A Cracker's Guide to Benicassim

If you’re looking to prove yourself as a true connoisseur of music by attending a festival abroad, you’ve probably considered Benicassim. The relatively short flight and warm weather make it an obvious choice, allowing you to combine a relaxing holiday in the sun with all the debauched fun of a music festival.

For those with the foresight to book a hotel in Benicassim Town I’m sure that was case, but for the proles slumming it in the camp sites things weren’t quite so rosy.

There are many mistakes to be made when attending a festival, especially if it’s in a foreign country and you’re skin is approaching translucent, so in the interest of making this blog entry as helpful as possible my friends and I decided to make plenty of them.

People that live for holidays can get into the spirit early by making the first fuck up several months in advance. I suggest waiting until all flights to Valencia Airport (the nearest to Benicassim) are fully booked and face value festival tickets have sold out before making any attempt at buying either. For maximum effect, be sure to have the necessary money in your account from the moment tickets go on sale and absolutely no reason not to buy them before they’re all gone.

Now you’re ready for your first taste of Benicassim extortion. Websites such as Seat Wave and Viagogo will helpfully break down all the different ways in which they’re ripping you off before presenting you with a sum total that is usually about £80 more expensive than originally advertised. It’s worth noting that they do at least offer insurance against counterfeit tickets, so if you enjoy living dangerously you may prefer to opt for an eBay seller with dubious credentials.

After purchasing your ticket you’ll be warned that in order to exchange it for a wristband at the festival you will need to show your passport, a copy of the passport of the crook who bought the ticket and sold it on to you, and a letter of authorisation from said crook, confirming you as the victim of the transaction. This turned out not to be true, as the people manning the ticket exchange desk didn’t seem in the least bit bothered as long as your barcode scanned and you were carrying some sort of maroon rectangle.

Should you fly to Alicante you will be greeted at the airport by a fat-headed Spaniard in a taxi. This man is a liar. He will tell you it costs 20 Euros to get to Alicante train station by taxi (it doesn’t) and that from there it’s 60 Euros for a train to Castellon (he’ll swear blind there is no station at Benicassim – there is) and something like 30 Euros to reach the festival from there. The good news is that for a pre-arranged price of just 60 Euros each he will take you directly to Benicassim, leave you at the wrong camp and insist the price was actually 70 Euros.

In Fat Head’s defence he does ask if you’d like to put one of your CDs on, but as no one carries CDs anymore you’re likely to spend the two hour journey listening to snide ‘90s techno dance on Spanish radio.

We arrived at FIB Camp at around 6pm on the Tuesday and it was already quite busy. There are little shanty town-looking areas which provide tents with a decent level of shade, but as the wait was at least five minutes long it made much more sense to instead pitch up under an emaciated tree in a dust bowl across the road.

The sheer folly of not only failing to book a hotel room but also being too impatient to wait for a spec in the shade doesn’t hit home until the following morning, when the sun beats you out of your tent with a relentless barrage of hot and humid abuse that persists for around twelve hours. The rocky floor is impossible to sit or even walk bare foot on, so if you’re flash like me you’ll take an old towel to sleep on. The truly extravagant amongst you may even spring for a mat or lilo if you can withstand the added heat they bring.

Once you properly wake up the desperation sets in. The tent is like a sauna but the sun and floor are trying to kill you. If your solution to this problem is to immediately get up, go into town and buy chairs, umbrellas and mats to walk around on you’re probably going to be ok. If your solution is to sit in silence for a few hours and wait for the problem to resolve itself then you’re probably one of my friends.

I suppose one benefit of doing everything in a lazy, piecemeal fashion is that you appreciate little (tiny, even) luxuries a lot more. First you get a chair and find yourself saying things like: “I had a really good sit this afternoon.” And you’ll mean it too. Next up are umbrellas, which should really be the first thing you buy, but as having a good sit is better than even the best stand or lean it’s seldom the case. After a day of hiding from the solar enemy beneath 18 Euros worth of shade, during which time you’ll develop a real hatred for the Spanish and other olive-skinned races who walk freely about the camp, you’ll hopefully build the confidence to buy some wooden mats and use them to walk around the tree from Evil Dead that your umbrella is tied to.

It seemed the best option for pasty sun-dodgers was to jump out of the tent straight after waking up, get to the showers (which are unisex, so if you and your mates start doing impressions of Leon from Curb Your Enthusiasm avoid shouting: “I’d break that ass in half, Larry” – girls will think you’re weird) and then find a bar in town with adequate shade and a toilet that doesn’t resemble the one from the bookies in Trainspotting. Stay there until it’s safe.

Night time is alright. Having a sleep between the sun going down and the better bands starting makes a difference, but it isn’t easy if there’s a gang of knobhead Spanish girls there who have a noisy summit right next to your tent whenever you want to get your head down. It also helps if you don’t have a trio of blerts from Devon who watch The Apprentice trying to make you the first customers of their ridiculous festival-based business ventures in between pestering your friends for ciggies.

You’ll need to be slick if you’re to sneak any ale into the performance area, as the Spanish security guards are a lot more willing to touch people up than their English counterparts. It’s quite easy to throw things over the side of the fence to your mate if you do it without looking obvious, so use your phone to let the thrower know the coast is clear (this has the added benefit of letting you feel like you’re on 24). Also, remember: a mis-thrown plastic bottle is a funny story; a mis-thrown glass bottle is manslaughter.

To finish, here are a few more bits of advice that I’m not skilled enough to slip into to the above:

- Don’t buy chicken nuggets from the big tent in the camp. They cost 6 Euros and are served with flavourless Benson’s crisps (no lie).

- Don’t wait until late at night to take a shower. It gets windy and you’ll tire yourself out chasing cold, weak streams of water about.

- Don’t get talking to a Spanish slap-head who goes around pubs telling people to remember the name Enzo Zidane and likening himself to Hitler, even if he does offer to buy you a BMW, Mercedes or Mini depending on your preference.

- Don’t forget that each drink ticket costs 2.5 Euros, or else you’ll end up thinking that a fiver for a Coke and a bottle or water is a good deal.

- Don’t let yourself get excited when you hear Everton have matched Aston Villa’s bid for Charles N’Zogbia, or whoever the club are pretending to be interested in when you’re there.