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Music

We Spent Most of Our Saturday at Glastonbury at a Strip Club in Hell

And we watched a bit of Fat White Family, Metallica, and some other shit.
Ryan Bassil
London, GB

By the time Saturday rolls around, everyone at Glastonbury is a bit worn out. You start to spot the stragglers; tired looking people sitting outside burger vans, clutching bottles of Coca-Cola, looking like they’re waiting for a bus that will never arrive. A lot of people pass out in the hammocks on top of the hill. I saw at least three people crying.

This is the calm before the storm - on Sunday night everyone will finish whatever they have left, as if they’re competing in some sort of narcotics World Cup where the only prize is feeling terrible for a week. But for now most people are taking it easy - which, if you’re us, apparently involves watching a lot of strippers.

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Jake, our photographer, had mentioned that Blondie were doing a DJ set over at a place called the Pussy Parlour. Great - I said to myself. I’ll be able to wake myself up by pumping Debbie Harry’s iPod into my ears at full volume. However, it turned out that Blondie were actually Blonde, the DJing duo who set up Eton Messy, your sister’s uni mate’s favourite YouTube channel.

Inside it was kind of a weird vibe - a girl manouvered her way around a pole like some sort of Z-list X-Men character whose only power is contorting her body into impossible positions, while Blonde played house music to, mostly, teenage girls and old guys that were trying to grind up behind them. But this is Glastonbury - literally anything is possible, even if that means stumbling into a “strip club” in the middle of a field in Somerset before dinner time.

Thinking that we hadn’t seen any guitar music yet this weekend, we caught a bit of Fat White Family. This is the fourth time I’ve seen them and, going to throw it out there, they’re the best up-and-coming live band in Britain. Every show seems to slowly sludge into madness; at previous gigs they’ve got their dicks out, dived into the crowd, and, apparently, Lias once spent a portion of their set rubbing himself with a tub of butter. Other bands should do this - Elbow would actually be enjoyable if Guy Garvey took his shirt off and poured a boat of gravy over his chest.

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The set seemed to be a bit of a challenge - this is the biggest venue I’ve seen them play. But it worked well - the slow, trudging build up of every song helped carry everyone into the evening. A lot of girls fell in love with Lias.

Metallica said that they were really excited to play Glastonbury. You could call that bullshit but this photo is proof - look at that grin.

We waited until we’d heard the one Metallica song that we knew before heading to the dance village to visit Despacio - a temporary night-club set up by James Murphy and Soulwax. At this point of the evening that disco ball was the most magical thing I’d ever seen - even simple things like electromagnetic radiation are incredible at Glastonbury.

We ended our day in Shangri-Hell - the part of the festival that incoporates performance art, installations, clubs and basically everything that makes Glastonbury kick every other festival in the arse. This year's theme takes on a bastardised Wolf of Wall Street vibe - the two women in this photo ate money, slapped each other, and chewed a lot of gum. Sure - that sounds tame but someone told me that, later, another woman arrived wearing a massive strap-on.

I can't remember the name of this club - but it was further proof that you can literally find whatever you want at Glastonbury, so long as you stay awake long enough and are not a pussy about entering strange rooms. Inside they had a bunch of strippers dancing around with fire in their mouths.

It then turned into some sort of voyeuristic BDSM session - which was pretty cool because I don't think I'll ever witness a half-naked woman fuck a man's mouth with fire anytime soon.

And then this guy turned up and stood awkwardly at the front for a while. I assume I must have left at some point because the next thing I remember is being woken up, early afternoon, by Luke Kooks singing 'She Moves in Her Own Way".

Tonight is the last night. I can't wait to not watch Kasabian.

Follow Ryan and Jake on Twitter: @RyanBassil @Jake_Photo