The festival is alive and growing all over the UK, and is now an institution. From grungy little local affairs, to “poshtivals” like Cornbury that I attended this year, they have become a national institution, celebrated in the local press and mainstream media alike.
The mother of them all in the UK is Glastonbury which, like Woodstock, does not take place in its namesake town but somewhere outside: Worthy Farm, in Pilton, Somerset.
I attended “Glasters” for the only time in 2000, and all I can say is: holy shit.
125,000 ticketed visitors housed in a tent city that literally went over the horizon from where I was pitched. On arrival I met up with my brother and his friends, and we set up a ring of tents with a campfire in the middle. All very friendly and civilised.
We headed down to the complex - which itself is vast, several hundred acres, and about 20 minutes’ walk from side to side. Food outlets and shopping and many stages and open-air auditoria. The whole thing is on 900 acres and is so big it almost defies imagination - a temporary conurbation that is impossible to explore in its entirety in the time it exists.
All around were people of varying degrees of intoxication, as well as people being Burning Man-style living artworks. My favourite was a guy riding round on a tricycle with a huge Elvis mask, towing a trailer that had a car-battery-powered stereo blasting Elvis numbers. He was ubiquitous for the entire three days I was there - no idea whether or how he enjoyed himself.
In the comedy tent a comedian was heckled, not in the normal way, but by a guy who said “my girlfriend would like to know if you’d suck her tits?” Bemusedly, he agreed and she came along for a tit-sucking. While this was going on, the tent opened again and two mummies on 6" stilts walked in. The female mummy walked up to the stage, parted her bandages, and produced her tit to be sucked. As this was going on, the tent opened again and reggae Elvis zoomed once around the audience at high volume, then disappeared. Naturally surreal, yet unnatural.
We went from band to band, at different stages, taking in Moby, Rolf Harris, before going into an Irish pub (in a tent of course). The landlord asked if anyone could play any Irish songs, so I said yes. Someone handed me a guitar, which I strummed with a coin, and played every Irish song I knew, and didn’t have to pay for a single drink. Afterwards I was told the guitar I’d abused was worth £2,000.
The toilets are appalling; filthy vomit-and-feces-strewn cabins, or open-air stalls over open troughs. The best find was a charity that dug waterless toilets for the third world, and had demos available to use, which I did. There were no official showers, though Greenpeace organised a “human car wash” where you paid money to strip off naked and run through a tent, being soaped and scrubbed and rinsed on the way by volunteers. I didn’t bother - few people do.
That night, the wall came down - right by our tent. Glastonbury is notoriously “leaky” and this year was no exception. Over the breach in the security fence, during a 24 hour period, flowed an estimated 100,000 more people who had arrived without a ticket and had pushed their way through the perimeter by brute force.
The next morning a bunch of hippies near us set fire to their kitchen tent. Looking at the proximity of all the canvas, me and one of my brother’s friends realised the implication of a tent fire - it would take out thousands of tents, some of them occupied, so we grabbed our drinking water and put it out. The hippies went “yeah, it was, like, on fire”. Later they thanked us by stealing what was left of our firewood. During the night someone put up a tent where our fire had been.
The site is a dairy farm. The infrastructure creaks at the best of times with the allotted number of people. With nearly double the population, it became unbearable. Watching the Chemical Brothers, we decided to avoid the crowds flowing out at the end of the gig, and left before they finished. Even with the minority of people doing this, the walkways became so crowded that we were swept along with no control over our direction. Later that night we got stuck, stationery, on a wooden bridge over a stream for thirty minutes, unable to retreat or advance. It was scary.
Returning to our tent, the gaps in between our tents had been filled with more tents. The next morning there was a tent on top of one side of ours.
On day three, my then-SO said “fuck this shit” and we left, and washed all the mud off ourselves in a very expensive hotel in the city of Bath.
I’d happily go again, especially now the crowd control issues have been addressed more firmly. Despite the privations and safety concerns, it is a truly special and at times beautiful experience.
