Last week I worked at the radio station at the Big Chill festival (87.7FM). It was awesome, and I definitely intend to do it again next year.

I arrived on Tuesday afternoon, around five, at the wrong gate. Apparently people working for Production aren’t allowed to go to Production gate. Of course. After that initial panic was sorted out (mostly by my lovely taxi driver) I went to Yellow gate, got my official Big Chill Radio lanyard and met Andrew Smillie, the guy who got me involved in the festival. Apparently him and my dad have been ‘internet buddies’ for years, but never met (less creepy than it sounds, I’m sure).

The first day was mostly spent setting up tents and looking at the MAHOOSIVE stage that we’d been given to work with. It was much bigger than anyone was really expecting and got us all a little nervous. I was also a tad nervous about having ‘On Stage Access’ to the stage (our stage) that had Mr Scruff and Cutline on (not together, as awesome as that would be). Ended up watching Mr Scruff from the sofa on stage, sitting between Norman Jay and Norman Jay’s kids. Surreal.

The second day was slightly more eventful. A few new faces turned up, but not many. We spent most of the day setting up the radio office and broadcasting shows from last year’s Big Chill. We couldn’t actually broadcast any new material, because the actual studio was about four feet too far away for our wires to reach. We did try to move it ourselves, but got told off. The highlights of Wednesday were hearing the bad-ass Funktion-One sound system on our stage and going to the pub in Ledbury after work. That was the only day we actually had time to leave the festival because from Thursday our stage kept going until 3am.

On Thursday a bunch of new people arrived (including all the people I ended up spending the whole festival with). Most of the station was set up already and I wasn’t on the rota to do anything because the rota started on Friday, so I just hung out and drank a few beers. As night approached I was roped into doing some track-listing, where you ask the DJ what tunes he’s playing (for PRS) everytime he sticks a new one on. It isn’t actually as bad as it sounds.

Whilst doing that I got talking to a girl who’d arrived that day called Carrie. She’s from Wales and is very cool. We spent the majority of the festival together, primarily because she was one of three people there that genuinely found my jokes funny. Always nice to make someone laugh. The picture above is of No. 477, a steward working in and around our tent, and Carrie.

Later that night we went to a bar/club/tent called the Juke Joint (sponsored by Southern Comfort) which, from the outside, looked awesome. It looked like a bar from True Blood. All corrugated iron sheets and western-ness. We were pretty unsure about going in, because if we went in and it was shit, it would ruin the memory of the awesome-looking iron bar. I took a photo of Carrie having fun outside the bar (below), before we went in, just in case.

It turned out to be freaking amazing, which was handy. There was a DJ playing pretty cool dance tunes, with some live brass musicians (they were playing brass instruments, they weren’t metallic automatons) and a few percussionists on pedestals dotted through the audience. The main musician, a trombophonist (shut up, I have a lanyard), had an effects pad and was just improvising over the tunes. So cool.

Carrie somehow hadn’t been put on the rota at all, so she basically got a free ticket to Big Chill, and an official lanyard. She just hung around with whoever was free at the time, or kept us company while we worked. For the rest of us however, Friday was actually a reasonably busy day. I had a double shift – 4pm until midnight – and that was spend lifting heavy things for people, track-listing and just being constantly available for helping out.

Also working the double shift with me was Jo, who’d just finished his first year at college studying Philosophy and Music Tech (among other things), so we had a lot to chat about. We ended up covering for each other, because you only really needed one person on at a time, so I worked whilst he went and watched Chemical Brothers with Carrie, and then he covered for me while Carrie and I went and got a free ostrich burger (“It’s a radio emergency – look at my official lanyard!”) and went on the ‘Freak Out’ – a giant, expensive, inside-out washing machine.

I was starting to feel pretty rough by the time Saturday rolled around. It was a gloomy, overcast morning, was starting to rain as I got to the radio tent (we had to camp about half an hour’s walk away) and I was wearing shorts and feeling like a pillock.

It did end up warming up, which was cool, because I had the day off (because of my double shift the day before). Jo and Joben (another radio worker we were hanging out with, doing stuff for Mixcloud) were both working, so Carrie and I just hung out for most of the day. We didn’t really do anything apart from wandering. We bought friendship bracelets, just because of how lame that was, and discussed how a small, bracelet-based social network for festival goers would be awesome (“Oh wow! You know Red and Blue Stripes? I know him too! What colours are you?). In retrospect, it would probably only work for one festival at a time, and it’d have to be tiny ones like Shambala.

The four of us watched Kanye West ‘play’ on the main stage and had a bit of a giggle at him and our surreal commentary of his gig. It was actually pretty good when he finally shut up about how mental people think he is, how much they think he’s like Hitler and how he was only late and voiceless because he wanted the gig to be perfect. Mentalist.

That night it was absolutely freezing. Jo went off to watch Example, so I spent most of the night with Carrie and Joben around the radiator. After a while Joben got bored and went to do something (he can’t remember what, so he must have had fun). Carrie and I waited there until half 3 in the morning (when our stage was packed up) so we could get a golf buggy lift back to the camp site, because it was too cold to walk. There was no golf buggy. We had literally spent 3 hours in front of a radiator instead of just walking for half an hour and sleeping for that much longer. Grr argh. Turned out to be quite a nice walk back in the end. We managed to find somewhere still open that did hot chocolate, and I had lost all feeling in my legs so wasn’t really bothered about the cold.

Sunday, the last day, was another pretty chilled day. I got up around 11, dawdled around camp for a bit and trudged into work. I didn’t want to be made a fool of by the weather again, so I wore jeans and a jumper. I was fucking boiling (of course). It actually wasn’t that bad, but it was pretty warm on the way to work and I felt pretty silly.

I ended up doing more work on Sunday than I had for the whole week put together. It was really good to get busy actually. I had the recording of what the radio transmitted for the whole weekend and had to find the stuff that wasn’t DJed on stage and cut it into the separate shows. Quite therapeutic.

That night, Jo and Joben went out partying. Carrie had to be up at 5am for her taxi to the train station so I hung around with her. I was a bit partied out by the end of the week actually. Was nice to spend a night just sitting around chatting. At five I went to bed for a couple hours, then got up and got ready for my taxi, which was at half 10. I got to the coach station (if you can call it that) in Ledbury about 10 minutes before it arrived. Everything went much smoother than I thought it would.

I’m hopefully going to be helping out the same guys at Green Man festival later this month and if I can, at Big Chill next year. I definitely recommend going to Big Chill if you never have. Bring a heavy jumper and some sunblock.

The rest of the photos from Big Chill can be found here.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve started blogging again! Unfortunately I’ve started doing cool and interesting things before finishing building my website, so bare with me for a few days.