Suzanne Harrington: despite my old-woman hips, Glastonbury keeps drawing me back

Turns out duct tape doesn’t work on busted airbeds. You end up making a kind of burrito out of the dead airbed and a rectangle of carpet you found in a backstage container, shove in your earplugs, and collapse in an exhausted heap.

For all its gruelling physicality — my steps app registered 112km in six days, working all day and dancing all night, fuelled solely by crew catering coffee strong enough to jumpstart a tractor — Glastonbury just keeps drawing you back. 

At my first one in 1989, Fela Kuti, the king of Afrobeat, was performing; this year it was his son Femi on the Pyramid. You mightn’t have a clue who half the artists are — I was calling SZA ‘EssZedAy’ until a teenager told me, quite witheringly, that it’s pronounced Sizza — but equally the kids have no idea who Squeeze are either. Ageism doesn’t exist at Glastonbury; from babies to eighty-somethings, everyone is there.

And there was so much Irish talent this year, from Annie Mac to Fontaines DC, The Mary Wallopers to Newdad. My personal highlights were Sprints and Kneecap — future headliners, viscerally refreshing, blasting us with furious joy. Sprints’ Karla Chubb held the blokey crowd enraptured, channelling a kind of Amyl & The Sniffers/Animal from the Muppets energy, with top notes of PJ Harvey and Patti Smith. Genuine magnificence.

And Kneecap. My new favourites, despite not speaking Irish and being old enough to be their granny. What a brilliant, brilliant trio. Performing at 11.30am and 1.30 the following morning, they did a Q&A in the cinema tent in the afternoon before the showing of their new film. They’d never acted before. They’d never been up so early. They were sharp, clever, subversive, hilarious.

The film, which has already won an award at Sundance, is their fictionalised origin story with added Michael Fassbender.

It’s an absolute cracker, belting along mixing up hip-hop and Irish, ketamine and MDMA, action and comedy, while remaining entirely on point politically. 

Watch out for the Gerry Adams cameo — your diaphragm will hurt from laughing. The film, in a cinema tent filled with both English and Irish, got a rapturous reception. 

They’ve done more for the Irish language in five minutes than Peig Sayers did in 150 years. They’re the future.

Back home watching the festival highlights on the sofa, your brain might feel like it’s had a factory reset. 

A week of no scrolling, no news, no outside world doom. Your old-woman hips and knees might ache from all the dancing and walking, you might be deafened from the music, but what joy to experience an alternative reality, no matter how brief.