Tom Harding

Now, as we all know, festival season is upon us in the Netherlands and ‘bring it on’ as far as I am concerned. They are outside, you can run around and you also get a great selection of DJs to listen to – what more could you want?

Well, not much actually, but what amazes me being an Englishman is just how many festivals there are in Holland..In the UK we have a variety of festivals each year like Creamfields, Homelands, Godskitchen and of course the huge, albeit more band-orientated Glastonbury but, apart from that, there isn’t that much more to mention. If you look at Holland however the difference is quite amazing. From what I can gather there is generally a huge event every weekend throughout the summer and the line-ups are all pretty incredible. Every week! I mean, that’s just ludicrous if you consider the size of Holland itself.

The population of Holland is a about double that of London, and about a quarter of the UK as a whole but, bugger me, do you lot like to party as the number of raves ‘per person’ is probably the biggest in the world. And it seems like every town wants its share of the fun. I recently played at a superb festival in Alem which I had never heard of before and was frankly pretty hard to even find on the map! However I turned up to find a tiny town that had basically put a f**k off big tent in the middle of it and had a party for three days – incredible, it really was.

So, the point of the column this week? Like your parents always tell you, don’t take what you’ve got for granted as you really don’t know how lucky you are.