GLASTONBURY 2002 – Friday
But for the freezing cold
at night (have taken to sleeping with the blanket shrouded around me AND over
my face), the Portaloos and the pit-latrines, the tent-enforced method employed
to put on trousers… Glastonbury can be so
very civilised. Today, over cereal, one was able to start the day by reading
the morning papers; catch up on the Great Wide World courtesy of The Guardian
(world’s financial markets are in big trouble, and slugs officially hate
caffeine), and our tiny little tented one too. For the festival has its own
onsite paper, the Q Glastonbury Times. And that contains news far more
pertinent (& entertaining & less likely to involve billion$ fraud) to
our hippy-village selves; 
Michael Eavis has been given a Lifetime
Achievement Award by the Beard Liberation Front, the Greenpeace solar-powered
showers can’t cope with the heat & have broken already, and a group of
travellers who’d planned to ram the fence with a home-made (“Mr.T style”)
snowplough have been scuppered by a breakaway faction who stole the lorry’s
engine. Ha.
There’s also a Stage Times
section, not that that helps me co-ordinate my afternoon. The programme says
Queen Adreena are on at 4:30, the Mini-Guide says they’re on an hour later, and
the Q paper, supposedly the most up to date of the lot, is going with half
four. (Though it doesn’t really seem to know much about the New Band Stage).
This isn’t helping. I turn instead to the Chap Manifesto pages, and learn the best
way to keep ruffians away from your tent. (Pitch it on a platform, and employ a
Filipino boy to poison-dart any would-be intruders.)
Now. Say, hypothetically
speaking, you’re playing on the main stage at midday. Would you 
go about luring out an audience from
their tented slumber by:
a) following a 50-piece Japanese techno-jazz orchestra (and
presuming the sight of a man yelling about GWOOOVES in small red pants while
startlingly be-wigged air-hostesses dance behind him will be enough to entice
people towards the Pyramid Stage and that all you have to do is KEEP their
attention)
b) starting on your most famous song (and thus getting credit
points from both ‘Sopranos’ fans and from people who like their serenading to
be apt for the time of day… ‘Woke Up This Morning’ indeedy…)
c) employing two dancing girls
in the smallest amount of clothing going
d) all of the above…?
Ah, the gospel-cowboy-funk wake-up call tactics of the ALABAMA 3…
Thus do I begin my festival with effortlessly schmoove odes to the
power 
of Jesus and heroin, in the company of
the very reverend Larry and D. Wayne Love, multiple other Stetsonned (yes, a
real verb) band members, and two (‘Carry On’ era) Barbara Windsor -esque
blondes in tiny stars ‘n’ stripes bikinis flanking the singers, both dancing
like a majorette Bez[1].
I was particularly taken with the introduction to the perkily titled ‘Dyin’
(“oh yeah, the very thing to wake up a field at 12:30”), the synchronised
ducking the entire band (including the 2 drummers) had going on on ‘Hypo Full
Of Love’, and the faintly grotesque hymn they got us all to join in with (“Well
I got 3 eyes, gonna pluck one out for Jesus…”). Niiiice…
Set end, I belted (um, briskly moseyed) my
way over to the New Bands Tent, hoping to catch the end of Goldblade. But when
I got there the stage was bare. The security guard I asked, though he did know
what tent he was in, couldn’t tell me the day’s stage times. Neither could he
find me anyone who could. So I resort to description, to find out if I have
missed the band I’m after, and by how much. “Did the band who were just on have
vertical hair, PVC trousers, and big boots[2]?”
Yup. A stage-side loitering John Robb is pointed out to me as the man who last
played. This means I have missed them (buggrit) but not by an hour, which
indicates the Mini-Guide times are right, so I may yet get to hear a joke about
Jesus (“born in 0 B.C., I am the inventor of Christianity, which J am I?”) AND
see Katie-Jane Garside fall off a chair. Whoop…
And so to the Other Stage,
for some terribly jolly piano-riddled indie music (they’re like the British Ben
Folds Five! she declares, lazily) courtesy of ED HARCOURT, who’s grown up 
some since his Snug days, and now prefers
to sing about hearts of darkness (rather’n his girl Keith). I want to use the
word winsome to describe him. (So I shall.) Very winsome it was. Though mostly
nothing was going on onstage for the majority of the set (man sits & sings,
man stands & sings, etc.), leaving me with much time to stare at the bald
scars on the stubbly shaven head directly before me, and let songs about apples
be a soundtrack to my wondering whether the head’s owner had fallen off his
bike a lot as a child. Until the last song, whereupon mister Harcourt took it
upon himself to try some rock ‘n’ roll stage destruction. In a terribly polite
& mostly ineffectual manner. The guitar he CRACKED against the side of the
stage, yes, but the trombone he laid down ever so gently, and when he raised
his keyboard aloft, WWF style, he overbalanced with the weight before he could
throw it down, and fell backwards onto it. S’not quite The Who or Hendrix,
really…
And up the hill to the Acoustic Stage, serenaded by Thea Gilmore’s
Bodixa-esque cover of the Buzzcocks’ ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ floating wistfully
away on the breeze. Am here on the recommendation of both my friend Ian (who
used to live in Toronto) and the festival programme (which promised the
possibilities of tap-dancing and a “blindfolded version of White Christmas”)
for the sake of the Canadian troubadour HAWKSLEY WORKMAN. Performing with THE
WOLVES. (Well if he’s not much cop, I can always scoot off to see the newly
beardy Dandy Warhols.) Two songs in, and I’m already taken with the way he can
throw shapes, declare something so beautiful it makes him want to go
figure-skating, and sing like Subcircus’ PB Jnr (with hints of David Devant’s
Vessel & Neil Hannon) – range, bombast, and the ability to hit the breathy
high-notes. Bugger the Dandy Warhols; this man can beat out a syncopated haaka stomp
on the stage floor with two tightly gripped sticks adorned with baby dolls’
heads (“avec cheveux, sans cheveux”). A bench-mark of brilliance if ever there
was one…
It was around this point in
the afternoon that all my good scheduling intentions just drifted off across
the field (and out of the gate, if not the window); I rarely manage more’n a
third of the 
acts whose times I’ve so diligently
copied out into my notebook, and this afternoon (so long Idlewild, farewell
Cooper Temple Clause, byeee Lamb) gets to be no exception. Ah well. To the
Cabaret Tent we go. Arriving in good enough time to see a man dressed as a
Cornetto salesman miming a microphone blowjob during an appalling rendition of Prince
(& everyone else)’s ‘Kiss’, followed by THE DANDINIS, four jugglers playing
skittle-tig in matching red trousers. Stephen K. Amos had introduced them as
being “mind-boggling”. (My notes from the set say simply: ‘Why are they here?
Why am I? The mind boggles…’) And after the compere had mocked the newly
arrived girl in front of me for being posh (she told him she was a web-designer
from London, I know Vicky Frango also doubles up as a comedian cos I saw her
last weekend and was thus here able to unintelligibly compliment her on
admirable use of the word 
‘conkers’), the tent was graced with the
presence of a man described by the festival programme as a “Glastonbury
veteran”[3].
That’ll be STEWART LEE then. Who kindly forewarned us of the likely inclusion
of old jokes in the set (having had 6 months off from this stand-up malarkey),
and then kicked things off with ‘The Answer Is Jesus: What Is The Question?’
material, which made excellent use of the word ‘demographic’, and then fairly
swiftly descended into a running laugh commentary (“and that in itself is going
well”). Which was glorious; an act still 
holding the audience’s patient attention
while having an out-of-body-experience from their own material, sufficiently detached
to be watching himself with interest to see where the comedian can go with
this… (As was later recalled when he distracted himself by the sight of his own
biro-scrawled set-list notes on his hand, and then mentions this being the
‘hand’ section of the show.) We learn that he spent September the 11th
in a bar in Grenada, and was able to do his bit for uniting two cultures by
farting. That he’s been harangued by an American bar-fly demanding the British
get the troops off the streets of Dublin. (“If you can’t place somewhere on a
map, don’t send it free weapons.”) That he has found out, at the age of 34,
that he’s actually of Scottish ancestry; an experience akin to “going fishing,
reeling in 33 haddock in a row, and then a haggis” (which isn’t even a fish,
thus making the experience ever more peculiar). So the old is smoothly balanced
with the new, and we careen towards a close with the tale of a “life sized
inflatable model of E.T.” appearing amongst the foral tributes to Diana, Stu
gaining much applause for the second reason as to why Jesus and Spielberg’s
alien are very similar (beyond their twin abilities to heal the sick)… they’re
both fictional…
Haring off across the site (the New Bands Tent being as far West
from the Cabaret tent as it could be without being in the car park), we go past
the Alabama 3’s besuited keyboard player (still looking a bit like Rod
Stewart); I bustle up, hustle him into a photo, congratulate him on the
synchronised 
ducking (they nicked it from The 4Tops, I
don’t think anyone here will notice), and zoom off. For the sake of QUEEN
ADREENA. Who were amazing. As always. A frenzied Katie-Jane ram-raiding Crispin
at every opportunity, him seldom losing his place in the songs as he attempts
to twist up and away from her, Orson seemingly oblivious. Screams and whispers,
plaintive whirling, banshee stalking, stage-side faery crouching, drink
hurling; they sound as good as they look and you can’t keep your eyes away from
it all. Pretty like druuuuugs…
Back to the tent for a bit of a sit down (and to check for
burglarisation), and then off to the Other Stage, glorying in the ease with
which you can walk around the site and sidle to the stage barriers this year;
the fence ensuring there aren’t 200,000 people all competing for space onsite
(or the chance to steal your stuff). So I got to the front (and stayed there
all night), in prime position for MERCURY REV (Jonathan arms out soaring happy
in the sunshine, shirt rippling as the clouds of dry ice drift past) who shone
brightest with ‘Goddess…’ but were lovely throughout, and then SPIRITUALIZED
(“what a pair of trousers!”), who enveloped us in a haze of wall-of-sound
guitar and Eeeeeelectricity…
As the stage was being
cleared and set up for the headliners, we had security-guard 183 on hand as
entertainment, trying (and failing) during a hip-hop number to lead his fellow
crew members in The Twist. Oh, and a pigeon on a stick, first noticed when I
turned round to see how far back the crowd stretched. I turn back to face the stage.
Turn round to see if I’m hallucinating. (Well I’m on the 70%proof rum by now.)
Am not. There is indeed a pigeon (fake) on a stick in the throng behind me.
It’s currently pecking at the head of an unsuspecting girl in a sunhat. As
inanimate birdlife on the end of 8foot poles are wont to do…
And finally, for our delectation, GARBAGE, straight into ‘Push It’
and we’re away. Duke silhouetted against the lights on one side and Steve on the other, with the guy who isn’t Butch
Vig letting rip on the drums, but no-one really pays them mind as we’ve got
Shirley to be watching. Shirley bouncing across the stage, Shirley legs apart
leaning back as though buffeted into the chorus, Shirley delightedly spotting
and stealing the pigeon on a stick… Her with the “come-on then” stance ‘n’ the
take-no-shit combats, thanking us for being there in the sweetest Scottish
burr, dedicating ‘Cherry Lips’ to lil J.T. Leroy, slamming her way into a
Ramones cover. Songs offa all three albums – from a purring ‘SuperVixen’ bang up
to a mournful ‘Cup Of Coffee’ – and they even tempt fate with a vituperative
‘Only Happy When It Rains’. Cracking. And them only on the second stage, when
Coldplay (Coldplay!)[4]
get to headline over on the Pyramid…
Set over, I peel myself off
the barrier, cheerfully telling the newly-appeared owner of the
(now-decapitated) pigeon-on-a-stick that he’ll never get his bird back, leave
him desperately trying 
to attract the attention of security
(while miming ‘pigeon’), and drift off towards the Cabaret Tent, at a
Zimmerframe shuffle. Arrive in the middle of IAN COGNITO’s set, and fairly
swiftly realise this to be no bad thing; his material was haphazard, and he
himself comes across like an angry little boil. (You can’t tell if he’s Putting
It On, or is really that seedynasty offstage…) He mixed topics which were just
screamingly unfunny (ahaha, you said ‘wank’), bogglingly crass (oh tell
us again about God’s Own Cunttree), fairly easy (if you are what you eat, he’s
a Ginster) and absolutely spot-on (notes the job of weight-lifter trainer to be
little more’n “pick that up”). At one point he spoke enviously of those
comedians who don’t drink as it makes them dull – Billy Connolly, Eddie Izzard,
etc. – telling the sleepy throng it’d be a “nice problem to have”. Or at least
a decent get-out-clause for occasions such as this…
After a brief interlude –
during which compere CAREY MARX threatens to shove the mike-stand up a
heckler’s arse and is 
then met with a shout from the back of
“I’ll buy you a burger if you do it” – the first CabaretTentCanadian of the
weekend was provided for our delectation. GLEN WOOL. Looking substantially less
like Wayne Campbell (in Otis Lee Crenshaw’s bandanna) than last I saw him –
possibly because he’s in a large cold field for a weekend, possibly because
he’s lost his bandanna – but it doesn’t seem to have impinged on his comedic
abilities. (Well you’d hope not, wouldn’t you…?) “There’s no way you can have
diplomacy with people who make their women dress up like PacMan ghosts,” he
assures us, before moving on to suggest that men who boast of sleeping with
hundreds of chicks are probably gay (“374 women and you still haven’t found one
you like?”). In retrospect, the things he was saying were at least as
provocative as those leaving the Cognito gob. (Incredibly fat men discovered
dead at the top of high-rise buildings are probably going to make their way
downstairs via the window and have a verdict of SUICIDE recorded on the
Coroner’s report…) But Wool – personable, easygoing, not discussing optimum
wanking techniques – comes across so much better. Even when suggesting a fun
night out consisting of “going into a Thai restaurant and subtly trying to
order a boy.”
And as I made my way back to my tent in the
wee small hours, hurrying into the freezing air with my coat pulled tight
around me, it was with Wool’s sage words still ringing in my ears. “No matter
how bad life is, at least Smurfs aren’t real…”[5]
>>> SATURDAY
Last revised: 13/07/02