Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts 2017
I can’t even remember how long Glastonbury has been on my List of Things I Really, Really Want to Do, (I’m not fond of the term Bucket List or …Before You Die lists because honestly who is going to hike to Machu Picchu or see the Taj Mahal by moonlight after they have died, so really it’s just a list of things you want to do or see and my advice is to get on with crossing them off), but it seems like the desire to experience this mother of all festivals has always been with me. To be honest it felt unattainable, mostly because I lived about as far from the muddy fields of Worthy Farm as it was possible to be. But then the geographical impossibility was resolved last year when Ian and I moved to London and a glimmer of hope sputtered into existence. Firstly, to be eligible to even attempt to buy tickets, you have to be registered with photo id and, knowing that 2018 was a ‘fallow year’ for Glastonbury that meant way back in early 2016 even before that year’s festival and months before our move across the world we needed to throw everything at a 2017 expedition. Let me make one thing clear, when you sign on for Glastonbury, it is not about the line-up. You won’t know anything about who will perform when you register and you won’t know anything but rumours, of which there are plenty I might add, when you sit hunched over two computers, two iPads and one iPhone as the tickets go on sale. It was a pretty surreal moment back in October when we secured our tickets with a minimal deposit and a whole heap of disbelief that we had been successful. Once the shock had worn off a little we had to contemplate travel and accommodation options pretty quickly.
We opted for an off-site camp
with…get this…hot showers and flushing toilets! Not very rock-and-roll and
definitely not very ‘Glasto’ but contemplating being coated in mud for five
days with few options for even diluting it, seemed a bit too daunting. Ian
organised coach travel from and back to Wembley Stadium. Around April, the
successful ticket holders pay up the balance and then await the arrival of the
all-important photo id - black light watermarked – tickets that arrive by
registered mail only a few weeks out from the event like the little pieces of legendary
festival holy grail that they are. This is the moment when I started to get
overwhelmingly excited. I was so sure that something would go wrong before I
had the tickets in my hand that I had drifted along in a little bubble of cool
detachment but now that entry was assured and tangible, my anticipation was
intense. I had my black and silver glitter wellies so that was the important
stuff taken care of.
Our travel and arrival was incident and worry free. We arrived on the Thursday when temperatures had dropped from around 32 degrees the day before to a sensible 22 degrees so our walk from the coach drop off to our shuttle pick up was a doddle.
Our camp was brilliant, just five minutes up the road and every home comfort you could need. To a lot of festival goers, I’m pretty sure this is tantamount to fraudulent but I can assure you it just made our entire experience more awesome. Our tent was tiny but totally adequate, the bar was a late opener and they even had a pretty cool solo singer/guitar dude entertaining us ‘til the wee hours. But I digress because after we had stowed our bags in our nylon home we set off for The Site.
A few years back I had the absolute pleasure of travelling about on the West Coast USA with Ian. We had a fabulous time (I wrote a blog about that too but due to some technical difficulties it never got posted. Hmmmmm must dig that out…) and one of our must see destinations was of course The Grand Canyon. I honestly thought I was prepared to see what was, according to its name, a canyon that was grand. Oh my! We were both overwhelmed and my eyes welled with tears and my breath drew in but I couldn’t exhale. Those yanks seriously need to recalibrate their vocabulary because ‘grand’ just did not do that gully justice. I’d seen photos, I thought I knew what I was about to see but I was wrong. The same goes when I first laid eyes on the Glastonbury site. We had been to Splendour in the Grass, Australia’s premier and largest green field music festival, several times and had enjoyed it immensely. Maybe we were expecting something similar but here was Splendour on steroids!!! The vastness is hard to comprehend. It is literally a ‘huge tented city, a mini-state under canvas’ to quote the website. Nestled in the beautiful Valley of Avalon in rural Somerset the site encompasses 900 acres, is a mile and a half (two and a half kilometres) across and has a perimeter of about eight miles (thirteen kilometres). It is said that King Arthur may be buried hereabouts.
Is there some mystical spirituality about this place? Maybe, how else do you explain 200,000 people converging in a temporary concentration of humanity, living literally cheek by jowl in vast tent suburbs and barely a cranky word is uttered in six days?
The spectacle rolls out for almost as far as the eye can see in an unbroken mass of colourful nylon domes and pyramids. My jaw dropped in amazement at the scale as we wandered without any plan in an attempt to orient ourselves, if only a little. We headed for Pyramid Stage which isn’t hard to do as its pointy apex emerges above all surrounding structures and trees. This is where my beloved Radiohead would be performing the following night so I needed to scope the location for its spectator possibilities. The area in front of the stage is huge. It rolls up a gentle slope to a field of tents. This took some getting used to. The campsites are literally plonked in vast swathes all over the site. You could actually sit in the door flap of your tent and watch the headline acts perform! This is very different to Splendour where camping surrounds the performance hub and you make your way onsite each day through security. At Glastonbury there are campsites ringing every performance space and interwoven guy ropes form a web like network between the closely positioned tents. God knows how anyone finds their way home after a big night of er… “festivalling”.
Making a plan of attack for your days at the festival is futile. Obviously for me I needed to be at Pyramid Stage on Friday night for Radiohead and again on Saturday evening for The National, everything else was down to serendipity. But nothing prepared me for the scope of experiences I would have and of course all the potential experiences I didn’t have. Every Glastonbury experience is unique to each and every festival punter. The permutations defy any attempt at calculation. I counted 87 venues on the line up section of the website and that doesn’t include everything.
We came upon a six year old kid wearing a dress up wig playing a ukulele and singing on a stage no bigger than our front door step, a dramatic theatre piece performed by two people set in a post-apocalyptic world presented on a large timber, vertically rotating stage fashioned from a recycled cable reel, a man doing improv stand up that was so excruciatingly feeble that his small audience were dumbstruck into mute surprise, a kazoo marching band,
and a group of people who were not only dressed as human size seagulls but did an amazingly convincing imitation of being as big a nuisance as a flock of seagulls, swooping on one lady’s sandwich, cawing loudly for no appaent reason and pecking at random objects.
We chanced upon a young lady from Adelaide, South Australia named Katie Wright Dynamite who persuaded three “volunteers” from the Outside Circus Stage audience to let her balance upon their shoulders while she juggled machetes. These volunteers rated their drunken status variously as ‘a little’ to ‘quite a bit’ so what could possibly go wrong? Right? (Nothing went wrong)
There was the Greencrafts Village where you could sign up for workshops in everything from flower hair garland making and stone sculpture to basket weaving and crochet.
On the Thursday early afternoon 15,000 people gathered in the Kings Meadow to form a record breaking largest human peace sign to send a message of international harmony into the world.
Photo from The Gardian
Cinemageddon is like an old fashioned drive in movie theatre where the cars are static and arranged in front of the screen. They are the most bizarre vehicles you will lay eyes on, ranging from a bumper car on giant tyres to an aeroplane fuselage.
There is a second cinema, a Circus, a Peace Garden, Kidzfield which as the name suggests, is especially for children, a Silent Disco, a bookshop, a pond where we glimpsed an otter on the bank, Left Field stage curated by Billy Bragg where we stood and watched Jeremy Corbyn address an impassioned crowd after they chanted him onto the stage to a Seven Nation Army inspired “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”.
There are areas devoted to rap, to dance, to acoustic sets, to sustainability, to spirituality and a stone circle atop a field. There are places to go to be immersed in the crowd and places to retreat to when you just want to look over the vision splendid.
Festival attire is astonishing in its scope and ingenuity. If you simply sat for three days and watched the crowd pass by, you could remain endlessly entertained. Glitter, sequins and jewels glued in patterns on faces is a big thing, in equal numbers for men and women.
We walked beside a couple of coppers who smiled and chatted to the crowds one of whom sported a lovely smattering of green glitter throughout his beard. Men wearing dresses was big too. The prettier and more elaborate the better, including several wedding gowns. We saw two men dressed as traffic cones, a lady wearing a mirror ball helmet, an entire posse of friends decked in gold, there were rainbow mohawks, top hats, flowers and onesies of every design.
A massive “thing” at Glastonbury is flags, on very tall poles and frequently topically themed they are a feature of every audience hub, fluttering over the crowd, there may be forty or fifty standards front of stage.
‘Bollocks to Brexit’, ‘At Glasto with my mum’, ‘Flaggy McFlag Face’, (google Boatie McBoat Face if you’re not sure about that one), a Blackstar Bowie tribute flag, May in a field of wheat of course, ‘People’s Front of Judea’ for the Python fans, Jeremy Corbyn flags, many different countries’ flags, and one that made me laugh out loud – a particularly tall pole with a bare flag about the size of a bus ticket – a brilliant bit of flag irony I believe.
Glastonbury is notoriously damp and consequently muddy. 2017 by contrast was a year of mild temperatures, and bursts of glorious sunshine. Thursday and Friday were a little dusty in high traffic areas and so the light overnight showers of rain Friday and Saturday were just enough to settle the dust. We could not have written ourselves a better weather outcome. Provided you were prepared for the cooler nights, which we were, it was very comfortable. The few days before and indeed the Wednesday before it opened had been over 30 degrees and last years festival was by all accounts a mud bath so our mid to low twenties and partly cloudy skies were a festival goer’s meteorological dream come true.
(Photo above is a stock image of Glastonbury 2016)
There was a plethora of food and beverage outlets, truly we were spoilt for choice and the enormous numbers meant queueing could easily be avoided. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten free were all well catered for and Water Aid did a fantastic job manning water fill stations all over the site. We had our steel flasks to refill.
Sustainability and recycling are focusses of the festival but that doesn’t stop many being blatantly and wilfully wasteful with plastic bottles still littering every space, not to mention the ridiculous numbers of camping chairs and tents abandoned at the farm every year despite signs everywhere exhorting the masses to ‘Leave No Trace’. Greenpeace, Water Aid and Oxfam are major beneficiaries of the festival and well represented. We also heard from CND who are campaigning to get Trident’s £205 billion replacement scrapped and the money diverted into health and education.
The crowd is about as far from generic as you can get. Age is irrelevant as we saw from young babies strapped onto parents up to go-go grannies. Ian and I certainly did not feel old. We were pretty surprised by the number of children who attend the festival. Pull along mini wagons laden with a child or two are pretty common as are baby buggies, single and double. You hear many different languages being spoken as you walk through the throng. There are boys holding hands, toddlers dancing, girls kissing, grandads bopping, teenagers on shoulders and 20 somethings moshing, 45 year old dads with a couple of pre-teen offspring in tow. Thousands ‘in all their astonishing and splendid diversity’ as the website explains, united by a willingness to abandon themselves to an experience they will never forget.
The performers are as diverse as the crowd, Lorde at just 20 years of age smashed it with an amazing stage set and a great performance while Kris Kristofferson appeared a tad confused on the Pyramid stage the day after his 81st birthday when he muttered “I wish I knew where I was”.
Had he lost his way in the song or just generally? It was poignant seeing the ole ‘Star is Born’ star meandering his way through his set. Bradley Cooper was there filming scenes for the remake of the film and Johnny Depp on guitar joined Kristofferson on stage for a couple of songs while Brad Pitt stood in the wings.
Radiohead were awesome again of course, Barry Gibb made me a bit teary as Ian and I hugged and danced our way through ‘How Deep is Your Love’. Back in 1977 we went to see Saturday Night Fever together and 40 years on here we are at Glastonbury together, listening to Bazza. Ah, a lifetime ago!
Foo Fighters, just two years late for their headline set smashed it, pushing the hits and cranking up the energy. The fireworks felt like the perfect release at the end of their full on performance. Chrissie Hynde was strong and energetic as ever as The Pretenders hit Other Stage and launched us into our Friday. We caught wind of The Killer’s “secret gig” after the John Peel Stage had been closed but that didn’t stop us standing just outside the barrier for half the set and singing along with the rest of the crowd to Mr Brightside. Ooh yeah! Charli XCX, The Avalanches, Haim, Alt J, Glass Animals, Chic (FREAK OUT!) Declan McKenna and Let’s Eat Grandma. The line-up is way too big to name even half of them but suffice to say everyone who plays Glastonbury is very happy to be there and it is routine for them to give outstanding performances as they feed off the enormous crowd’s equally enormous positive energy.
That same crowd, all 200,000 men women and children are a pretty chilled bunch by and large. They are friendly and chatty. We made loads of ‘Festival friends’ over the five days. We did have one incident while waiting for the National but it came down to my own enthusiasm as much as anyone else’s contribution. You know those big beach-balls that are a standard in festival crowds? Well I always really want to jump up and hit them skyward as they approach but I am always surrounded by tall dudes who get to it first, doesn’t stop me trying however. Only problem was, as me and tall guy jumped, his pint of beer exited the paper cup and drenched me. We all made up in the end and Ian was at hand with his trusty hanky. What a gentleman. We saw plenty of illicit pill popping, hash brownie consumption, NO2 cylinders littered the fields and the air was thick with dope but we personally did not witness any bad behaviour. Apparently in a crowd of 200,000 police made just 77 arrests.
Three of our favourite 'new best friends'
So eating and drinking is well catered but what about the inevitable excreting I hear you ask? Well that’s covered too. There is the Toilet of Dreams, complete with disco ball! There are ordinary long drop stalls and the more aromatically friendly compost toilets but also urinals, both male and female. Let me confide ladies, it’s a bit weird but you do get used to it and it is a much more pleasant and less odorous experience than anything else available. I highly recommend the She Pee. I’m just putting that out there, sorry to the preternaturally squeamish!
So, all in all how would I rate Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts 2017 as an experience? I’ve done a lot of things in my time but to be honest I would have to rate it in the top 5 of my life. If I live to be eleventy one I can’t see it getting knocked out of that rating. We wandered and watched and listened and looked. We experienced far more than we had expected and missed more than we will ever know. Would we do it again, well I can’t speak for Ian but if the opportunity ever arose again, then most definitely. Truly I didn’t want it to end, the measure of a good time if ever there was one.
P.S. Ian read this. He says he would defs do it again J