Clash Guest Blog: Emmy The Great (Festival Special)

We've said in the past that butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. It is rumoured she is lighter than one feather and her whistle attracts bluebirds. Emmy The Great is officially the darling of indie-folk.

This summer we asked Emmy to review every festival she graced with her live performance, and her reply is an in-depth artists point of view, covering everything from Kendall Calling, to Glasto. Today is the South's most mystical bash, Secret Garden Party...

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Emmy writes...

The last time I went to Secret Garden Party was not for a performance. It was on a whim with two of my friends. The morning after we arrived, I woke to find one of them attached to my steering wheel by her handbag, counting little purple animals that weren’t there. Since then I’ve had an idea of this festival as one where you can leave someone for five minutes and return to find her face down on the ground with a group of half-sentient strangers. As a result, I am apprehensive about playing. I know this festival as a fun factory, a place where you can dress up and indulge your urges to act like a kid, and I wonder where watching music factors into all this.

Turns out, I needn’t have worried. The festival has grown and become more organised since I was here. It’s won an award for the best small festival, and it’s streamlined its activities to work alongside the music. People are still having a lot of fun, but it’s less chaotic. We wander around the site for an hour and find people engaged in groups. Some are making a communal fruit salad, some playing giant jenga. Some people are wheeling each other about in wheelbarrows, and some are having mudfights. There is a sense of the communal, and of being in a giant dress-up box. I can see why people love it here. We stop in a tea tent and catch a couple of songs from Alessi’s Ark, which is lovely, then we play a set of our own to a crowd made almost entirely of people we’ve made things or been to school with. It is our new keyboard player Glenn’s first time playing with anyone but me, but he's amazing, making no mistakes. That night, the band send me a picture. It’s of Glenn soaking wet and naked except for shorts and a towel, sometime after midnight. He was supposed to go home straight after the show, but instead stayed behind and jumped in the lake. "I think it was my initiation," he tells me later.