It's 7:00 AM and we pull up to Leeds Festival. The roads into and out of the festival are narrow country roads not designed for buses or trucks. The address is a field, and as you approach there are signs that direct where to go. We're looking for the Blue Lot.
We're met by a bloke standing at a fork in the road dressed in high-visibility yellow. Behind him are signs with arrows to the different stages. There are a dozen or so arrows, half point to the left and half to the right. He sends us right. After 100 yards we're met by another high-viz girl who tells us we've gone the wrong way, the bus can't make it if we continue. The roads are too narrow and muddy.
So she tells us to drive just another couple of hundred yards where we can turn around and come back. We drive a couple of hundred yards where we're met by another person in high-viz. We tell him we're looking for the Radio 1 / NME stage. There's no place to turn around but he says we're going the wrong way so he sends us further down. We go through another three or four people like this who keep telling us we're going the wrong way but there's no place to turn around. Eventually I see a sign for our stage. We've gone so far in the wrong direction that we're now on the correct path.
None of the stages are marked as we pass them, but eventually we find ours.
Our driver refuses to park on the mud and grass. Our "stage manager" is a 20-year-old girl with a ring in her nose getting paid minimum wage. She made sure to tell our driver several times as he berated her that she's getting paid minimum wage. But he's letting her have it at 8:00 AM. Lovely way to start the day, but we're at our stage.
We've been driving for two days straight to make it here. We were in Milan on Wednesday night and now it's Friday morning. That's 1000 miles in 36 hours, which is quite difficult in Europe with the regulation of driver's hours even though we had two drivers trading off.
So I return to stage to find out that Queens of the Stone Age is playing a secret set on our stage ... directly after us. And all the stagehands that would normally help us are unloading their truck. So now we have three bands fighting for space on the same stage at the same time.
We start humping our gear onto stage and real estate is tight. It's chaos actually, unmitigated. As far as load ins go, it's chaos. It's 9:00 AM.
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Reading / Leeds is a difficult festival to navigate if it's your first time. But why shouldn't it be?
It's the rugged and hostile environments that teach us.
Why shouldn't you be tired at the end of the day? If you aren't you're probably doing something wrong.
Why do you deserve breakfast? or parking on something that isn't mud and grass? or a proper map or directions to the stage? or a ramp or loading dock access?
You can complain but that's a disease that spreads to everyone it touches. Just remember, it's not funny today but one day it will be funny.