my life as a artist
I aint gonna work on Worthy farm no more
Monday 4th July 2011 6:32 PM
I'm pleased to report that taking a couple of years off from the Glastonbury festival, as a protest, has had some unexpected benefits. It's difficult to gauge the incremental changes to so vast an event when you're in the middle of it, so returning after an interval gave me some valuable perspective. In the few years before the break, struggling with the increasing corporatisation of the festival, I never really knew if I wanted to be there or not. Now I know. I am at peace. Praise the Lord!
Mud-pie preparation started early on Wednesday morning. There were already plenty of people in the mixing-bowl, each wearing their mixing-blade wellies, and when God simply added water, the churning began. By Thursday evening the mix was heavy going, and the half-mile walk to my first gig, carrying a metallophone and a guitar, left me with calf-muscles like a Nepalese sherpa.
The performance was in the 'Spirit of 71' area, which was comprised of an antique clothes stall, mud, a main stage and a small café stage. I was booked to do an hour-long spoken word set on the café stage at 9pm, and the organisers decided that simultaneously, on the main stage, thirty yards away, it would be a good idea to play some ear-shattering, liver-juggling techno music. Maybe it was their idea of contrast.
The techno-demon's heartbeat of hell was so loud that I had to deliver my material with the same exaggerated articulation that Lancashire mill-workers had to use when conversing over the din of the machinery. By an act of grace, this grotesque facial manoeuvring somehow served as a prayer, and within minutes I felt the comforting presence and guidance of a mighty cosmic power, and knew that I was being protected by the ascended soul of that exalted being, who, when he walked this earth, was known as Les Dawson. Luckily, as well as Les and some other non-corporeal helpers, I had some faithful fans in there, and their enthusiasm and patience was so encouraging that it ended up being a good gig. Afterwards BOOM I was supposed to BOOM do a set with BOOM the Travelling BOOM Libraries but BOOM this was a-BOOM-bandoned BOOM after five songs BOOM because we couldn't BOOM hear each other BOOM or ourselves.
On Friday the rain was fitful and the mud-pie mix was now smooth and creamy, its bland uniformity occasionally textured with the odd wallet and mobile phone, its glistening surface rippling in accordance with the prevailing sound-waves of the nearest bowel-wrenching mega-bass-boom sound-system, which in the spirit of democracy seemed to be owned by even the humblest tea-shop. That evening, on the scarred battlefield of Cacophony, rather than go over the top and witness the pitiful waste of so many young lives experiencing the sheer horror and mindless futility of U2, I retreated to my tent. On my way back through the Green Futures field I noticed that the 'Squall' anarchist magazine yurt had been replaced by a shiny David Attenborough eugenics stall. When I got to my flimsy tissue home I put in a pair of squashy yellow earplugs, boiled up a pot of jasmine tea, got into bed, rolled a pyramid-shaped joint, and did the Guardian crossword.
On Saturday God added the last of the water to his mix, and when he saw how firm the peaked minarets of mud were that towered over the glutinous mass of wellie-sucking delay, he saw that the mix was good, and ready, and lo, he began to cook it.
My second gig of the festival was in the voluminous 3,500 capacity cabaret tent in the early evening and was scheduled to follow Four Puffs and a Piano. Their regular appearances on the Jonathon Ross show have made them very popular with middle-management types, and the tent was completely rammed, right up to the backside and beyond the flaps. As soon as they'd finished with a rousing chorus of 'We Take It Up The Arse', roughly 3,450 members of the audience promptly got up and left the marquee, presumably in search of other telly-gods, leaving me with a stunned, thin smear of fifty brutalised souls.
Even though I'd noticed that these days this particular cabaret tent audience seemed to prefer material about the triumph of science and bum-holes, I persisted with my hippy foolishness, and, alas, died on my foolish hippy arse. Later that evening, rather than go and see Coldplay on the pyramid stage, me and my brother Nick went back to our tents and ate some plain yoghurt.
On Sunday God set the oven to solar gas-mark 7, and for the first time in my admittedly shaky memory, a famous Glastonbury mud-pie was actually baked. Hurray! That evening I had another gig in the dreaded cabaret tent. In previous years it had always been a pleasurable, tribal affair and often the highlight of my performing year, but this time, for the first time, and probably the last time, in the new spirit of Glastonbury 2011, I opted to give them my corporate set. (It's the set I do when I feel culturally estranged. The secret is not to mention spiritual paradigm shifts). Although I felt no warmth or cheer coming back at me, my brother Nick said it went down OK.
Afterwards, in the lovely warm evening, beneath a thin mist of special glasto-chemtrails, we set off to the refreshingly sane Buddhafields café to dine on dahl and brown rice. As we walked across the mud-pie's sandal-smoothed pastry, the distant, bouncing bass-boom of Beyonce told us that something else was cooking. Yes, it was her sexuality as a frozen shrink-wrapped ready-meal being micro-waved on the pyramid stage. DING!
Amidst the sham and drudgery of all this enforced bliss there were still people having a go. Sam, with his Magic Hat Sauna is one of the few remaining Warriors of the Guttering Candle still working at the festival, and to him I offer a full damp-towel salute.
As far as the festival as a (w)hole goes, despite the few sporadic acts of brave resistance, I fear the war is lost. I'm sorry to say that the same white-collared conservative, the one that flashed down the street pointing his plastic finger at Jimi Hendrix, all those years ago, has somehow managed to take control of the Glastonbury festival, and turn it into a TV programme. It's a shame that when he sanitised it, he never thought to include the toilets.
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