin! I pull off the deely-boppers and ker-ping the boil somewhere past the Hexagon Stage.
“Take a seat, Ronnie! Everyone shift up a bit!” says Joel, patting a space beside him on the camping blanket he’s perched on. “So the tire held out then?”
“Yeah! We’re all here in one piece,” I smile, vaguely mesmerized by Joel’s long brown eyelashes and hazel eyes. Joel’s eyelashes are, dare I say, even longer than Jimi’s, which I’d never have thought possible.
“Hey, thanks again for helping us out before,” I say, trying to smooth down my fringe, which has gone a bit woo-hah because of the deely-boppers.
“No problem at all.” Joel smiles, picking up his guitar, and strums a perfect G chord. “So, are you ready for a sing-along ?”
“Ooh, I’m not much of a singer,” I blush. “I play a bit of bass guitar ... Hey, but you can fairly belt it out, eh? Was that one of the new Spike Saunders CD tracks?”
“Yeah!” Joel says, grinning. “I mean, it’s not released for weeks, but ...”
“You downloaded it off the Internet, didn’t you?”
I grin. “So did we!”
“Ugghhh! Not another Spike Saunders fan!” groans Damon, glugging a can of lager. “What a total moron that guy is! Total popified girlie rubbish. Joel must be the only geezer in Britain that likes ‘im. I reckon it’s just a ruse to woo ladies. Y’know, show off his sensitive side? Not that any of you girls would be as daft as to fall for that.”
Joel blushes now.
So do I, for that matter.
“Actually, I just think he’s a brilliant songwriter,” Joel says to me. “I know all his stuff off by heart. That new album Prize is his best yet!”
“What?” I smile. “You can play all the tracks off Prize already?”
“Er ... yeah, sad but true,” Joel blushes again. “You think I’m a total dweeb now, don’t you?”
“No, that’s totally cool!” I begin to tell him, only I’m interrupted by a loud familiar voice and a fragrant waft of Supermodel Eau de Parfum.
“You guys again!” squawks Fleur Swan, who has made a swift costume change into delicate pink cotton pajama bottoms, a cream cashmere sweater and fluffy kitten-heel slippers. “What are you lot doing in our field? Ronnie, call security! Have them release the hounds!”
All the boys cheer as La Swan makes her entrance.
“Eh? What do you mean, your field?” laughs Franny, clearly in an advanced state of beer-induced relaxation. “We were always going to camp here. In fact, we told Claude ...”
“Hey! How about another song?” interrupts Claude “Dark Horse” Cassiera. “Let’s have something off Spike’s last album, eh, Joel?”
Fleur finds a pew and everyone cheers as Joel strums the opening bars of “Merry-Go-Round,” Spike’s most famous, multimillion-selling, award-winning hit.
Ah, up close he sounds even more excellent! He can do all those twiddly bits and complicated chord changes, just like Spike’s guitarist Twiggy Starr, and he can do the swooping high and low notes straight after each other too! When I first met Jimi, he used to play his guitar loads; his band Lost Messiah were always playing little gigs. I was so proud of him. That all went down the drain when the town council built that new skate park. Now his guitar just gets used as a door stop.
