As part of a sponsored content collaboration with the folks at Jagerhaus – the best festival-based house you’ve ever been in – we asked Slaves to tell us about their strangest festival experience. Laurie Vincent responded with a tale about the mischief he and Isaac Holman have inflicted on dressing rooms/campsites/themselves between their raucous festival sets.- - -I always try and forget the bad festival experiences, because you have to try and get over them. But like most people, I’ll always remember the first time I properly partied in a field with all my mates.Now that me and Isaac are expected to show up and perform, we can’t really get as silly as we used to. Even so, weird stuff still happens, but these days it tends to involve breaking stuff, bizarre injuries, and - when we first started out - playing to about three people.We played our first festival in 2012 at Reading and Leeds, on the Introducing stage. We figured there wouldn’t be too many people watching so we brought a bunch of our mates along. One got a little over excited and refused to leave, and was so muddy that we had to wrap him up in binliners and try and carry him out of the festival. Taking your mates to gigs is always a questionable one.We’ve performed at a lot of festivals since then. I’ve learned that you’ve got to be prepared. I think the biggest one for me was always take shoes that fit, like waterproof shoes, like Dr Martens or wellies, otherwise you get blisters - especially if you have to walk through a muddy field to a terrible dressing room that’s stuck at the very end of the site with basically nothing there. Even hotels and portakabins can be pretty bleak. One time at SXSW we spent an entire week in a Motel 6 room, sharing two beds between four of us. It was one of the darkest experiences of our lives.Last year we played at Hogmanay, which is this New Year's Eve festival up in Scotland. We had just finished our set and we were staying in a portakabin - one of those things you used to have your lessons in at school sometimes. We came off stage and it was freezing, because it was obviously New Year's Eve in Edinburgh, and we were all getting into it and fucking around. We were jumping up and down in the portakabin so harshly that one of the strip lights from the ceiling fell down and smashed all over the floor.Whatever. Not a big deal. Strip lights can be replaced and no one gets hurt. Unlike the time Isaac jumped off a Bestival sign a few years ago and dislocated his knee really badly. He had to have keyhole surgery.Festivals are fun.SLAVES DJ set is on Friday 29th July 2016 from midnight til 2am in the JÄGERHAUS tent at Kendal Calling Festival.
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