There’s high demand for hairdryers on Friday as festivalgoers shake off a wet Thursday, ready for a weekend of musicElectric Picnic 2026: 80,000 people are arriving at a wet Stradbally for the 21st festival. Photograph: Enda O’Dowd Fri Aug 28 2026 - 16:02 • 3 MIN READA long queue snakes out of the TK Maxx tent at Electric Picnic, where festivalgoers can use hairdryers and hair straighteners, on Friday morning, between the Janice Joplin and Samuel Beckett campsites.They’re among the people who signed up for early access, on what turned out to be a wet Thursday, to the Stradbally Hall estate, in Co Laois, which the three-day, 80,000-person music festival has taken over for the weekend. The queue includes Eimear Boland, Amy Coughlan and Leah Davis, three final-year pharmaceutical-science students at Munster Technological University. “We are here to salvage our hair from the rain,” Coughlan says. “We were used to the heatwave all summer. I don’t think we were expecting [the wet weather]. It was awful.” Electric Picnic 2026: people queued for more than an hour to use hair straighteners at the TK Maxx tent. Photograph: Enda O'Dowd Boland, who is from Tipperary, adds, “I really need to straighten my hair. I got my hair blow-dried yesterday, and then it got soaked last night, so it’s not straight any more.”“The rain was the worst,” Davis says. “Putting up the tent, we had an awful time, because we had nowhere to put our bags until the tent was up.”The women think they’ll be an hour queuing for the hair facilities – but it will be worth it. “Tomorrow it will be heatless curls, or we will put the hood up, but for the first day you want to look nice,” Davis says.Electric Picnic 2026: Carrie Jackman, who flew home from Paris for the festival When Carrie Jackman arrived at Electric Picnic late on Thursday night, after a delayed flight from Paris, it had already been raining all day. “We came in, dropped my bags. We decided it’s dry enough, the tent is dry, so we went for a walk. We came back two hours later to just a flood in the porch area, and all of our bags, everything, was just drenched.”[ Electric Picnic 2026: Friday stage times for all the top areas, weather forecast and moreOpens in new window ]The accounting and finance student at Dublin City University, who is on Erasmus in Paris, flew back to Ireland for the festival.“There are pros and cons to everything. Everything is soaking wet, so we are just taking it as it comes, but I’m glad I came home.”The bad weather cleared on Friday – at least for now – leaving the Electric Picnic site much brighter. “We ended up kicking the flood out of our tent. We were able to kind of hang up our tent and let it dry out. We have it back together now. So there’s a positive ending to the story: we are ready now for the day.” Ayla and Mark Phelan are a married couple who arrived on Friday morning with a big tray of “funeral sandwiches”. The pair are celebrating their 10th anniversary: they met on the Friday night of Electric Picnic in 2016. “Get to the campsite, put out our chairs, crack a can, have a sandwich and we are ready to rock. Who doesn’t love funeral sandwiches?” Ayla says. “The amount of people eyeing these up, we could have sold them three times over before we entered the gate,” adds Mark.For all the latest festival news, reviews and more, download the Irish Times appIN THIS SECTION