God Shave The Queen
A week in Mayrhofen and I’m still not entirely sure which parts actually happened. That’s not a complaint—it’s the festival’s whole premise operating as designed.
Snowbombing is the concept you have to explain twice before anyone believes it: a full-scale music festival built inside an Austrian ski resort, where the days are for the mountain and the nights are for watching The Prodigy destroy a tent that has no business holding The Prodigy. The lineup tilts heavily British, which means the crowd does too, and I walked in expecting the usual press-trip awkwardness. Instead I found several hundred deeply drunk English people who were, without exception, unfailingly polite. I have no explanation for this.
Between sets I got short windows to sit with Mark Ronson, Ms. Dynamite, and Fatboy Slim, asking questions I’d assembled at speed in a hotel corridor. They were all generous about it. Norman Cook in particular seemed constitutionally incapable of being anything other than delighted about everything, which is either deeply admirable or slightly alarming.
The Prodigy delivered exactly what The Prodigy deliver. 2manydjs turned the main room into something structurally suspect. Magnetic Man held their end. But Pendulum were the night that actually stuck—not because they were necessarily better than anyone else, but because they were the only set I can reconstruct in full the following morning. Black Bull takes complete credit for everything else.
There was also a solo entertainer in the bar of the Neue Post hotel who deserves more space than I can give him here, because I’ve lost most of the specifics. I remember thinking he was extraordinary. I’m choosing to trust that memory.
Saturday, 3am: out of the Fatboy Slim set and directly into the shuttle to Munich, four beers each, half my clothes still back in the hotel room. I noticed somewhere past the Austrian border that I’d left things behind and decided not to care. The correct response to that festival, I think, is to leave something behind. And never forget: ask for Coke first, then Pepsi.