Setting sail for Stradbally

ELECTRIC PICNIC:Be silent, ye doomsayers. Summer isn't quite over yet, not until a good few thousand of us stragglers test our budgeting skills one last time and head to Stradbally for the Electric Picnic. PATSEY MURPHYroamed the fields in advance to meet just a few of the designers who create sets sure to make you crack a smile

DEEP IN THE woods of Laois, perhaps the most landlocked county in the country, lies an abandoned ship, sails luffing, boards creaking. Well off the beaten track, it’s one of the best retreats to discover at the Electric Picnic, especially by night, when the “foginator” rolls out a lot of atmospheric sea mist, and Caribbean wastrels, rasping folksters, rum-fuelled sea shanty collectives and gravelly maritime pranksters stir up some music .

As you may have already guessed, we like the schtick: “Loyal to the last, lowering the tone and welcoming the infirm, the insomniacs, those to whom a compass is no use . . . aye, the Salty Dog is the crude, regretted, smudged tattoo on the cufflinked shirted arm of the Picnic . . . and ready for an arm wrestle with the leggiest girl in the woods.”

The schtick – and the Salty Dog – is the invention of Hugo Jellett, head of development at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, who moonlights once a year on this theatrical project, and his brother-in-law Charles Preston, of LPM Bohemia, which manufactures some of the most magnificent tents, yurts and tepees to be found in these parts. Add to the mix Hugo’s wife, Roz Jellett, who has been one of the site decorator for the Electric Picnic since it began on Tom Cosby’s front lawn seven years ago, and Charles’s wife (and Hugo’s sister) Minnie Jellett, an event organiser. Presto, Prestons. A creative family enterprise is born. .

“Nowadays, it’s all about the sideshows at these festivals – the music is seen as a given – and one of the craziest sideshows, or so we like to think, is without doubt the Salty Dog stage,” Hugo Jellett explains. “It involved hoisting a decommissioned 40-tonne trawler from a dry dock in west Cork on to a flatbed truck, driving it up to Laois in the middle of the night and into the woods in Stradbally, where it fell off the truck . . . and that is where she now lies.”

A crafty stage was cut into the deck of the boat and masts, sails and lorry loads of nautical debris, including a ton of seaweed, complete the set. A specially commissioned treasure chest of dry ice was invented by Polar Ice in Portarlington, which otherwise specialises in keeping Aer Lingus food cold.

“The stage is treated like a stage set really, not a music stage, although it is predominantly music-based, and there are 150 people involved in it. The performers tend towards something a little eccentric, rooted in cabaret or blues or bluegrass or ska or gypsy, not mainstream rock. There is a rotund, top-hatted compère called Jig, and entrée acts of dancing troupes and sea-shanty performers,” he says.

But at the heart of it is the very surreal sight of a hulking great shipping vessel in a forest about as far away from the sea in Ireland as one can get. In that sense, it epitomises the Electric Picnic and what it set out to do six years ago, to reveal a parkland full of wonderful surprises and to inspire us all to change our fixed notions about how outdoor performance can delight, energise and entertain.

You may come upon the Salty Dog long after dark on your way back to the camping grounds. The saloon is an attraction, for sure, as are the benches under the trees offering a welcome chance to bloody well sit down. But it is the theatre and music that will stop you in your tracks. Seasick Steve was a highlight last year and returns again next week. Phelim Drew, currently in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class in the Abbey, plays the Salty Dog on Sunday on his day off. Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros appear on Friday, the Cajun Kings and Prison Love will be there, along with Black Friday from Cornwall and ship-resident bands Jerry Fish and the Mudbug Club and the Mighty Stef. There will be 25 acts in all.

The Jelletts live in Stradbally and Roz’s role as designer is something that evolved, and promoter John Reynolds gives her free rein to come up with her own concepts. “I spend a lot of time on the artists’ area – it’s great to be able to make a patch of lawn into a sort of emporium of elegance and luxury, sort of like a pop-up boutique hotel,” say Roz. “I dress a beautiful pavilion tent with Indian beds and cushions, and set up lots of tables for bands to plot and scheme around – and a pool table because that’s what I’d like . . . and in the garden I have hammocks and gaudy changing cabins and table tennis and exotic plants.” Fabric is her speciality – she makes her own silk bunting - and when not festooning tents she decorates houses and also designs clothes (her label Emperors Robes has been stocked in Fortnum and Mason in London and Rococco in Dublin).

The Mindfield Spoken Word Arena is a favourite area at the festival. “I bring in church pews for seating and old miltary vintage chairs and sofas, and design entrance-way signs and stage sets.” The “craziest thing” she does is the entrance to the festival. “I let my imagination wander into the corner of my mind where, if you can imagine, wires are sticking out and fizzing, and try to find something that is both welcoming and utterly mad. The entrance way has variously been an old lady’s cottage, a yellow submarine, a strawberry patch, a junk yard. This year I am working with sculptor Harry Harris on a random marriage of elephant grass, scrap metal and computer components.”

The festival will be in full swing next Saturday, August 27th, a date Hugo Jellett remembers. It’s the anniversary of the Mountbatten murder. “When I was a kid I used to go on board my uncle’s trawler, the Bonnie Lass, and it was docked in Mullaghmore back then before it went to France each year. We went down for our hols one year and I was playing on the beach by the harbour when Lord Mountbatten’s boat set off to pull up the lobster pots. And then came the explosion. The Bonnie Lass was the one boat with a radio on board and was used to fish out the victims and debris.

“We kids were all bundled off indoors and told it was a ‘crow-scarer’ – but that didn’t wash for long.” It did have an effect on the nine-year-old, “but it would be an exaggeration to say I lost my sea legs. I do still love fish and the sea. I find the documentary footage of the tragedy very eerie, though, and my uncle moved the boat away from Mullaghmore from then on too.”

Preston was a more active sailor while growing up in Cornwall, so it is fitting that he uses canvass and sailcloth to build his festive structures. The Salty Dog got its name from a Procum Harum song which, he says, betrays his age.

So if you’re up for one more summery swan song, look for this mirage in the Stradbally woods – “For those who sleep in hammocks with one eye open, come home my sons and daughters, come to the mothership.”