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Can I ask you to move a little bit
this way, please.
Yes, that's perfect.
- Hi, I'm Freddie.
I am the Head Gardener,
and Secret Garden Party is all my fault.
Crazy, crazy ass motherfuckers.
Hot-housing of creative minds
and wreckheads together.
One of those places that everybody
looked forward to the whole year.
Secret Garden was always never really
about the bands or the headliners,
it was always about the fact that it's a party.
Being able to bear your chest and run wild.
Celebrating your uniqueness and your insanity.
- It kind of goes from really sort of slick,
and everyone looks great on Friday,
but by Sunday people are literally gaffer taping
a wig back onto their head.
- I was struck by the vibrancy
and kind of new frontier of the whole place.
You know, it was like a free party,
but it was a festival.
There were rules, but there weren't rules.
All good things must come to an end.
- It went from a baby to a city.
- Such a beautiful piece of land.
You don't want to cast scorn on the local landscape,
but it comes with a sort of surprise,
cause you're so aware of farming
as an industry around here.
And then in the middle of it,
there's this magic little paradise that people can turn up
and ruin over a weekend.
Thing with festivals is, like,
you work on them all year,
and then they only exist for three days.
We've got a medium sized town here.
A festival builds a city, a Brigadoon,
that pops up and disappears after four days.
It's the land more than anything.
You come here and you just get that magic feeling, you know.
And there were 300 people in the first year.
You couldn't have imagined that it would grow to this.
You go in and you can be a plumber,
an accountant, whatever.
And you come out as, you know, Queen of Swords or,
you know, whoever you fucking wanna be.
And that ability to inspire people to go
and make their own fun, that has become what people expect.
I suppose everyone who's into this scene
in one form or another can pinpoint that first moment
they came across that part of the counterculture
that really opened their eyes, blew their hair back.
For me, it was the late end of the raves.
- Often overlooked is the role that anarchic traveling,
free festivals played in the development of that culture,
you know.
50 People have been arrested,
and the police helicopter fired out with flares.
The travelers say they won't be moving on for a few days.
And tonight, the festival still appears to be in full swing.
We were in all the papers, you know.
We were called like the public enemy number one, you know.
We had like police and helicopters following us everywhere.
Secret Garden was really different in the sense that
it kind of somehow managed to put a lot of that kind of
crazy, diverse stuff into a slightly more commercial,
in serious inverted commas, setting, you know.
And for kind of another generation, actually.
How did it start?
- Kind of by accident, I suppose.
- I don't know your excuse,
but I literally had no other option for a decent job
or all, you know, street credit.
- We wanted to do a party.
We thought we would probably be quite good at it.
- We'd had the idea of what we thought made a good party,
which was all the idea of the toys and the involvement.
- The influence is an emphasis on participation
that didn't really exist in the UK much
in festival culture until Secret Garden Party
really took it to the next level,
where they basically said to everyone like,
"Don't come if you're not gonna get involved."
- It's about time and place.
The opportunity to be something different,
that exists only here and now.
And that's it.
- If you have a really great time and you are colorful
and you feel that you are part of the reason
it was a great party,
then those are the ones that you'll remember all your life.
- There's a moment when, however delinquent you are,
you finally realize that your parents are actually farmers.
We have here John and Alison.
- "Hi, do we have anywhere around us
that we could do this kind of batshit crazy scene?"
That's wax earplugs.
I hope. Or suppositories.
I was like, "Well there's the field
around the end of the lake."
Shut the fucking front door.
- Fred took me down to the field and then he said,
"This is a beautiful field."
And I said, as a farmer,
it's not a very good field, actually.
And he said, "No, no, no. You're looking at it all wrong.
It's beautiful.
Look at the lake, the trees, all the rest of it.
It's a great place for a musical event."
Now I knew we were not talking about choirs and orchestras.
- He did tell me that he was somewhat trepidatious
to be doing that.
- No shit.
And it was such a good opportunity.
So we decided to do our own party.
It's pain in the ass trying to think
of the name for an event.
Anyone who's ever tried to start a rock band or do the,
you know, will tell you the same thing.
Listening to Radio 4, children's, you know,
story time came on and Secret Garden Party.
- Do I talk to the camera or to you?
Just to me, just to me.
- Okay. My name's Eddy Temple-Morris.
I'm a DJ producer, and my proudest title is Patron Saint
of the Secret Garden Party.
Freddie approached me through the XFM website
and said that they loved my show,
that I'd be perfect for this party that they were throwing.
I thought it looked and sounded fantastic.
So I said, "Yeah, where do I sign? I'm in?"
- So we duly did that and about 700 people turned up.
And a lot of our friends who went there,
loved the vibe of the party,
loved the freedom of what you could do
and, you know, the general style and the culture around it.
- Try and sit up a bit, might be good if...
I think we got a bit of a tendency to hunch.
- I'm Ned.
- I'm Maff from The Egg.
- I'm from The Egg as well.
We're a live electronic dance music stuff.
And we've been playing Secret Garden
since the beginning.
- Yeah. We have a friend Grantley.
He said, "There are these people who wanna do the best party
in the world ever and they want you to play."
And I was like, "Okay, great."
And it's all really funny and ridiculous
and eccentric and goodly silly.
- Secret Garden Party!
- It was the start of something really, really special.
- You're always talking to us.
- Not the giant cock behind you.
We moved here nearly 20 years ago.
Everyone knows everyone.
My husband's on the parish council,
and suddenly a party arrives.
And "Oh, we don't want them. Think of the traffic.
Think of the noise and they're not even local.
And what do we get out of it?
And I don't want my children going because that'd be awful."
And then you see these children who snuck in
at the beginning.
- Back in those days...
- I had no money.
- I didn't have a ticket.
So, I looked for ways to get in.
We'd already invented the game of trying to find
someone that had actually bought a ticket.
- You know, I've been there when the kids are kind of
drunken and disheveled behind the toilets going,
"Oh, gosh."
- I'm Pete Loveday.
And what is Pete Loveday?
Probably someone who's been with this festival
for 13 years doing artwork for them.
How did you get involved?
Just a phone call out of nowhere.
And it was Freddie.
Cause he'd read the Russell Comics
and come down to check it out
and see whether I fancy doing artwork for him.
He'd found a few images there that probably made him think
that I, I might know what a festival was about.
And what did you think?
- Well, I thought it was very small and it was very sweet.
It had one stage.
- By the lake, which is now
the Where The Wild Things Are stage.
- And the pagoda sorted being used for DJ's.
- The dance area was a tree house.
- The magic boots? Do you remember the magic boots?
- Or the Fuck Yeah bar with the cars outside
that people pushed into the lake.
It was the definition of just fucking reckless abandon.
- Yeah, it was great.
We rocked up and the moment we started,
it was just one enormous fiesta.
- First time I went to SGP, I was...
I must have been dressed as a cow.
- Then shit got really outta hand for five years.
- Well, I can't remember the 14th, the second one,
but I certainly can remember the 13th one.
Why was that particularly memorable?
- I went down the rabbit hole.
And then I came out and I was in a couple of mud
with lots of pretty girls.
And with this really wicked little sound system
that somebody had made out of bits.
And we were in a tent that was literally
just kind of half fallen down,
but we were dry and we were warm and we were
in this little space and this is the Secret Garden.
It was incredibly difficult not to let your hair down.
We've gone from literally three muddy stages to this.
- My sister, Fred's mom, was slightly tearing her hair out
because each year the festival had got bigger and better
and the loss had got bigger and better every year.
They were very casual about, you know, receipts.
I think we started getting it quite well
developed in 2005, which is, I think also when we
started noticing the sort of quite parabolic increase
in our attendees.
And then 2006 got very popular.
We got very lucky with a couple of bookings.
- 2006 was like, we'd booked by accident...
Well, not by accident.
She was brilliant, Lily Allen.
- Go well today?
- Went really, really well.
I didn't think it was gonna go very well
cause it was raining and there were no people
out to the front stage.
And then suddenly there were.
- We had people turning up with picnic chairs
and like they'd printed out the program.
- They wanted to know where the information booth was
and we're just like...
- And the best complaint letter we had in the early years
was someone who thought they'd found the information desk.
They got handcuffed to each other and then pointed
to 500 keys hanging from fishing wire
and told one of these keys is gonna set you free.
- Everyone harps back to the good old days.
"The good old days.
My days, my days when I was coming up."
"Oh, it was magic, wasn't it?"
You know, magical time, magical time.
- I told my friends I was going to Secret Garden
and they all kind of laughed at me.
They were like, "Are you going to that posh kids' party?"
Back in the day, it was seen as a posh party
because people wore 60 pound animal hats and drank Pims.
- I actually ended up doing my 40th birthday party there.
So I had like 150 people all turned up.
Everybody like in pure white.
- And yeah, it was, it was quite polite, wasn't it?
- And it was sometimes like, "Are we running a festival?"
- Fred called me.
And he said, "I would like talk to you about some festival."
I said to Fred, I said,
"Listen, I'm going to come with Desmond
and let's see what happens."
- Are ready to sing?
- And when we walk out on stage, it was in the thousands.
I went, "Oh my God. Secret Garden Party is born."
- And suddenly like the time I was going,
they're the best festival ever.
- Honestly, on the Saturday night,
it really was as if everyone was, you know,
high up on one thing or another with a glow stick
sticking out of their nostril,
running around like blue ass flies.
Been to Glastonbury fairly regularly.
We didn't go to Burning Man until summer of 2006.
- If we're being honest,
Secret Garden Party borrowed a lot from Burning Man.
Which is like an art festival that everyone's
doing something, burning something, dressing up
and making, just anything to get people to interact.
It's still one of the best parties
I've ever been to because the people you'll meet,
things to do and interact with, the creativity
and the capability that's brought to it,
is just jaw dropping.
- You realize that actually it is okay to be this
fucking indulgently bonkers in the whimsical.
- But Burning Man is a little bit po-faced
and they take it really seriously
whereas here it was just all about fun.
Action.
- Can we do it again? That was fucking shit.
The level of dedication to nonsense
was unparalleled in any of the other festivals,
even Glastonbury to a certain extent.
They took the most bizarre and weird parts of Glastonbury
and just went pew.
This is the raw bones of the nonsense,
and we're gonna give it to you here in one place.
- We made an agreement with Secret Garden
that I would come here and make something amazing.
I believe it was like, I promised a spontaneous miracle.
Nice to have your own phone line here
and the landline, too. Mom?
Your have reached a number
that has been disconnected.
- I was taken to a barn where almost all of that stuff
was found. I mean, this is quality goods.
It's all those cans, I brought with me
from the last festival in Ireland.
I had a huge bag. I was like loitering in, you know,
kind of customs.
Like somebody please ask me what's in this huge bag.
I was like, "Na, na, na."
You know, looking suspicious. Nothing.
They didn't want any, they didn't care.
I wanted to like open it up and go, "Ha-ha!
You ever seen that before?"
Nothing. And some of the people were looking at me,
kinda like "You're such a dick."
- In this screwed up, over health and safety-ised,
very controlled English, stiff upper lip culture,
Secret Garden proves that, you know,
we can have the same vibes as a Favela in Brazil,
at least for a few days anyway.
You know what I mean?
- When I first joined Secret Garden Party, it was-
- Shambles.
- It was the biggest circus I've ever seen.
I thought everyone was going to die
and people were just coming into the office going,
"I'm just going to suicide Olympics.
Where's the suicide Olympics."
Are they literally suicide Olympics?
- Pretty much. It was a wheelchair on the top of a hill
and they used to just push people down there.
- So, I mean, I remember the first year
of watching someone in the wheelchair go down the hill.
- It was the tractor tire.
That one went all the way down the hill with the,
with the guy in it, into the lake.
And that was, and then he didn't come out for ages.
We were like "Where's the, where's the guy gone?"
- Well, I think as long as they don't drain the lake.
We were willing to give anyone a chance
who had a crazy enough idea that sounded like
we could execute it and then develop them
and help them along the way on that.
- So I used to do this thing where I would
forge a load of doctors' prescriptions,
dress up as a doctor and break into festivals.
And on Sunday I'd walk around writing people off sick
so they could stay out and party more.
And I was sitting with these people drinking
their champagne.
There was someone there who was chatting
and he, you know, I thought he was being a little bit cocky.
So I quietly wrote him out of prescription,
describing him with cock throat
and explaining to him or his jewels
would start to sink down into his throat scrotum
and the cock would come out of hid mouth.
And he looked at it for a little bit
and he just went, "Are they paying you to be here?"
I was like, "No, I jumped over the fence like always."
And he went, "This is our festival."
And he said, "Okay, come next time
and bring some people and do something."
You've talked about Vito, haven't you?
Yeah, if you say,
have you got a few words to say?
- What? You asking me who I am?
Mm?
- Vito was ridiculous.
Beautifully, happily, joyfully visible at all times.
He'd say goodbye to you and he'd say,
"I'll see you in my dreams."
Or something stupid and then he'd suddenly disappear.
And literally 10, 15 minutes later, he'd come back
and he was in a completely different costume
Different makeup even.
And he'd gone back to his little hole
where he did these magical things and he'd just get...
And the whole reason for it was just to make you gasp.
- Think he was particularly proud of being able
to of coined 'This is a serious party'.
- And walked around with his sign on him
He got on stage a few times, danced with us.
- I mean, I don't remember the first time.
It was sort of, one of those things where
he just always seemed to be around at the garden party.
By the time that he'd got his iconic sign, we'd met.
- I invited him to compere for Artful Badger.
He's an incredible compere and incredible energy.
- I got him to do the, "Oh, How Lucky You Are"
business from Dr. Seuss, to open the rabbit hole.
- Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to,
The Cat in the Hat.
- And he did the entire thing.
- 'No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.'
- Verbatim.
- 'Congratulations, today is your day.
You're off to great places. You're off and away.'
- Got it completely right, I think.
- 'You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any which direction you choose'.
- We were all going a bit like, "Can we get on with it?
Can we get on with this? We wanna hear the band now."
- 'Oh, the places you'll go, you'll be on your way up.
You'll be seeing great sights.
You'll join the high flyers who soar to high heights."
- In 2007, me and a guy called Dickie Cohen
did mud wrestling at Glastonbury.
It went down really well.
We got some Barbie dolls.
- Not Barbie dolls, but they were like-
- Yeah, okay. Cabbage Patch.
- No, they were like sort of ugly little like-
- Trolls?
- Something between My Little Pony and a Barbie doll.
I can't remember where, I dunno where we got them from.
- We put them in the bowl full of mud
and had them wrestling.
We had like weird legs and arms sticking out.
And then one arm was holding a proposal.
- And we put it in a box.
- And then we just sent that to Secret Garden Party HQ.
We didn't want any money at all.
We just wanted five tickets
and we'd do everything ourselves.
So in 2007, me and Dickie hand dug a mud pit.
It took us three days to dig.
And then we just stood around it with megaphones,
getting people to wrestle.
- The mud pit was just like a continued success.
And everyone knew it. Loads of people liked it.
But of course, we didn't have a lid.
So loads of people slept in it.
Like cuddled in it, pissed in it.
I mean all sorts like, you know,
people passed out in it while someone else
was pissing in it.
At like two o'clock in the morning, I was just like,
"I am not getting involved in this."
- I can't see. I can't see.
- I remember one year, I got about 25 people in
and I thought this had the potential to get quite sexy.
But then there was just a few guys, just writhing around
and just started almost fucking each other in the mud.
And it escalated really quickly.
And that was the start of the Collosillium.
10 years later, it's this massive 2000 capacity venue.
And we have a strong belief that we are not the headliners,
It's the crowd.
So then we played ridiculous games.
'Wax on, wax off', where you are on the aerial truss
and you're ripping off hair with wax strips.
- We had a new game called, 'Whose Anus Is This Anyway?'
Four bums, four girls guessing the boyfriend's bums.
She's very sure it's his bottom
but she's not sure about the balls.
- This girl, beautiful, she decided
that she definitely knew it was her boyfriend's bum.
And instead of like just kissing it,
she licked the bum right in the middle.
- Full crack. - Full crack.
Well that was daring, well done.
- But at least it's your boyfriend.
- At least it's your boyfriend.
She picked it wrong.
How do you circumvent health and safety?
- Yeah. You don't circumvent health and safety.
- When you're creating things like this in the sort of space
that we are talking about,
we kind of hope people subscribe to the danger aspect.
What was the guy's name
in health and safety?
- He's actually, he's asked not to be named
and remain anonymous.
- Truth be told a lot of the crazies I saw running around,
they were pretty aware of how insane this place was.
It's this safety third thing.
First, have fun. Second, have more fun.
And then think, is this dangerous?
- Even if someone did come out with no leg,
it was just like,
"Hey, I've scarred my leg for life, but it's fine."
Not that I think that's a good thing.
And now we're much more professional, of course.
We're much more professional.
- It always helps if it looks like
you've completely thrown the rule book away
because the public love that.
But you know, at the end of the day, they're our guests.
We need to look after them and send them home in one piece.
- The model that all those guys came up with
was that they got all these micro venues together.
Each one of those micro venues was run
by a really cool posse.
They all came together and each one of those little crews
pulled like a mule.
- There's things, there's the action counselors.
There's the physics council,
there's the political things.
There's lots of discussions about stuff.
- Me and Jim were like obsessed with 9/11
conspiracy theories.
So we were like, "Hey, let's do a conspiracy camp."
So then I, we invited all these David Icke's
and journalists and ex MI5 agents
and all these weirdo's and conspiracy theorists
into this tent which was decked out like the war room
in Stanley Kubrick's, 'Dr. Strangelove'.
- Once the foundation perception of reality is flawed,
everything that comes from that must by definition,
be flawed.
- The idea of bringing serious academics and professors
and serious people into this environment
where everyone's like naked and on drugs.
And it's all crazy and hectic and hedonistic,
that really appealed to me.
- Is that a cucumber? That's a cucumber.
- Cucumber, cucumber, cucumber.
- E.T. phone homo.
- When it comes to like representing LGBT+ communities
at festivals, like it's actually really poor.
Glastonbury's championed that with like Block9 festival,
have done some good stuff as well,
but like Secret Garden Party was always
a very open, friendly festival.
So I think lots of gay people used to gravitate there.
We originally asked to do a tent,
the kind of ceremony celebration of coming out.
Someone sent us a thousand bottles of poppers.
So poppers actually sponsored the first gay bar.
It meant that our tent was really busy.
It's sweaty, it's amazing, it smells of mud
and all the sweat and human bodies.
And then all of the kind of chemicals which are coming out
of everyone's pores.
It's a little like a chemical toilet,
but like kind of sexier.
And it just turns into this dirty, amazing little ray
that just never seems to sort of stop.
One guy who sort of grabbed the microphone,
he was like super nervous.
We stopped the music and he came out and he started crying.
His friends started crying, I started crying.
And then the whole tent was just like weeping for this guy.
And his friends were celebrating him and they were like,
"Oh my God, we never knew."
And I was like, yeah.
And you look at him and he's covered in glitter
and I was like, "How did you not know?"
Having that place where people can be celebrated,
people can be who they want to be and be empowered for that
is always what we've stood for.
Come inside my bar,
it will change your life and the size of your anus.
- Things like introducing drug testing,
first festival to do that.
- So I'm Henry Fisher. I'm one of the testers for The Loop.
We provide advice on drug use and sexual health
for people at festivals and other events.
Last year was the first year when we were able to actually
provide multi-agency safety testing.
So that's where people can come and bring a little scoop
of powder or a bit of a pill, or ideally a whole pill.
We then find out what's in the sample
and we can tell 'em how strong it is.
So you are not telling people
not to take drugs?
We neither condone or condemn drug use.
We know it's gonna happen.
So what we're trying to do is just make sure that they don't
end up in the welfare tent or worse, in hospital.
That was a great, great thing to be a part of.
And certainly something that, you know,
it helps if you're independent,
to be able to make that move.
- Are people who come to you suspicious?
They were suspicious at first
because it was such a new thing.
Now there's a bit more publicity.
People have heard us a bit more. It's been really popular.
We wouldn't have been able to do it
without the support of our local police force
who were awesome in their response.
It's something we'd been talking to them about
for a couple of years.
And I know when it first got mentioned, it was a,
a very uncomfortable concept.
The reasoning they went through was very interesting.
Their primary directive is the prevention of harm.
Their secondary directive is the persecution of criminality.
Once you've entered into the event
and you've gone through the searches and all that security,
the option for that second directive has gone.
If you are going to be able to effectively discharge your
primary directive of reducing harm.
And this is not an opportunity to persecute petty,
civil disobedience.
So far, how's the quality of the drugs been?
- It's been really variable and it always is.
We've had a few very strong pills so far,
which is as much of a worry as well.
We're telling people to take a quarter.
But then we've had some, some really awful things.
I think we had some plaster of paris,
happened to us yesterday,
that someone was sold on site as MDMA.
- Prohibition has been doing more harm than drugs
since whatever it is, 1963.
If drugs are, you know,
have a dangerous side, they should be controlled.
And to be able to at least used, if they're gonna be used,
in a safe way.
A word of balloons?
- That omnipotent sound.
- So laughing gas, yeah.
Nitrous oxide occurred through this period
and suddenly everybody was doing it.
I remember getting there for the Monday...
No, I was there from Sunday. I can't remember.
I think I arrived with Ans.
And there's a big, huge tube of it.
And I had some, and I blacked out and fell over.
Hit my head on this picnic table.
And I went to hospital and I think we played a festival
on the main stage a couple of weeks later.
And I went on stage and said,
"Laughing gas, right, it's not that funny."
- It's no laughing matter. - No.
- When it first appeared on the scene,
one of our crew started off with a gas bar.
Yeah, I think you got mentioned
in the same sentence as laughing gas.
- Never. - There you go.
- Yes. - But I did hear it from you.
- I think the people running it made a very,
very nice little fortune.
I had a girlfriend who did a nitrous oxide stall
at the Garden Party.
And so we organized a, a big tank.
It was, it was just totally fucking ridiculous.
I mean, there's people sort of burning their mouths on it.
There's people literally just falling over.
We had to like confiscate it
cause people are still squabbling over it.
Hippie fucking crack.
- Now the new psychoactive substance laws come in,
we have gone to it now being the preferred drug for sale
by organized criminal gangs at festivals.
Now, if you think about the upstring on that
and the consequences for getting caught with it,
it is not really a big win in that area for that law.
Especially not for us at the bloody edge of it.
- Are we not here to talk about music?
- I'm Lissie.
This is like the coolest place we've ever been I think.
- Yeah.
The new music has come through the festival,
where you think that Where The Wild Things Are,
which is a very small stage kind of built into a tree.
And the artists we've had come through that,
from Florence and The Machine and The XX
and Lily Allen and Daughter and all these kind of acts,
as time gone on, they then kind of
upgraded to the main stage.
Crystal Fighters were one of our headliners this year,
on the final year.
They came to the festival as punters
and it inspired them to start the band in the first place.
That I think is, is part of what's important
with Secret Garden Party,
it's inspired, not just us and punters,
but inspired the artists as well.
- All of the acts that were booked into the Garden Party
understood the ethos of the show.
You can play and we can't pay loads of money
cause we haven't got it,
cause we spent it all on fluff and bunting.
And when you finish playing
get in the party with everyone else.
DJs who are used to getting paid six figures for a set
would come and play for free.
That's how we managed to bank all the early headliners.
DJs love playing at the Collisillium.
We've had Disclosure, Sub Focus, Chase & Status,
Roni Size, all the Hospital Records guys
and a whole range of like massive DJs.
These guys who came over from America
and came back backstage with me,
Dickie and Frodo and Timmy were like,
"Say man, what you doing now?"
He's, "Oh man, you know, I'm just gonna go back
to the hotel, you know."
And we were like, "No, you're not.
You're gonna come back to the sweaty lingerie party.
And you're just gonna take off your trousers
and like wander around in your pants."
And he is like, "Okay, I'm gonna do that."
- There wasn't any pandering.
Grace Jones, you know, exception
cause she was a bloody nightmare.
- She wanted to have a scissor lift
that kind of brought her up.
But the people in charge of doing that before,
perhaps they didn't have the ability
to organize something like that.
So it pretty much was one of our stage crew
with Grace Jones on their shoulders.
And he just kind of went like this.
- You'd never go to garden party to,
because of the band lineup,
sorry James Brennan but you wouldn't.
But like it's, you'd go to garden party for so much more.
Tell us about that complaint email
that you got from somebody.
- I love it. - You make it sound like
there's just been one in 15 years.
We get, you know, depending on the year we, you know,
you get one or two.
If it's been a very good year,
you, you know, you normally get one.
A very wet year, you can get a lot more.
Last year's which has, we had a love,
brilliant year, last year.
And it was the only real letter of complaint.
Her major beef was, she was promised Secret Places
and she couldn't find them.
- Well, sorry for that.
But you missed this secret and this secret and this secret,
this secret and that you didn't find them
is not really our fault,
Well, that's the thing about
the Secret Garden Party.
It's about the little secret things
that actually, for me, make the festival so wonderful.
- S&Empathy, that was good.
- We did the Dog House.
It's just a little place where we just play filthy,
dirty, funky dance music.
I seem to remember that time when we lost the power.
Yeah, yeah. So after the power went down,
we were following the blue power cable,
pulling it out the mud tryna figure out where it had gone.
I went inside a tent, I kind of unzipped it and went in.
And as I walked in,
there's 200 naked people having a massive rave.
I didn't even know we were next to a sort of
secret naked rave tent.
- One of my favorite things doing was with sunflower field.
Fred built a field of sunflowers
and put a row of toilets against one side
with the back cut out of the toilet.
You walk through and then
into this sunflower field.
- We didn't tell her that the sunflowers
were in the secret places cause that'd been a bit mean.
Could you state your real name?
- My name's Ian Duff.
What do you do here?
I run the Secret Bar.
- I first met Ian in 2006 and Ian was sort of,
kind of ricocheting behind the bar and he asked me,
"What day is it?", I went, "it's Friday morning."
And Duff went, "Fuck, I've been awake for four days.
I'm going to bed."
And literally just disappeared off to bed.
Right.
And how many years have you been doing Secret Bar?
I can't actually remember how many years.
It's all kind of merged into one.
Set up the bar, we gave all the booze away for free
if people could find it.
- Yeah. How did he ever run that bar?
Who was paying for all the booze?
- We hid the bar in various places throughout the site.
And then if they found the bar,
they could have a free drink.
Open to anyone as long as you can find it.
- I mean, the first few years
we were right next to Duff's Bar.
Everybody just sort of went from Duff's to get refreshed
and relax for a little bit and then come to ours for a quick
hour on the dance floor and then back to Duff's again.
- As people got to know about it,
they tended to take the piss.
So we changed it a little bit to make it a little bit more,
well a little bit more participatory.
Where the drinks are free
if you're willing to perform
one of several silly, bad ideas that we came up with.
This year, we've got the bartender haircut,
topless electric fence limbo.
We tend to make the people who don't join in, pay.
Right, yeah.
So that, that's how we kind of make ends meet.
Yeah, fair enough.
- But we never really make ends meet.
- I remember actually going to...
I remember, was it last year the year before?
I'd gone to see Air on the main stage
and all these girls were dancing around me, kind of going
"Oh my God, it's like I'm orgasming. It's amazing."
And uh... - Who said that? You did?
- No, no, not me.
Some of the girls I know were like dancing,
the music's like, "Oh man, I'm just having this orgasm."
So, and then afterwards-
- They said that? - Yeah, they said that.
- Okay. - Yeah.
And then we went backstage and I met the drummer
and I said, "So what's it like playing drums in there?"
And he said, "Well, they told me to play
like I'm making love to a beautiful woman,
but you're never actually coming."
And isn't that funny that the girls
all actually felt the same vibe from them. Easy.
Anyway, we took him to Duff's Bar
and got them completely twatted.
- Sorry about that. - Just fucking breaking strings.
I like breaking strings, it's fun.
Does anyone know where the Artful Badger tent is?
When Garden Party started
it was pretty camp to watch it.
Garden Party was reacting to something
that wasn't there and wasn't being fed.
Suddenly, festival has become
incredibly mainstream.
- There need to be festivals that have their independence.
And when you have your independence,
there's a bit of a trade off.
You have to do a dance with law enforcement
and local authority.
At the same time, it also means
that you're not swallowing corporate cock.
People are not trying to shaft something really horrible
and big and unappetizing down your gullet.
And that is important
because you will have
all the strings associated with sponsorship.
They're nasty.
- We went to New York and it was
the Woodstock Reunion Festival.
Big corporate love and peace pizzas
and Pepsi logos and everything everywhere.
But these kinda topless guys on stage with oil saying,
let's go and see how much love there is at Woodstock.
And Woodstock money, which people ran out of.
And people pulling fences down.
Commercialism,
that's what some people say led
to the fall of Woodstock 99.
Garden Party's always been
that kind of fuck you to that corporate scene.
We're doing it for us.
We're not doing it to earn money because like,
who the fuck earned money out of Secret Garden Party.
Like definitely not any of us.
SGP started organically.
So it requires a lot of interaction and, you know,
buy in from people.
If you go out to try and invent and create a massive
counter-cultural significant thing,
you're gonna end up with probably something very different.
Hit the mic.
Let's see whose headset's still on.
- Oh no, it's stopped. - Testing.
I'll get the sound man to see if-
- Yeah, it's stopped.
- Ah, what's that?
- This is the H6.
It's much more superior than the original zoom.
- There we go.
Secret Garden Party's contribution to festival culture.
- So there was a review in like Mixmag or DJ,
one of those things.
There was actually a review of V Festival.
It was this whole column being able to site
and this band, and this band, and this band,
and this band, and this band.
And you know, all the stuff and then the last sentence was,
"But of course, all the cool kids
were at Secret Garden Party."
We needed to really identify ourselves
as a bit different and we did that wholeheartedly
with this sort of idea that you either think
we're a bunch of wankers or you think that looks cool.
We didn't really want a reaction anywhere in between.
- My greatest moment was the year
that I realized it wasn't a secret anymore.
I was on the top of the Ferris wheel,
looking out across this incredible canopy of stars below me.
And I cried, you know, at that moment.
It was just so, so emotional.
- The first time I went, I thought,
"Hello. It's not a secret. It's massive."
And I know exactly where it is.
So it's not a Secret Garden Party at all.
It's a massive sore thumb in the middle of Cambridgeshire.
With planes flying overhead and like really loud music
and queues for miles and all the Tesco's
completely empty of beer.
You know, it's not secret.
- I got a text message saying,
"Is it okay, Prince William's coming to the Garden Party.
He's gonna camp in the Garden."
Prince Harry.
- Prince Harry. Thank you.
"No, it's not okay to put the Prince of the realm
in our Garden when we are like, have no VIP area."
This is supposed to be, you know, one tier and shit.
And Daisy, you actually phoned me up and went,
"That's really not cool.
Like, he doesn't, you know, what else does he get to do"
- "Okay, you can come, but you're not having a free ticket."
- Well, if he plays the same game as everyone else,
if we book four or five lookalikes of Prince Harry,
then not only does he get a chance of a bit of anonymity,
we have plausible deniability the whole fucking way.
And telling their private security
that there's loads of lookalike on site,
was probably one of the funnest moments of my life.
- When I was introducing Jarvis Cocker,
we had this pact that Jarvis Cocker
would come to the microphone.
As he got the microphone, Captain America and I,
would go boooom,
stage dive off the stage, onto the crowd.
What could possibly go wrong?
So I go and tell Jarvis Cocker the plan.
He goes, "Brilliant. Do you want a chocolate?"
So we all had a chocolate.
And then Jarvis Cocker comes to the microphone.
And I'm looking at my receivers,
thinking like, eyeballing them to go,
"I'm coming. I'm coming."
I had a few seconds in which to just sort of
translate to them, the fact that I was about to
throw myself onto them.
And I sort of got a few positives and a few confused looks
but I just went for it anyway,
cause the moment was, it was there.
So I just launched myself up and they literally,
it was like the red, the Red Sea,
parted and just went peow, like a cartoon.
And I went boom and I collapsed,
almost breaking my back on one woman
in about her sixties at tie-dye.
She just turns to me and she goes,
"Oh my God, you're lucky you didn't kill yourself.
I can't believe the youngsters these days.
They've got no festival etiquette at all, have they?"
So she saved me.
Morning guys.
So it's now day two of Secret Garden party.
Today, I've got these amazing trousers on from Penny Drop.
I've got a mesh body suit
and some cool stickers in little mushroom.
- The kids came up and they bought their outfit at Topshop.
Sure.
We got it from charity shops and stapled it together
and painted it blue.
And then just tipped buckets of glitter on our faces
and rolled around, getting herpes.
But at least there was some, you know, there was,
there was a level of inventiveness.
- We've worked very hard to get something
that we really understood what we wanted
as a bunch of people.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of voyeurs here,
not partaking...
Who are kind of just here to watch us, right?
It's like, no, fuck off.
I don't want you to watch me. I want you to be with me.
- And I think it's gone through lots of,
lots of kind of waves really.
I think the rain and the mud helped with the phases
because the weather would be shit all weekend
and all the kind of part-time party goers would be like,
"Oh no, I've got mud in my furry boots."
Last night, it rained a lot.
And I mean, a lot.
Music was like pumping all night, as well.
It was ridiculous.
Gangs of pissed up blokes wandering around,
getting a bit rowdy and a bit, you know,
not really in the spirit of things.
Then word would get out that that year had been brilliant
and the next year a load of assholes would turn up again.
- When all the Joshua's and Tiffany's, you know,
discount themselves on the, on the greenery.
Sipping away on their Buck's Fizz
as the sky turned from blue to pink.
And then next thing you know,
it's dubstep and a man with neck tattoos,
has a football shirt that he's holding
above his head like that and walking with his shoulders,
kinda moving back and forth like this,
as his mate throws a cider bottle in a lake.
I'm like, yeah...
What do I think about this?
You know, yeah, the Joshua's and Tiffany's
sipping Sancerre on the green,
they were twats but at least they were polite.
- The only one thing that never changes,
is that everything changes.
And the reality is if you,
if you don't accept that, things can go wrong.
Any horror stories though?
- Absolutely not.
- I remember we had one girl who was working on our crew.
She was tripping on acid and she had found
a security guards radio, and she was shoving
it up her vagina, shouting, "Fuck me now. Fuck me now."
And all of our crew was like, "Whoa! Oh.
What do we do with you?"
And like the security guard is like,
"Can I have my radio? I should maybe keep the radio."
- One of the wet years.
Does everyone have stories about the wet years?
Oh, God. I better be good then.
The mud was pretty crazy a few years ago.
Really nuts. And it was worst I've ever seen.
Didn't the Pagoda Stage sink?
- Did it? - Yeah.
The Pagoda Stage sank?
- Yeah.
- Kids in bin bags, stamping around through just trenches.
And when you, when rains in your face the whole time,
you have to frown, you spend the whole day frowning.
Spend the whole day frowning, you know?
Not good.
- I was doing a stall here and the field was draining off,
down through the stalls.
So we dug with adjoining people, a trench.
And I was sitting there thinking,
this is a very, very middle class festival
and I'm not quite sure how I feel about this.
And just then, an extremely pretty young girl came up,
vomited in our trench and walked away.
And I thought, well, maybe it is a festival.
- I was always surprised that it never would dissuade people
from getting in the mud pit,
the fact that there was already mud everywhere.
- We love it when it rains at Garden Party
because we're indoors and it means that we're packed.
- They're the real fight. - They're the bloody fight.
The battle of the Somme.
2007, Glade Festival, was one of the most nuts
experiences of my entire life.
I mean, we had rivers.
We went to the police and said,
"We can't keep everyone safe. Sorry"
And the police said, "Well, you can't evacuate
cause the roads are closed.
So you've got to keep everyone safe."
And that kind of triggered this Dunkirk spirit.
Yeah. I mean, they amount to some very,
very tough days in the office,
but you do always end up quite proud of the,
the people you're standing shoulder to shoulder with.
- It's just that general carnage
but you're all in it together.
And you kind of just keep going
cause what else you gonna do?
- Garden Party had a lot of rain as well, but whatever.
It's nothing compared to what we had.
- In Duff's Bar, in Duff's bar...
In Duff's Bar at seven o'clock in the morning,
there is a Heras fence
with blue plastic draped over it.
In front of the Heras fence, in the muddy grass,
is a paddling pool full of dirty brown water.
In that paddling pool is an inflatable champagne bottle,
which is just meandering around slowly in the dirty water,
under the gray skies up against the plastic
on the Heras fence.
And five men stand around with their hands in their pockets
staring at the little inflatable champagne bottle.
And I sat there and watched this
and thought, "Yeah, this is ace"
There was something almost Beckett like about this bleak,
bleak remnants of something that may have
one time been spectacular.
Long washed out, dead.
Yeah, I fucking loved that.
Oh, the glare of fresh air.
- I remember sitting up on this tree watching a stage
and I didn't know the guy next to me,
but I just sat there and I said, "Nice."
And the guy next to me said, "Nice."
And I said, "Nice."
And he said, "Nice."
And we had, like went through 30 different 'nices'.
It's really funny.
And then he walks off and I never talked to him again.
And then six months later I met him
and I realized that was Vito.
First time I met him, yeah.
- Oh really?
- He just loved that lifestyle of being out with people,
being fun and energetic.
- 20 minutes ago, you were looking like Father Christmas.
Now you're, you know, Dr. Seuss or whatever.
The tragedy was this, you know,
the ying and the yang.
He did suffer from depression.
- We definitely saw eye to eye on the world.
- The festival draw was the party draw,
the creativity that, you know, that suspended reality,
that escapism, drew him in too much.
- I knew he was struggling a little bit
with the festival scene and I didn't know how much.
- But you never know, do you?
Yeah.
- I was meant to call him.
And then the week later I heard the news.
- Like everyone, we probably all thought,
"Oh God, we should have said something,
done something or gone down or helped."
It's all very well if you pronounce
all these great intentions under the black light,
but when the house lights come on and you need to actually
follow through and make all of that real,
otherwise it's all bullshit.
- CALM came through Freddie.
I think until Vito died,
I had absolutely no comprehension of the suicide rates
in men being quite so high and quite such an issue.
The Campaign Against Living Miserably
is for us an obvious ally.
Well, it started with Eddie Temple-Morris,
who first mentioned it and introduced it to me.
It fitted our ethos of responsibility.
At CALM, we believe you can't have
a great festival without tea.
So come say hi at this year's Secret Garden Party.
We started giving them space
for interactive art pieces that gave people an opportunity
to open up, engage, acknowledge maybe some of the things
that they carried themselves.
- 'Well, I'm sorry to say so,
but sadly it's true that Bang-ups and Hang-ups,
well, they can happen to you.'
- Bizarrely at the time that he died,
he was at his strongest.
Now I know, quite often the case when someone has made
that conscious decision, they're like at their happiest,
clearest, most cognant stage.
You need to take care of each other.
- Waiting around for the phone to ring,
ding-a-ling, ring-ding-a-ling.
- One thing I've learnt is to just try to listen
a little bit more to that niggling little voice.
When someone pops in your head
a couple of times, just call them.
Yeah.
- Well, you've probably been told about his firework finale.
His sister got in touch.
He'd asked whether his ashes could be scattered
at the Garden Party or some such.
He suggested a rather Hunter S. Thompson
style firework display.
- Nothing would give him greater pleasure
than to know that we'd done the nearest equivalent
we possibly could.
- Seeing Vito's firework go up, that was great.
He would've just loved that.
He would've just loved the sheer silliness of it,
of sending someone's ashes up in a firework and going pew.
Perfect. Absolutely bang on.
- I just miss him madly.
The friendships that you made here
would gravitate out into your real life.
You wouldn't get that love like and support
and people being that open anywhere else.
You know, I met the mother of my child here.
I think we probably made that child here, I think.
When you've got that many people projecting
that amount of love, it's very overwhelming.
- Will you marry me?
- Fucking yes!
The amount of relationships and friendships
and businesses and skills and careers
that were kind of born here,
make it like just one of those really, really special places
for a really big crew of friends.
- There maybe that weird kind of, you know,
naked ping-pong tent that they made
becomes like, you know, takes over the world
as crazy international business.
- Secret Garden ending is a sad chapter.
- The last dance and the last party,
everyone was just crying.
There will be people who will remember
Secret Garden as a place where they first fell in love.
There will be people there who remember it
for the wild shag that they had.
- I've got laid quite a lot at Secret Garden Party.
So I've got to thank it just for that.
Why are you stopping it?
Why not keep doing it?
One of the reasons we didn't fight on
is we never wanted to be that festival
that wasn't as good as it used to be.
We'd always said we'd pull it if we got to that point.
- Secret Garden created a model,
which I truly believe, if you look around the world,
lots of people are doing now.
Festivals had a certain format
and then Secret Garden came along
and that format changed.
- More and more festivals are now selling tickets
because of the production and the non-music entertainment,
rather than those big headliners.
That worked until I think what we were doing
then became part of the norm.
But I think times have changed.
There certainly wasn't Facebook.
There wasn't YouTube and then all the rest.
The currency of how you presented your life online
and that being mainly photos took a massive role
in people's lives.
I think an event like ours with such a rich backdrop,
that was certainly a plus for us,
but I don't think we credited that we were losing control
of how we were presenting ourselves.
We were getting accusations of having sold out.
It was, you know, diametrically opposite online.
People going, "That's brilliant. We love you guys."
Or, "That's awful. You're a bunch of tossers."
You become a bucket list event.
A sort of festival republic machine,
where you are just trying to churn out what's popular
rather than help create what's popular.
- This was exactly the right move.
Rather than slip into some kind of obscurity.
- Yeah, the horse wasn't lame
but shoot it anyway.
The Garden man, long live the Garden.
Going out with a bang
was always gonna be preferable.