Illustrations by Jessica Penfold
I AM GROSS
It was the All Tomorrow’s Parties when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played and I remember being really into the fact that I’d spent all of my wages that month on cocaine, ecstasy and the ATP rent. On day two I was pretty wired and pilled out of my mind and so I was more than happy when I attracted the attention of a young American lady who, it seemed, was up for doing some hugging and kissing in the toilets. She also had a Smint dispenser full of ecstasy.
I get shivers thinking about this but as I took her into the men’s toilets the toilet attendant told me: “Better you than me, mate.”
I don’t know what possessed me, but about a minute into groping the girl, I decided that at that point, I must absolutely, totally, take a shit. So I excused myself, pulled my pants down and started taking this amazing, long, ecstasy-enhanced defecation, my face all red, sweating, and holding the girl’s hand while she stood there doing more bumps of cocaine.
She started to get a bit freaked out when I told her I wanted to stay there taking a dump and would it be okay if I played with myself while she rubbed her tits. Sadly this was too much for the poor girl and she told me, “You’ve gone too far!” and stormed out. I stayed there for the next three hours, trying to figure out how to leave.
I eventually left and can’t really remember the next bit apart from the fact my friends found me hugging an alligator ride for children in the arcades. Apparently I’d been asking it for directions to my house, back in London.
STEVE, LONDON
FINDING THE PORTAL
I was always a large consumer of ecstasy and booze but I’d never really ridden the rollercoaster of psychedelic drugs before.
This being my first Glastonbury, I decided to jump in at the deep end and, after I’d had about a gram of cocaine and 15 (I shit you not) Es in a day, I started hanging out in the healing fields.
A drug dealer approached us and, seeing that I was already totally out of my mind, did an amazing sales pitch where he sold us mushrooms, acid, weird little pills and some powder or other. Like weird grey-looking stuff.
I did two tabs of acid, took the whole plate of mushrooms, took a pill (I think it was DMT) and sniffed in some of the weird powder. Still feeling quite happy at my ability to walk I wandered onto the NME’s tour bus whereupon I found one of our writers Pete taking ketamine with some of the NME staff. Pretty much the last thing I remember was Pete giving me a massive key bump of K and telling me: “It’s lush.”
From that moment I left my body and flew through the windows of the tour bus. My soul was enveloped in skeletons and huge dark rushes of fear and hell. I convinced myself I had died and so started walking around the festival site completely naked, bawling and telling people: “I just want my life back.”
I saw a gathering of people inside a tent and realised it was a press conference. I pushed myself, still naked, to the front of the crowd and saw Michael Eavis giving a speech. Convinced that I’d discovered some meaning and reason to this violent drugs war going on inside my brain, I took the microphone, pointed at Michael Eavis and told the assembled press: “Of course it’s him!” After that my brain told me that I absolutely must find out where Moby was hanging out because he would provide me with the answers I needed.
The next day was spent in my motor home with my girlfriend who was also fucked on acid but nowhere near as bad as me. I told myself the only way I could re-enter the white light portal back into reality was by having anal sex with her. This proved pretty difficult as my penis was the size of a worm so I spent hours squatting over her, furiously tugging my dick, crying and screaming, “Noooo! Nooo!” I think I got it up there for about five minutes in the next seven hours. Convinced I was dead or dying I eventually fell into a nightmarish sleep. During this I was flying through portals of terror at a million miles-an-hour, crying, “I want my life back!” and trying to jerk off. I was woken up on day two by a friend telling me to calm down because “it was only drugs.” His four-day whiskey breath was so foul that it acted as a kind of smelling salt and slowly my journey towards full mental health began.
ALAN, LONDON
60 ACID TRIPS
It's day one of Glastonbury and we're all sat around the tent smoking weed and drinking. One of the people we were with, let's call him Dominic, was a bit of a dick and he always doing things to draw attention to himself and piss other people off.
When he saw that my friend Simon had a bottle of 7-Up in his bags, he took the bottle, unscrewed it and proceeded to glug down as much of the liquid as possible.
“Wait!” shouts Simon. “That's got like 60 trips in it!”. And yes, there were 60 trips of LSD in there and Dominic had just drunk half the bottle. Oh dear.
Over the course of the next 48 hours we had to deal with Dominic tripping very hard. He took his clothes off and started walking around the festival site on his own. We found him behind a tent in the healing fields, dancing around a stone and wanking himself off. He did this kind of thing all festival until one morning he awoke in a bedroom of another man not far from the festival sight. The man bathed him and gave him soup and dried him with towels. Dominic told us he wept on his shoulder and then walked back to Glastonbury train station on his own, wearing some ill-fitting tracksuit the man had given him.
That was his last festival. I think he works as an assistant bank manager now.
MILO, LONDON
FESTIVAL HORROR STORIES | 1 | 2 |


