Secret Garden Party Full Review // Top Hats & Tall Tales

Abe Lincoln was a dude 

Throughout history, top hats (stovepipes or stovies) were the preferred headwear for important people. Uncle Sam, Abraham Lincoln, W.C. Fields, Fred Astaire, and (probably) even eminent German social philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that humans were ultimately motivated only by their own basic desires, rather than the sort of collective consciousness espoused by Kant, and more recently, hippies - coincidentally, none of whom (probably) wore top hats. 

Top-hat Schops (as he may have been known) would have loved festivals, the ultimate collection of base human desires and a cauldron of individual escapism, though its unlikely he’d have doffed his stovey at them all, since most only pay lip service to embracing the free spirited and the dilettante. Most, that is, except Secret Garden Party.

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Secret Garden Party // One Albarn Short Of A Band

Being an esteemed and fully paid up member of the fourth estate, Noize likes to think of itself as well educated in the world of words. We even impressed ourselves by spotting the cleverness behind the name of Damon’s cartoon creations - that is, if we’re barking up the right tree. Onomatology aside, we were just stoked to get down and boogie to Gorillaz Sound System.

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Secret Garden Party Interview // Filthy Dukes

Picture the scene. If we said that we caught up with one half of Noizes’ favourite electro DJ kings dressed as a dinosaur (or was it a dragon?) right before they played a floating Pagoda, you might say that we’d been experimenting a little too hard with the medicine cabinet. But we weren’t tripping; such happenings are a dime a dozen here at SGP, and so it was that Mr. Olly Dixon filled us in on the Dukes’ love of festivals, the perils of partying too hard and what the future might hold.

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Secret Garden Party // Eel Pie With Chips

Being the stylish, urban sophisticates that we are, we’ve sampled some of the finest culinary creations known to man. Eel Pie was not among them. Nor have we set foot on the famous Island, but wandering through this fairyland of a festival, we happened upon the band who have done more than most to keep that little part of Richmond on the map - Mystery Jets.

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Secret Garden Party // Stage Invaders

Having finally tracked down the person who needed to speak to the person in order to get a photo pass, Noize was surprised to find that many stages didn’t even have a photo pit. We were shoulder to shoulder with the great unwashed, jostling for position, and as a man of the people, we’re normally happy to show solidarity with fellow fans.

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Secret Garden Party // Robot Wars

You’ll have noted already that this is not your average shindig – one glance at the line up will tell you that - but that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a nod to the mainstream, to the sort of bands that quicken the pulse and get you thinking “Can’t miss that”.

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Festival Preview // Secret Garden Party, 23rd-26th July

Picture, if you will, Toad (Wind in the Willows), the Moog (Willow the Wisp), and Zebedee (Magic Roundabout) sitting at a large mushroom, planning a musical shindig, on a farm with a lake, in the idyllic Cambridgeshire countryside, you’d call it Secret Garden Party.  Six years on, the award winning SGP is boutique about to go big, it’s Bestival before the masses moved in. 

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