Getting that mix of hedonism and health right can be a tricky business, and to tell you the truth, we’re about as well balanced as George Hook on ice skates, but we have picked up a trick or two along the way.
Festival goers of 2015, if we could offer you only one piece of advice for your festival future it would be this: hover. Toilets are not something that you read much about in festival reviews, but the fact of the matter is that, for the regular festival bunny, the jacks can be the making or breaking of a weekend. In some instances the WCs can be much more important than Hercules & Love Affair’s setlist; which is probably neither absorbent nor two-ply.
Head torches aren’t as cutesy as a daisy headband or as omnipresent as the Native American feather head-dress, but entering a portaloo at 3am, we know which one we’d rather have on our bulb. Phones do have torches, but they tend to get dropped while multi-tasking. And while Vodafone Centre Stage will be offering some helpful and worthwhile services to festival goers at Castlepalooza this year, unfortunately the Emergency Portaloo Phone Retrival and Disinfecting Service is yet to be announced.
Box Head suggests picking up a second-hand fur coat (fake fur of course) for late-night rambling around the castle grounds at Charleville. The stroke of genius here is that not only will you be rocking that festival chic all weekend, but wherever you happen to fall down, you can sleep cosy and snug. When you eventually hop up the next morning, you're instantly in princess mode. Take that,Vogue!
Berocca and bangers don’t mix. The bangers referred to here are flash-fried sausages that had been lingering in a festival cool box for a couple of days, washed down by some effervescing elixir. The day-glo orange goo regurgitated by Markie, our bass player, was not pretty.
When you wake up in your tent with a tongue on you like Gandhi’s sandal, and your body puts in a request for some form of sustenance other than cider, a large 99 is not the answer. Ice cream will curdle when it meets last night’s cider, and for anyone who thought our guitarist, Aley, was going for a smouldering menacing squint to convey an earnest performance at Castlepalooza last year, the truth is he was desperately practicing his man-Kegels. Probably the tightest set he’s ever done.
The castle ballroom is always a hive of activity and the crew from Homebeat have pulled off some very special and intimate gigs here over the past couple of years. The castle and grounds add a special atmosphere to proceedings and if you get a chance to have a tilt at sword fighting or archery with the medieval buzzers in the Moat campsite, you’d almost swear you were in Winterfell. Thankfully it’s a bit less stark here though.
Just like members of Macra na Feirme, King Kong Company do some of their best work in fields during the summer months, partly because we enjoy digging deeply into the festival experience. We’ve never managed to get the hang of going home after gigs, so being able to camp where we play suits us perfectly; we’re basically a bunch of dirty stop-outs.
The music will make Castlepalooza swing, but the essential ingredient at every really good festival we’ve ever been to is sound heads. If you can manage to surround yourself with good people, embrace some of the madness and dance, everything else should fall in to place. Milk it dry.
King Kong Company play the Cityjet Stage on Sunday at 4pm
