Thousands of festivalgoers woke up in their tents at Curraghmore Estate, Co Waterford, on Saturday morning with sore limbs and even sorer heads. They were faced with a quick turnaround to get their second day at All Together Now under way.
Some had called it a night soon after Fontaines DC’s headline set on the main stage on Friday. The hillside of fans hooked on their every lyric – many in Bohemian FC’s Fontaines tops – grew loudest when Grian Chatten, the band’s frontman, declared “f**k the far right” and “free Palestine”.
Others took that energy to the midnight techno set of the DJ Nia Archives, on the Lovely Days stage, and to electronic acts playing into the small hours.
Those different approaches on Friday night might help explain why, on Saturday morning, you tended to see two types of people: those walking around with iced coffees and those walking around with cans. (Although we shouldn’t forget the families who are here – fair play to the parents pulling their children around the hilly festival site in trolleys.)
RM Block
Passing the big yellow Something Kind of Wonderful tent, where Tommy Tiernan is performing, the sizeable crowd is bellowing every second line of an a-cappella rendition of the Eurythmics track Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).
At the Bandstand, the audience sing Happy Birthday to a young girl called Emily who Tiernan’s fellow comedian Tony Cantwell has brought up on stage. Then she shows us some of her karate moves.
In Imro’s Flourish tent, Bonya, a folk-infused acoustic group from Waterford, are catching the attention of everyone walking by. Everyone agrees on how well they sound.
Up at the boutique campsite, no expense is being spared. The Sculpted by Aimee booth, in the Beauty Garden, is booked out for makeup on Saturday.
That kind of glamour might be the exception rather than the rule. As people began to emerge from their sleeping bags on Saturday, they had formed dazed but vaguely orderly queues outside portaloos across the campsites. Early risers had remarked on how surprisingly clean the facilities were. The sheer number of people heading to use them dashed any hopes that they might stay that way for long.
At least there’s music to provide a distraction. One of the acts you hear people playing most around the campsites is CMAT, the Meath singer who’s appearing on the main stage on Saturday, just a few weeks before the release of Euro-Country, her highly anticipated third album.
Its song Take a Sexy Picture of Me and the album’s title track have gone viral thanks to their catchy hooks decrying misogyny and lamenting the legacy of the crash of 2008.
Sophie McAlpin, from Glasnevin in Dublin, is looking forward to the crowd joining CMAT in blaming “all the big boys, all the Berties”, for the financial meltdown that followed the boom years.
She hopes they’ll react to CMAT’s lyrics as strongly as they did on Friday when Fontaines DC asked, in the line from their song I Love You, “Is their mammy Fine Gael and is their daddy Fianna Fáil?”.
“I’m looking forward to her country roots, too, like Aw Shoot and I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! I know there’ll be a good buzz in the crowd for that,” says McAlpin, who first saw CMAT perform when she opened for Florence & the Machine at Malahide Castle in Dublin two summers ago.
“I saw her last year at Electric Picnic and didn’t know who she was before it,” another festivalgoer says. “She was easily the best act of the weekend.”
With CMAT’s sets at this year’s Primavera and Glastonbury festivals having already shown how good she is at commanding a big crowd, her fans at All Together Now are in for a treat tonight.
