field of dreams

live on? Or are today’s corporate jamborees just too well behaved? No chance, says

festival diehard Phil Kay, who takes time out from preparing for another summer of mud to

explain the joys of tunes, teepees and thong bikinis

One year at T in the Park us eight were the only ones still up in the campsite, playing brilliant inspired wasted football in dawn’s suprisingly ample light, learning to dribble past tent ropes with the lightest of skips despite a body still roasting on a heady cocktail of cocktails and classes A to D inclusive. I returned to my tent for 40 minutes’ nap before filming ‘humorous’ inserts for TV with my friend Paddy, who had been pushing an old mate around in a wheelchair for most of the previous day. It was half seven when we came back and the guy was standing up, stretching in front of his wheelchair, smoking a fag. We laughed, he sat down slowly.

Ah, the sweet simplicity of camping and toxins with music. It is, in fact, the simplest form of human life, imbibing and tunes, and at festivals we arrange this in a legitimate triumvirate with hardship to surpass ourselves with. We camp and excel.

Then there was the time I was heading to Glastonbury with my girlfriend and we knew it was wet there, we knew it would be muddy, and so - cleverly, eagerly, majestically - she had bought me a pair of wellingtons. Two new pristine green bendy wellies that would protect and be envied and be a simple enough sign that I had made enough effort and not too much, not moleskin insoles in new waterproof gorey textural breathable climbing equipment: just wellyboots. I could feel them warming and suppling up on the way.

It took us 17 hours to get there and, getting to the beginning of the muddy tracks, I took out my two fantastic vessels of dry carriage and found that they were two left wellies, each one bending the same way. They were a pair, technically; a right pair, clones, perfect replicants. "I can’t wear twins," I informed the horizon.

Course, I had no choice - I wore them all weekend, like I had a slight limp, the right foot as if slightly refracted underwater, and walking in an enormous circle around Glastonbury because of the slant down there at the end of the leg.

It felt odd and I tried bending them a bit though this just looked berodd: a man wrestling with a welly, vainly trying to alter it like toffee and failing. It felt a bit freaky the more stoned I got and it did start to look like I was a cartoon character with easy-draw feet. I think I made someone a bit nauseated by sitting with my legs crossed, really bending the foot round the corner, telling him I had had a motorcycle accident and the foot had been replaced with another actual left-footed foot. I said it was now a prophetic limb and pointed to things.

He didn’t ask me to dance.

I did dance, though, danced it off and took to the stage at midnight in my anatomically helpful trainers because it was the only place clean and dry. The crowd watched as I explained it all and took some simple, pleasurable straight-line walks for them up and down throughout the show, happy in the zone of podiatric ergonomics.

The crowd are happy at Glastonbury, two thousand happy and sitting on the ground in a giant tent, and you can come off and walk among them and feel communal. One year I sat with friends in the morning watching tons of folk climb in over the walls on temporarily hired ladders and I realised it was the opposite of a prison break. People climbing in. Outside Glastonbury is the place to escape from.

Sometimes it is not like that at T in the Park, where huge amounts of neds are sitting indoors in a marquee de s.a.d. at picnic tables enjoying the music, all mixed up together in one soup, battering the canvas and clouds around outside. I ended up far too high wearing all of a thong bikini which merely resulted in an obscene still-life in my lap area. Like hiding plums in an eyepatch.

One T in the Park I ended up at the five-star Gleneagles in an accidental upgrade, eating smoked salmon scrambled breakfast, our scrunched rizla blowing off the balcony and floating down like executive hand-fashioned miniature origami orchids. I was reflecting on the incredible safety of my night: at one point I was driving so safely on the narrow country roads that I was on the verge for a while without there even being any cars to have to let past.

I decided to nick a bathrobe for my sister’s birthday and when I was checking out, the receptionist pointed to my bag - nearly a foot and a half of the bathrobe chord was escaping out of my bag, like part of an albino Eeyore.

I paid for it, wore it to drive home and then posted it to my sister. She called to thank me and said it was very kind though she did have to wash it because there was mystery faeces upon it. Somehow I had got actual shit on this most white of white garments.

This isn’t really any advice on any festival. If you want some I’d say there is only really Glastonbury - the rest are all gigs outdoors and that is magic enough. Go to Glastonbury Tor and witness a whole different thing: the children’s fields, the healing fields, the underground venues, nakedity, Egyptian tea rooms, the Teepees, the total 24-hour non-stop all-night nature of it and thousands and thousands of people who have made a choice to be friendly and get on with folk.

There is not too much even semi-spiritual about the others, apart from once seeing Mogwai with four huge mirror balls and the whole crowd just gently listening in awe and swaying, although last year at Leeds I did look in a random tent and see Gary Numan dressed casually.

Last year my enthusiasm for T in the Park waned and I only went for a few hours. As I was leaving, a little Shakespearean lady recognised me; she was a cousin of my dad’s and said our family owned the land the festival was on. Wow.

Each year as we leave we stretch off the hospitality wristbands and choose someone to give them to. One year I had extra tickets and four of us chose someone to give a ticket to. I got a guy shouting out from a Buckfast reclining position - "Phil Kay, gonnae get us a ticket..." I said: "Yes, okay," and I went over and gave him it. He fell up.

After a whole evening at Reading spent with Polly Harvey playing through the sunset, the joy of nobody shouting about her knickers when they were clearly seen by thousands and the last hour sucking unlit fags dipped in poppers at one of the barely legal stalls, I walked off the site to find a mythical taxi-rank. There I found two Spaniards sleeping, leaning up around the makeshift sign. Perhaps they had been waiting a while, so I walked for a mile and hailed the cab that was coming towards me. I figured the Spaniards were okay; they were together, with their bags, in a comfortable enough place to sleep, and sleeping. They were already there. You can be too - so go and set a new personal best. It is a true modern ritual: hardship and surpassing yourself. Go, and then heal. n