Glastonbury: The Prelude

I was on the front cover of the Guardian once.

I’d love to say it was in the by-line of an article that brought down the government, or in a photo linking arms with Scarlett Johansson, but alas: it was the tip of my £20 tent peering above a sea of sewage and shit, 3 inches of material cowering beneath the lashing rain, bewildered as a camel on an ice-cap.

The location was Glastonbury festival and the year was 2005: the one where the rain ‘really’ came. June’s entire average annual rainfall burst from the heavens that morning like the impossible tears of a cuckolded teenager, coating Pilton in grief inside one small hour. The images were beamed out across the nation of the worst affected corner of the camp sites: the school-boy-error spot at the bottom of a hill we had chosen in the previous day’s deceitful sunlight. In the foreground of the shots, someone with a comic’s sense of preparation was captured floating by in a canoe.

I remember being coaxed in and out of sleep that morning by the thudding pitter-patter above, brain reeling from excess and vaguely registering the water seeping the in the edges of my hot little hovel, body curling into a smaller and smaller ball in meek defiance. I suppose for the hour or so it took me to realise what was going on it was a little like regressing back to the womb. If so, my subsequent ‘birth’ was the kind mothers must have nightmares about.

We all emerged from our tents and stood dumbly for a second, mouths open like sallow fish as the rising tide of sewage swallowed our festival from the feet up. I remember my friend Kimmy fumbling down for his car keys, shoulder-length hair floating in the water like dead weeds along a river bank. The source of the smell became apparent: the nearby toilets were over-flowing and carrying with it the unspeakable detritus of drug-addled arseholes, casually coating what in a blink of an eye ago was a scene of pastoral innocence: guitars poised on backpacks, disposable barbeques dying gracefully in the sun, polite bags of rubbish nestled between cans of lager…

It felt biblical. Unreal. We trudged to the edge of the flood with what little we could salvage and watched chaos lick its way through the narrow passageways between our tents, consuming our entire Glastonbury - my first - like a snake. Shivering, soaking, stunned, we slapped our way through the mud to the nearest shelter and stood sharing cigarettes. For about half an hour of teeth-chattering, it seemed the only option was probably to go home.

Then someone threw on ‘Nice Weather For Ducks’ by Lemon Jelly. Suddenly, a crumb of sunlight landed obscenely on a puddle a few feet away. We all began to laugh. Someone began to dance. What followed, via a trip to an emergency refugee camp set up by the Eavies farmhouse, free jam sandwiches, cups of tea and second-hand clothes provided by the good people at Oxfam, were three of the best days of my life. Being stripped of your possessions, it transpired, was the best possible preparation for Glastonbury. For me at least, it meant racing through the next few days feeling more care-free than an adult has any right to.

And there’s the point. The need to save money looks set to keep me from attending any music festivals this summer, and yet my year will be poorer for it. There is something Wordsworth says in The Prelude about looking over the countryside where he once roamed as a boy, knowing that he can never rediscover the essential and instinctive rhythms of freedom that propelled him at that age to explore, climb and leap through the woodlands. In adulthood it is not possible, he says, to enjoy the world in same carefree way again.

Perhaps if Wordsworth had been able to convince Coleridge to split the petrol and drive to a field somewhere that summer, struggle through the gates of a music festival with three crates of Strongbow and plonk down in a field for four days of drinking, wandering, listening, learning to play the bongos and taking free yoga classes, chatting to strangers and stumbling between burger vans, he’d have forgotten for a moment the pressures of iambic pentameter, the Lake District rent and Dorothy’s gout and relaxed.

There has to be a good reason that thousands of us spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds each year simply to be allowed to sit in a muddle of our own rubbish, unable to wash or defecate comfortably, rain poised like the sword of Damocles above our heads. Put simply: it unshackles us from everything that makes the rest of year so wearisome. It allows us to be children again.

Glastonbury 2005 demonstrated to me like no other festival quite how true this is. In relative terms, our homes were completely destroyed, and in real terms, we woke up in a river made up party of sewage and human waste. Yet still the good times rolled. So to those people lucky enough to be off watching Springsteen and Blur while I’m glumly counting out my £200 – good luck to you.

I hope it absolutely pisses down.

for a review of Newcastle's very own answer to Glastonbury by yours truly, check this out: http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/index.php?section=1&category=7&page=1658

and for an interview with Dizzee Rascal in which I try my best to be cool, see here: http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/index.php?section=1&category=9&page=1659