The Friday Thing 1st July 2005 - The Onwards And Upwards Issue
TFT GOES TO GLASTONBURY=
When you go to a festival, you expect to be entertained. When you go to a festival and a fortnight's rain dumps on it in six hours, you become the entertainment. Sodden front-page fodder. As the stories from outside the Glastonbury site bounce back to you in the form of panicked phone-calls asking if you've been struck by lightning or drowned, you start to be grimly amused by the extent of the media's gleeful hyperbole.
Not that there isn't horror. The tectonic-plate-shifting storm at 6am on Friday is genuinely frightening, fat fingers of rain pummelling our tent while God flashes his floodlights and angrily crumples his Doritos bag. Then there's a genuine sense of human tragedy and devastation as thousands emerge to tramp about in hopelessly inadequate footwear. Of course we felt a bit bad about this later, given that we were essentially making the same noises about a few damp sleeping bags as we made about the Asian tsumani; but the visceral reaction upon seeing tents half-submerged in filthy water, odd shoes floating by, was a deep and heartfelt ‘ahhhhh, look... How terrible. Those poor people'.
Such jolly souls as Billy Bragg will have you believe that ‘if you haven't done Glastonbury in the mud, you haven't done it at all'. It's a chance to really let it all out, be a child again and demonstrate how gloriously uninhibited you are. Nuts. The mud clogs the festival's arteries, spoils your mood, knackers your legs and makes you so desperate for a bath that you'd climb into one already occupied by Nicholas Soames. Still, as in life, you only get as messed-up as you want to above the house minimum (28% caked-on, 14% light spatter). Also, there's something nature-programme-fascinating about its evolution and widely-varying consistency. Sometimes it's like liquidy Ready Brek, some places over-whisked Angel Delight, and in other areas it is like melted souvenir fudge or just really powerful animate squidgy glop, mouths of it sucking hard at your sad ankles like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. This last was most virulent in the most populous areas, and best navigated by adopting a sort of baby-rhino galumph. It was like leaping to the promised land as hell tried to claim us in its filthy maw.
Weather aside - and by Sunday, it was possible to put it there - Glastonbury remains a wonderful thing. People are often heard to gripe that it's not what it used to be - they even complain that it's lost something vital since the erection of the super-fence. Given that the something lost is mostly bunches of marauding purse-snatchers armed with crowbars, we'd rather consider with joy the extent to which the unique spirit of the place has prevailed. The atmosphere is powerfully pleasant, rampant march of capitalism or not. Although there is a certain MTV-generation zing about it, in that you find your attention span shrinks to minus two minutes. There are literally 66,740 things going on at any one time, one for every two attendees, and it's easy to be distracted from a band by a hat that looks like catshit or a hapless bloke, hands over face, having glass removed from his bare foot by medics. That one drew one of the weekend's biggest crowds.
It's perpetually stimulating, wherever you are. Lost Vagueness, a sort of festival-within-a-festival tucked away in a corner, is especially bewitching, what with its ballroom, casino, wedding chapel and population of evening-dressed fops. Bands of every stripe play all night amongst cabaret and burlesque acts, which last consist mostly of women taking their clothes off in imaginative ways; one dressed in feathers performing ‘live plucking', and another doing a trapeze-tease from the ballroom's chandelier culminating in the removal and triumphant dangling of a string of diamante from her... herself. The caravans, beach huts, proper loos and showers which made up the Paradise Lost hotel created a definite them-and-us tension, alleviated somewhat by a convenient fence-gap enabling us to sneak a couple of blissful visits to the sweet, sweet low-cisterns.
Since the Green Fields remained more or less greenish we hid there for some of the time, marvelling at the tranquillity, the good food and terrible tie-dye. George Galloway with a hip hop style entourage we espied, striding through the Healing Field in classic green folded-down wellies. We duly saluted his indefatigability. The commitment to environmental and humanitarian ideals amongst the Green Fields contingent is unwavering, as the accoutrements unaltered since 1973 mirror. This immutability has its downside - sticking blindly to your ideology without having the flexibility to consider what's actually workable in the world can make you very easy to dismiss as a hippy idiot. But a little hippy idiocy is good for the soul. And let he who is making any less of a cock of things cast the first gobbit of toxic waste.
Inbetween being slowly seduced by the idea of living in a tipi and yomping for miles without aim, we did manage to stand and observe well-known musicians doing songs. A curmudgeonly New Order plodded with the occasional star-jump of nostalgic excellence, then butted out without playing ‘Blue Monday'. This was festival cuntery in excelsis, even without the ugly mug of Keith Allen making an appearance. Coldplay are now the kind of massive that people just wave their beer in the air to and far too commonplace to be moving, but we wept sober, and anyone not watching with upturned face rapt with wonder, we slew. On Sunday the sun came out, and so did The Bravery, and so did their bassist's cock. There's something about public nudity in a rock context that delights the soul, just as the throwing of guitars and trashing of drumkits does. Truly it is beyond cliché. Imagine the cheers then when Dirt - for it was he - combined all of these in one glorious routine. And the set was brilliant too. The fully-clothed Killers were seen backstage asking for a spoon with which to eat from their bowl of fuck.
Basement Jaxx polished off the weekend with one big rumpshake, and we left sated. None of that caper is occurring next year, so we can all revert to our usual state of joyless sneering cynicism and wearing fashionable clothes. Thank fuck.
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WAYS TO MAKE MONEY AT GLASTONBURY
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1) Offer your services as a porter or piggy-backer. Helps if you are an ex-professional wrestler.
2) Be a peripatetic drugs counsellor. Gently assure the acid-fried that the ground is not actually swallowing them from the feet up. Even if it is.
3) Be a welly-shine boy, or walking-sandal-breaker-inner.
4) Persuade the gullible that the perimeter fence has fallen in amoment of stickin-it-to-da-man rebellion on the part of the scally chancers massing outside, then sell them a bit of corrugated iron as 'a piece of history'. See also: locks of Michael Eavis's beard, anti-histamines masquerading as ecstasy.
5) Build a prototype Mudmaster exercise machine and flog it to a big gym. Works the upper legs, abs and patience.
6) Loot submerged tents, you despicable prick.
* * *
MAKING WRISTBANDS HISTORY
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Glastonbury has always been where hedonism meets moral consciousness, and with the G8 summit just around the corner, the festival was the ideal platform for the Make Poverty History campaign. Everyone passing through the turnstiles was handed a special ‘Glastonbury 2005 - Helping Make Poverty History' band. At 4pm on Saturday Sir Bob Geldof Himself took to the Pyramid Stage with festival organiser Michael Eavis to exhort the thousands present to raise their arms (if not their middle fingers) in defiance of nasty old poverty and the rotten old G8, and in support of the good old cause.
'On 6th July we will face down those eight men that can do this thing', Sir Bob said. ‘This is not a question of money. I want you to individually believe you can change the condition of the most put-upon and beaten-down people on this planet. To die of want is an intellectual absurdity and it is morally repulsive. I would ask the people watching this on television to imagine half of this field dying now, and half tomorrow. And between them, those men at the G8 could have resolved it in seconds.'
TFT was walking past the Jazz World stage at the time, and the gang of earnest bongo-fondlers thereon paused in their set to say something a little less stirring but equally heartfelt, and ask us to raise our arms. This happened all over the 30-acre site, and well over 100,000 people all lifted limbs in a show of unity. As we put ours in the air we felt a warm glow, buoyed further bythe cheers of the crowd, and we thought for a moment about the power of Ideas and of Simple Gestures and Conviction and Hope. Then we wended our way to that nice recycled jewellery stall we'd found via the ice cream van and forgot all about it, our wristband yellowing in the weak sun.
The trouble with the Make Poverty History campaign is that it's too easy for people, especially pear-cider-sozzled festival-goers, to join in a big display of something for the helicopters and whoop and think that they've done their bit, that they have contributed something. As though wearing a bit of rubbery stuff around one wrist directly puts food in some Kenyan urchin's mouth. The wristbands were designed as a simple statement of the wearer's alignment with an ideal, but have quickly become perverted to the extent that they might as well say ‘Make Sickening Public Displays Of Altruism History'. Thinking about the complacency and dumb herd mentality of people who wear a rainbow of bands up and down their arms, around their necks and through their nipple piercings, you fear that that's all you are, and the wrist-jerk reaction is to look around for a burning lake to cast yours into.
The organisers may have had people's shallower impulses in mind all along, possibly appealing to individuals' desire to look like they care, in order to access via this their better nature and make them consider the grave implications beyond the fad. Only there's a wider chasm between vanity and selflessness than they'd hoped. Similarly, the wristbands themselves are aimed at garnering media coverage, which the campaign needs to use as a tool to vicariously bop the G8's heads with. A great idea but again, this may not work in a country whose government blithely soundbit into oblivion the presence of a million of its citizens on the streets.
None of this, however, is a reason to discard your wristband. It is made of good intentions, and isn't likely to grout the road to hell. Snubbing it because you are afraid of hypocrisy, or of looking like a fashionable wonk, suggests that you really only do care about your own appearance, and not about people living on a quid a week. Subverted by trendy Barleyite idiots it may have been, but you can't let them get in the way of something that may give you or someone else pause for long enough to start a ripple. So really, you are doing your bit just by wearing it and sticking it in the air for the cameras. Even if you are a contemptible, vacuous, cause-happy, iPod-shuffling prannock.
More TFT here and here. And here.
posted by lethalbuzzle @ 6:01 PM
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