15^th - 18^th July 2009, Matterley Bowl, Hampshire
Well, you wouldn't write home about the weather. Festivals generally go one of two ways - you're either sweltering for four days in baking heat, where you end up red and sunburnt with the complexion of a Dorito, or you're treated to constant rain and mud, leaving you with a horrid case of trenchfoot and little yellow mushrooms between your toes that could, if dosed correctly, leave you tripping for days.

But Glade fell somewhere in the middle - yeah it rained, Words & pics: Will Jobbins
Film: Infected Media
but at no point could you say that the new site was flooding and so the mud was merely a hindrance, rather than a nightmarish quagmire. However, the sun was evasive and only made a fashionably late entrance on Sunday evening - probably the only entity in the universe capable of upstaging Underworld at that point. For most of the weekend the skies were dull, grey and perpetually damp, as if in sympathy with my socks. Thankfully the quality and variety of music, and indeed the whole event, more than made up for the weather.

I got off to a bad start on Friday by spectacularly misjudging the programme of events and missing Afghan Headspin by five whole hours. How on earth did that happen? Still, I'm told they were excellent despite their curious time slot - 12:00 midday for one of the hardest, darkest breaks acts ever to grace a set of decks? Hmm... Anyway, without a specially modified DeLorean and one point twenty one gigawatts on tap there was nothing I could do about missing the Headspin, but at least we managed to get to the Liquid tent in time to catch ZubZub who laid on an eclectic mix of psychedelia, both trance and breaks oriented.

In fact it's pretty accurate to say that psychedelic breakbeat was being played out widely, its genre-bending nature making it sound right at home on three or four of the big systems and in some of the smaller tents too. Later on in the weekend, the Liquid tent would host Beatnik, Hedflux, Far Too Loud, the Nagual Sound Experiment, Sensient and Eat Static... a choice selection of beat manufacturers indeed. Also billed to perform was Broken Robot artist Rex, but a disastrous laptop malfunction at the last minute pissed right on his bonfire - and indeed on mine, as I was looking forward to that.
Right in the centre of the 'village' was the Arcadia system, an enormous post-apocalyptic metal sculpture complete with DJ booth, the ubiquitous Funktion One rig, flame-belching pyrotechnics and brutally-blinding strobes that lit up the entire night sky and must have made epileptics as far away as the Isle Of Wight twitchy. This made for a spectacular centrepiece and was perpetually surrounded by an enormous crowd, even when the rain was coming in horizontally like some kind of gravity-defying monsoon.

When it got too much for us, we would usually head for the IdSpiral tent, the most relaxing place we found all weekend. Dry, soft grass to cosset the arse, a selection of organic drinks to soothe the throat and stomach, and chilled, laid-back music to massage ringing, bassline-abused ears back into a state of semi-functionality made it a no-brainer for a spot of tranquil calm.

For dedicated bassheads, one of the tents of choice was Boom Town which spent a large part of the weekend playing gut-wobbling dubstep and grime and as a result was extremely popular, with big name headliners like Benga, Rusko and Reso doing their best to blow the cones clean out of the speaker stacks. From there, adventurous types could set sail across a (thankfully shallow) sea of mud on a course for the Brakedown tent, which was constantly serving up generous and varied portions of breakbeat from DJs and artists such as the Beat Assassins, the Equalizers, Pyramid and Vent. I also managed to catch a wicked performance by breaks specialists Soul Of Man in the nearby Club tent.

With many smaller systems and tents pumping tunes out constantly, the choice was almost too much to bear. In order to catch the pick of the acts, one had to exercise military levels of self-discipline for fear of missing things completely, or make the difficult decision to sacrifice one performance for another - I missed the Freestylers completely in favour of Far Too Loud's utterly banging set, for example. But of course the biggest and best shows were on the Glade Stage itself - a large, semi-covered platform with a sound system even louder than the rest - something I thought impossible, til I stood directly in front of one monolithic speaker which felt like it was peeling the flesh clean off my face. Notable performers this year included Beardyman, the Dub Pistols, a bass guitar-playing Squarepusher, Nitin Sawhney - whose set was absolutely spellbinding, despite some initial sound issues - and of course the headliners, Underworld.

As Underworld frontman Karl took the stage in his trademark glittering jacket (which appears to have been stolen from Bruce Forsythe's wardrobe sometime during the 1970s) the rest of the site was like a ghost town, as probably the entire population of the sold-out festival gathered under a warm, setting sun to enjoy such classics as Dark And Long Train, Pearls Girl, King Of Snake, and - naturally - the iconic Born Slippy for a magnificent floor-shaking finale, and so thousands of screaming, ecstatic fans danced wildly, ankle deep in mud in the growing twilight.

Only a few hours later the systems were closing down - the Sunday night's revelries had to end at midnight for licensing reasons, whereas for the rest of the weekend the music had been banging almost constantly, or so it seemed. The rain and mud had failed to ruin this amazing event - great organisation, coupled with a good location and a stellar artist lineup to die for (incidentally, we have decided to award Glade's booking agents the Toxin Magazine Best Booking Agents 2009 award, for which they receive a leaking pen I found under my desk and half a pouch of dry Golden Virginia) made it a memorable and top quality event - which is just what we've come to expect from Glade.





Earlybird tickets for next year's event are already on sale and I'm telling you that nothing, apart from emigration, heavy pregnancy or sudden and unavoidable death, should be allowed to stand in the way of your attendance...

More info and 2010 tickets available at:
www.gladefestival.com