Secret Garden Party, Cambridge 20/08/05

Linz enjoys a well earned rest

The Secret Garden Party was a colourful wee affair, held on a rather beautiful patch of Cambridgeshire countryside, kindly donated by an understanding landowner, and populated with thousands of pretty people wearing silly hats and expensive wellies. We came on at dusk, which was rather nice, and were warmly welcomed by lots of loved-up festival types dancing in that mysterious way so often highlighted in TV coverage of things like Glastonbury and Woodstock y’know, apparently dancing to an entirely different song to the one we were actually playing, but having a smashing time anyway. Stan excelled himself at drunken Scottish stage patter, at one point declaring that, as the audience couldn’t understand a word he was saying anyway, he would just bark instead. The next song was introduced as WUFF wuff-wuff rrrrrrOWFF-wuff. Whether the audience noticed this transition from Glaswegian to Alasatian, we may never know, as they just kept grinning and trying to catch the invisible fairies that only they could see flying around their heads. Afterwards, we got well and truly messed up ourselves, thanks to the generous backstage booze allowance and a man giving away balloons full of nitrous oxide laughing gas. Highlights: the lovely young ladies at the hospitality shed, who found us not one, not two, but three whole bottles of Buckfast, as well as copious beer and some Pedigree Chum for Stan. Lowlights: somehow managing to entirely lose Joel's brand new crash cymbal whilst packing up. And Hard-Fi, who were, in a word, baws.