Pontardawe Festival

It's likely to be raining, I thought; it's Wales, after all - best put the wellies in the back of the car. No other preparation necessary for this one - it's a lovely litle folk festival situated conveniently near to an enormous Lidl, which takes cars of all your pre-festy bogroll & beer needs (anything else is pure self-indulgence. I survived for 2 weeks at Stonehenge in 1983 with nothing but a £20 note and a family sized packet of McVities Digestives. Mind you, at the end of that 2 weeks I was sitting on the seafront in Bournemouth wrapped in a stained blanket, begging loose change from passers-by in German. But that's another story.)
Two gigs at this festival: first spot on the Friday night on the New Music stage, which went off extremely nicely as far as we could tell from behind the blinding stage lights. I was even asked by an enthusiastic Younger Person if they could have my plectrum when we finished - I had to explain that I only had the one, and I needed it for tomorrow night... in retrospect, I should have given it to him & basked in the momentary glow of alcohol-induced fame & glory, but where was I to get another Jim Dunlop .73mm pick in a muddy field in Wales at that time of night?
Did I mention the mud? Overnight (an uncomfortable one for me, spent as it was in the boot of my elderly Nissan with Joe's microscooter as a pillow) it rained like it only can rain in Wales, and by the time I woke at the crack of noon on the Saturday (a traumatic awakening, involving an urgent pressure on the bladder coupled with a complete & utter inability to extricate myself from the aforementioned boot) the site had been transformed into a reasonable facsimile of the Somme. All vehicle movements on site were banned, which left us with the interesting problem of how to get all our gear to the stage for our next gig in the Beer Tent...
Over the years, I've arrived at gigs in many and varied forms of transport, including motorbikes, buses, taxis, helicopters & an amphibious landing craft. This was a first, though - never before have I arrived backstage with a fleet of commandeered wheelbarrows. Gave the performance an extra frisson too, keeping one eye on our transport to make sure no-one nicked 'em...
Terrific gig - you can't beat playing your heart out in front of a tentful of people who are 100% with you - that's the reason we do this, after all - as I've said before, if we were in it for the money, we'd all have starved to death years ago.
I'll draw a veil over the horrible scenes the next morning - suffice to say I was towed off site by an enormous forklift which sprayed mud all over my windscreen as it pulled me through the mire towards the exit; with hindsight, perhaps it was a mistake to wind the window down at that point...