Adam James saved up for a whole year to go alone to his first festival.
He was 23 and autistic, and he knew that the hardest part wouldn’t be the music: it would be not knowing anyone among thousands of people at Boomtown Fair, in Hampshire, England. To break the ice, he did the only thing he could think of: he asked a group of young people from Bristol to lend him a mallet so he could help them put up their tent. Ciaran Herniman and his friends noticed that Adam was alone and wouldn’t let him go. They invited him to stay with them for the rest of the weekend, and somewhere between the laughter and the tents, they discovered something else: Adam dreamed of becoming a drum and bass DJ.
They gave him the chance. They lent him the equipment and let him DJ in front of the group who, just hours earlier, had been complete strangers. His father, Andy James, ended up publicly thanking those young people for looking after and including his son, and the story went so viral that the festival organizers offered Adam his own set for the following year.
