GLASTONBURY 2000 - Saturday

Quote of the Day: Malcolm Hardee, ‘You should never drink on an empty head.’

Exceedingly knackered ( given Friday night’s lack of sleep ) and a leetle peloothered ( ahem ), I slept pretty much through. ( Which means I only woke up a couple of times, mostly troubled by the cold. Rather than yesterday’s ‘every-half-hour’, sleep continually pierced by the incessant yapping around us. ) Was still awake far earlier’n suggested by my day’s schedule ( cheerfully paper scribbled every morning… I like to know exactly what I’m missing during all my daylight loitering hours ); the first act of the day isn’t on till 11:00, so I had time to just pootle for a couple of hours. And then set off after the mildly-excitable Adam & Philippa for the Jazz Stage, for the sake of JOHN MARTYN, a singer who, I’ve just realised, proves the closest a man can get to Peggy Lee. Just past the Other Stage, my phone starts ringing – he’s cancelled. I meet the now disconsolate advance-party under some hanging baskets, for cheer-up coffee. We amble around to the Mainstage, sit in the sunshine, listen to some harmonies. Try to decide just how many of the weekend’s acts are doubling up on different stages – Martyn was supposed to be headlining this evening’s Avalon as well, G Love & David Gray are playing twice, and the LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO ( currently soothing away the day’s troubles to my far right ) are on again later too. Honestly. ( It’s like a real-life version of BBC Choice… )

And from there, back to the Other Stage, for the sake of CLINIC. ‘What are they like?’ I’m asked, only slightly warily, by the friends I’m dragging with me. ‘Like Ten Benson’, I reply, hopefully. Blank faces. ‘Clatteringly beatific noise-niks. They like guitars and kids’ keyboards. John Peel loves ‘em. Come on…’ And so they do. And Clinic rollick through their set, and though there aren’t enough of the old zippy classics everything’s pretty much dandy, and my grin is set in place for the next hour or so. Even though I’m standing in front of a large gloopy puddle of a mud-hole - I only get splashed once, and that is mostly counterbalanced by the fact that no-one seems to be that keen on squishing up to me from behind given this mini-moat. Besides which, I have SOULWAX, up next. Whose infectious classy cheer begins with their stage set-up ( they use neon light bars as microphone stands… sigh… ), and sassies its sashaying way right on through the set. Good suits, good hair, good songs. Very niiice…

Soulwax over, I ran ( metaphor only, today I’m languid… ) from the impending Toploader, and went back to the tent. Had my lunch. And a little sleep. And all while the folks in the tents behind us bonded with their neighbours ( ‘oh YOU’RE THE ones who kept us up all last night with bad jokes!’ )…

Somewhat sluggish, I only managed to stir myself into moving after the first couple of songs of the lovely COLDPLAY came echoing down my end of the field, and even then didn’t manage to penetrate too deeply into the crowd. For a three in the afternoon set, they had an awful lot of people coming out to play with them… as is only right and proper. Considering. Gentle beauty and bounce-able optimism loop together throughout their songs, and a whole host of beaming adjectives could easily be hurled their way, if I only had the literary inclination. Instead, I’ll just tell you that they seemed to sum up the sunny afternoon…

Half an hour later, set over, I’m meeting Charlie to the left of the mixing desk, and so I concentrate on looking distinctive. ( Which involves making myself taller using the aid of toes, and pulling my candy-floss mane up to stand on end. ) After a few minutes of being pink-haired, I start wondering if maybe one us is in the wrong place, so I move off, in case it’s me, and start peering at other people. There’s one lying down by the mixing desk with Charlie’s hat ( and face ) on, and the requisite colour t-shirt, grinning back at me, but as I squint my way closer I note he has the wrong length of hair ( ie, it’s visible under the hat ). Eek. And then, further off, I see Jesse. Who conveniently, is still looking very tall and very black, as yesterday, and provides an instant marker buoy. I beetle over, happy not to have to use my phone to find them ( under such circumstances I usually realise myself to be approx. 2m away from the person I’m talking to and trying to locate ). Plans are being made to head for the Greenfields. Which I have ( shamefully ) never visited before. So I utilise this gang opportunity to do so. Pausing en route, naturally, for the boys to wee in bushes and then buy more warm beer.

Coming through the hedge-break gateway into the Green Fields, we become trapped in a pedestrian bottle neck, and very… slowly… shuffle our way forwards. After a few moments, the root of the congestion is revealed – a Land-Rover is parked in the middle of the path. ( Naturally. ) Closer condensed inspection reveals it to be manned by a camera crew, and a slightly unhappy looking Billy Bragg. As they start filming, we gradually inch past the vehicle, muttering unpleasantries about the BBC’s astute parking and ill-thought-out desires to ‘get to the heart’ of the festival. People perplexedly creeping along in the other direction are cheerfully told the blockage is being caused by Billy Bragg’s arse, as my companions resort to raising their beer-cans aloft as beacons by which they can be found and followed. And eventually, we emerge.

( It’s taken four years and one impromptu game of sardines to get there, and when I do, I find… ) It doesn’t look as I had thought it would. I think had expected to feel more mystical and more peaceful, in the Green Fields. And while I hadn’t genuinely thought that I’d find a blanket of grassy fields interspersed with the odd tepee hosting holistic massages, I’d have rather it had less of an air of a giant craft fair on a hill. Still. After a little bit, once I had got over the area NOT being a magical den of iniquity and dragons that I should have always been spending all of my time in, I started to appreciate it. And just as we began to pass an astonishingly ineffectual maze ( all its fencing was approximately a foot-tall and made of transparent coloured plastic ), I am hailed. By Ellen. Which, yes, was nice. Plans were laid for Reading ( there’s talk of the re-emergence of the House-Tent, and vodka & Red Bull jellies ) , and then we moseyed on upwards, towards the Stone Circle. Which was something of a sprawl of bodies, sleeping security guards and hash truffles, all encircled by baby menhirs, themselves topped with hippy gnomes. And which proved a lovely place to sit down for a while. And ponder the ways of the world. For example: why the Wicker Man is posing in a manner unrealistic for a human ( ‘look, that leg’s longer than the other one!’ ), which in itself sparks a wondering over the demonstration helpfulness of the Emergency Exit man ( moving through that backlit green doorway in a style impossible to recreate ).

Six-ish, and the wander back has started, taking in a trampoline-fountain of slime, and the seemingly ubiquitous festival-staples of farmyard animal models on sticks. The others disappear according to their tastes, and then off I’m pelting for the sake of the ( foxy ) DUMDUMS, who make perkily decent bounce-around pop-tunes straight offa the J-17 problem pages, and whose contagious energy is all set to ricochet around the tent, from band to crowd and back again. But I’m not really there for the songs, just to gaze admiringly at the luvverly badger-striped bassist for forty-minutes… sigh…

Afterwards, I am found by Chi. ( For some reason, she knew I’d be there… ) Who dives for chips from the lovely café by the New Band Tent. And then resolutely refuses to be persuaded into anything which might feature a didgeridoo and a cover of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. She is NOT coming with me to see the man who brought us Jake the Peg ( diddle-iddle-iddle-um ). So I set off for the sake of ROLF HARRIS alone. And, upon finding the Avalon Stage, realise myself unable to wiggle my way into the tent. ( Why is this man playing a tent? Why are Travis headlining at a festival where Rolf Harris has to play in a tent? ) Like the Foo Fighters but with a wobble-board, the tent is packed to bursting, and I have to content myself to listening on tip-toes outside. He covered ‘Angels’. I wandered away, beaming at the very idea. And found myself in the Cabaret Tent, again. Jim Tavare is on in a bit. Actually IN CABARET. Ahaha. ( And as I’ve been singing his theme song all day – every time I open the guide-booklet and see his name, it happens again – I felt that watching him could help exorcise the tendency. ) But first, TONY LAW. ‘Books are good… but not when the acting in your head is shit.’ Who was, thankfully, fairly good at his job. Though he did ‘drop a pill’ at the beginning of the set, as a part of his own personal Glastonbury experiment, and so was becoming slightly less lucid after twenty minutes or so. Not that anyone muchly seemed to notice or care, the majority of the tent being similarly affected ( one way or another ), and still using the Cabaret facility as a roofed mattress with background entertainment. However, he was being heckled throughout by the world’s weirdest man, who for some reason choice to yell choice lines such as ‘MY MOTHER’S GERMAN BUT I LOVE YOUR JACKET!’ at mostly inopportune moments. But LAW still found the time to liken Morris Dancing to ‘Kendo for gay clubbers’. Which was nice… And following that, but for a bit of compering by ( The ) Malcolm ( Hardee ), was SILKY. Who was mostly forgettable. ( My tent-scrawled notes say simply ‘urgh’, which should give you a fairly reasonable idea of the state of things. ) Malcolm, returning to the stage to introduce the next act, tried to engender another round of applause for the man, noting ‘Nice one Silky – He’s shit really, but it doesn’t matter…’ And up after him was BRIAN DAMAGE, replacing Jim Tavare ( sniff ), and only once managing to make me laugh when he sought to recreate the ‘magic’ of Mousse T, with his acoustic guitar. You possibly had to be there. For the next act, you certainly should have been. Stalking onstage in bowler hat and pin-striped skirt suit and spitting tobacco chews at choice audience members, MISS BEHAVE is a sword-swallowing Marlene Dietrich for the addled Cabaret generation. She made an audience member ( male ) kneel before her onstage, an upward-pointing cucumber in his mouth, which she then proceeded to slice up using a small scimitar to the tune of Eric Idle’s ‘Not The Noel Coward Song’. ( ‘Isn’t it awfully nice to have a penis…’ THWACK! ). If you have it – ‘Monty Python Sings’ – play it. It should help to set the scene. Which was quite an astonishing one. And what I like best about the Cabaret Tent. ( I could quite happily just stay in there all weekend – until Woody Bop Muddy comes on… ) There’s always entertainment in there, even if it’s not on the stage. For example. Malcolm’s shift being over, he handed the compere reins over to a man whom I believe was called Craig. ( He shall, however, be remembered in other ways. Oh yes. ) About ten minutes into his preliminary material, a girl came up to the front of the stage, and asked if he would ‘suck one of my tits’. The compere, being a man, acquiesced. She stripped. He got on with it. And then the girl’s boyfriend came up, to take a photograph. It was all very very odd. And it was all repeated, after ANDREW MORRELL’s set, when there was another tit-sucking request. From a different member of the audience. Craig duly complied – to the incredulity of the newly arrived Adam & Philippa. But this action was interrupted by the appearance of two eight-foot tall mummies into the tent, who also seemed to want to be licked by the compere…

Eventually, it got to be eleven o’clock. Waiting for Rich Hall somehow turned into an all-night sit-in in the Cabaret Tent, and now my one big regret of the festival is that I didn’t get to see The Flaming Lips. Again. ( He had hand-puppets, she wailed plaintively, who were doing the vocals… ) Instead, I got a disconcertingly enthusiastic Welsh-man in boxers waving around dangerous kitchen utensils ( of which more in a minute ), preceded by a woman in a tutu re-enacting Death on the Nile using three foreign men from the audience. ABBY COLLINS dressed two of them up as centurions ( so they had Always pads stuck onto their shoulders and brushes stuck onto their helmets ), and the lucky one that got to play at being Anthony had to wear a tutu ( classy black, mind ) and tights. Somehow, her doing the splits on the dry-weave shoulders of the centurions equated, in theatrical terms, with the death of Cleopatra…

And the last act that we saw, on this bright and sharp Somerset night, was a scrawny Welshman in a Fez and little else, picking up weights with his nipple rings and generally being disconcerting with his body and its many parts. THE BASTARD SON OF TOMMY COOPER proved a Cabaret equivalent to ‘Gladiator’, in that the bits of his set that I could squeamishly bear to watch were very very good ( but the majority was too much for lil ol me ). Oh, and he was clearly delighted with his empty bin ( ‘EMPTY BIN!’ ), which was peculiarly enchanting, particularly as my lasting image of the end of the evening…

>>> Sunday

Last revised: 09/07/03