Glastonbury Day 5: "There Are Eyeballs In A Tree"

Day 5 found we Glastonbury old hands lying about on our stomachs in our usual Space of Coolness near the toilets in the morning (along with a few usurpers), before peeling off in various directions to enjoy the festival. I was on the 5pm-10pm shift with N. C, L & T had a different shift which fortunately finished at 8pm, so all of us did the Dance of Going To See Muse Tonight, Yay, again in the interests of good luck, before heading off to the Pyramid Stage to see the Lightning Seeds. I seem to remember it was on this occasion that we learned more about each other’s sexual preferences than any of us ever needed to know (alcohol wasn’t involved at this time in the morning, so I know not why the conversation took a turn that involved the phrase “hair-pulling”), and also the following discussion as we passed the cow barns on the way in:

L: I think the cows are talking to me.
C: Really?
L: MOOOO.
Cow from inside the barn: MOOOOOOO!!!!
L: You see?
Me: You’re like the Cow Whisperer.

We settled ourselves in at a comfortable spot towards the back of the field. The great thing about the Pyramid Stage is that the visuals and audio are pretty good from just about everywhere, so if you don’t fancy being in the squash at the front, you can occupy the “picnic” bit at the back of the field, where people spread themselves out with blankets, chairs, and four-packs of Carlsberg. Or, in our case, frosty lemonades and iced coffee – we really were far too respectable. Iced coffee from the stall near the Pyramid Stage was fast becoming my favourite thing, and if you know me, you’ll know that for it to be too hot for me to drink liquid coffee means it was pretty fricken’ hot.

We sprawled about all over the field, basking in the sunshine. Then jumped up and down to “Three Lions” and “Life of Riley”. Then sat down again, because it was roasting. Now I like the heat, and am famed among my friends for feeling the cold if there’s a stiff breeze. Indeed, one of my colleagues at work once dubbed me “The Lizard” for my ability to sit around in the warmth, but this was pushing it, even for me. People were hiding in any bit of shade they could find. After the Lightning Seeds finished, we went our separate ways to see the different bits of the festival we were interested in. I went off to catch one of the bands at the West Holts (ex- Jazz World) Stage, then hide from the sun inside tents. Specifically, the Cabaret Tent, where I was about to fufil a six-year-old Glastonbury personal tradition.

I was at the Cabaret Stage to see the punk performance poet, Attila the Stockbroker. Attila was the first act I ever saw at Glastonbury, back in 2005. I was trudging along in the mud past a tent, when I heard a song with the memorable refrain: “Aneurin Bevin, your party is dead / And the time for a new one is nigh / Will the last person left please turn off the lights? / New Labour, just fuck off and die.” I promptly wheeled left, and became a fan of Attila the Stockbroker. I now always check the line-up to see if I can get to his show, and this year my luck held; he was on at 3pm. I settled in early to avoid the sun and stake out my spot.

Whilst in the Cabaret Tent, I also got to see the Great Glastonbury Filling The Tent Trick. It was impressive. As the previous act (a middle-aged man in a kilt doing diablo tricks) trotted off, the compere decided the crowd was not impressive enough for Attila the Stockbrocker, and announced: “Right everyone, we’re going to do the Glastonbury Filling the Tent Trick. This always works. Trust me. Right now I want all the people at the back to stand up, stand up, yes that’s right, don’t worry, you’ll get to sit back down again soon, so just go stand at the back and fill the entrances. That’s right, fill the entrances right up so that it looks like the entire tent is standing room only, that’s it, excellent. And now, when I raise my arms, I want you all to clap and cheer as if the most exciting thing you’ve ever seen in your life is on stage, Really raise the roof. That’s it. Right, one-two-three… Yes! Excellent! Keep going, keep going, it’s working, even louder please, even louder, that’s it, the people are coming in – make room for them, folks! Make room! Fantastic!”

He was right; it did work. Drawn by the magnetic urge to see what all the fuss is about and the fear that you might be missing a good time, people packed themselves into the tent, and Attila came onstage to see a full tent, which waved back at him. He ran through his list of favourites: “Libyan Students from Hell”, “Doggy on a String” and the song with the afore-mentioned chorus, “Guy Fawkes’ Table”. You can always tell when people in the tent have never seen him perform it before; they’re the ones who gape with surprise at the chorus, then laugh, then cheer. As his set ended, I reluctantly assumed the perpendicular, and dragged myself off to the beer tent to get on with my shift.

There’s not a lot to say about the shifts at Glastonbury this year, which is a good thing. You show up, you push beer over the counter at people, you throw the cash in the bucket, you repeat. Ours was, as previously observed, a very good and well-run bar to work in. The only challenge was that for some reason people would enter the tent at one end and form a queue there, rather than spreading out down the bar where there were more people to serve them. Being an insanely helpful type, I developed a Village People-style routine where, whenever this happened, I went up to that end and yelled “Folks, please move down inside the tent – we are waiting to serve you at the other end!” then did a sort of Mexican wave indicating the general direction of the people waiting to serve.

By and large, the punters at Glastonbury at our tent were good people. This is something I’ve observed on many occasions; I’ve no idea what working in a bar on a professional basis is like, but by and large, the Glastonbury punters are fairly easygoing. I was happy this year not to be in the Dance Field. The Dance Field is probably my least favourite bit of the festival; it is not my scene, and probably has a higher proportion of drink- / drug- casualties who are still up and perambulating around than anywhere else in the festival. (We used to call the 11am-5pm Sunday shift on the bar in the Dance Field the “zombie shift” because of the appearance of anyone who staggered into it at that time.)

By contrast, our bar was cheerful and, being next to the Pyramid Stage, had the best live soundtrack ever. It’s a funny thing about Glastonbury. We are all so used to hearing music in the background that at first, the sound of “Time to Pretend” or “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” playing nearby doesn’t strike you as remarkable; then you look up and realise that, actually, you’re hearing MGMT or Scissor Sisters playing it live. As the slogan has it: “If Carlsberg did live bar music…”

I was sorry to miss seeing Scissor Sisters, as they were on before Muse, but my shift clashed. At least I got to hear them, albeit through the tent wall. Fortunately, I was going to get to see Muse.

If you know me, you’ll know that Muse are pretty much my favourite band, ever. I have seen them live once before at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle, but whilst that was fantastic, there’s something about the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury that seems to add an extra dimension to the artists’ performance. Probably, it’s the knowledge that a fair part of their audience did not pay for their ticket specifically so that they could see them, and is standing there thinking: “Go on then, impress me”. To say that I was bouncing up and down a bit as the clock ticked towards 10pm would be accurate.

Fortunately for N and I, Muse were on in the field next to us at 10.15pm. As soon as we finished (and you’d better believe we were in the queue for signing off the work rota and collecting our shift vouchers about 9.55pm), we tore out of the tent, made the fastest change into our non-work clothes ever, then took off towards our rendezvous with L, C, & T like heat-seeking missiles. Amazingly, we found them, and threaded our way through the MASSIVE crowd to the best spot we could find. Annoyingly, it had a guy behind us who apparently believed that Muse’s light show really needed him to point his green laser pointer at the top of the Pyramid Stage as an interesting addition. Sadly, he was not near enough behind us that I could “accidentally” tread on his foot.

All this was forgotten when Muse strutted on stage like returning heroes. (I’m sorry, this is the point in this blog where my objectivity is temporarily absent – I apologise if I sound like a cross between a fangirl and a sleep-deprived NME reporter, normal sarcastic service WILL be resumed further down this blog when Muse have gone offstage.) Matt Bellamy looked out at the crowd and muttered into the mike “Fucking hell, this is massive!”, and, in the words of the NME’s reporter, “did his best not to look like a man who plays to 25,000-capacity stadiums every day of his working week. (He does. He so does.) But yeah, maybe this one’s a little bit special…”.

Not just for the obvious reason, which is that the Glastonbury Saturday headline slot on the Pyramid is the “you have made it to the big league” signifier. If you’re a fan of Muse, this had a special resonance. Muse’s first performance on the Sunday of the festival on the Pyramid Stage back in 2004 is widely regarded as being the moment they entered rock’s big league and made it into the “you might have heard of them” mainstream. Unfortunately, it was also followed by one of the band’s worst moments, when their drummer Dominic Howard’s father collapsed and died of a heart attack half an hour after watching his son’s band on the main stage. Whether Muse would ever play Glastonbury again was something of a hushed question among their fans. To see them back on the stage was an emotional experience.

Then they opened up with “Knights of Cydonia”, and the crowd went ballistic. At this point I can really only say that I enjoyed the whole gig immensely (with the exception of Annoying Green Pointer Guy). For me Muse on top form + Glastonbury on a summer’s evening = perfect musical experience. Hearing “Guiding Light” live was a particular highlight for me, it’s one of my favourites from “The Resistance”. I also think that Matt Bellamy may actually have said more to the audience whilst onstage than at just about any gig I’ve seen footage of. He is notorious for saying very little to the audience other than “Hello, how are you doing?”, then ripping into “Plug In Baby” or “Stockholm Syndrome”, apparently out of the feeling that the audience is there to see him play rather than listen to him talk. (Possibly correct, although I think the Saturday evening audience would have been quite receptive to tales of aliens taking over the world in disguise.) Seeing him actually smile at the audience and say hello was quite a nice moment.

Then, of course, it was back to “Hysteria” and “Supermassive Black Hole”, and the party continued until Muse finally capped an excellent, excellent performance by bringing the Edge on stage and concluding with “Where the Streets Have No Name”. I’d like to say I don’t need other people to validate my taste, but when you have a favourite band, and when you get to see that favourite band demonstrate their brilliance to 40,000 people plus the watching media, it’s a very, very nice moment.

As the field very slowly emptied, we headed for our rendezvous at the Bread and Roses pub nearby. The Bread and Roses is another WBC bar, and highly popular due to the fact that it was the only bar in the main festival area that took WBC end-of-shift drinks vouchers. In the old days, any WBC bar would take them in exchange for a drink, which made being a volunteer somewhat more fun. Indeed, I don’t think I paid for a drink during the entirety of my first festival back in 2005 (people would just hand over the drink and grin “Nah, don’t bother” at you when you proffered the voucher), which is, of course, why the WBC no longer does things this way.

It does mean that the Bread and Roses is the default off-duty bar for WBC workers, and it was packed that night. We found each other, found some drinks and, after quickly making some new friends, found some seating in, around and on one of the very elderly sofas in the bar. Suddenly, Alabama 3 wandered onstage and started singing. We’d reached the point in the festival where this sort of thing had become the norm. Due to my alcohol intake, I actually cannot remember a great many details of their performance, except that a) I enjoyed it and b) at one point they were singing a slow country and western dirge when suddenly the lead singer yelled “Nah, you don’t wanna hear any more of this sad country and western shit!”, stopped the song halfway through and broke into a much livelier singalong song, to wild cheers from the (largely drunk) audience.

At this point, a debate occurred within the team. We’d talked early about going to see a band recommended in the Guardian Guide to the Festival, the Phenomenal Handclap Band in the Dance East tent, introduced by Craig Charles. Some of us were still up for this, but others were fading fast. After a slightly intense debate, myself and T decided that no, we actually weren’t too tired to go watch them. We staggered on out of the tent and rambled over to the Dance Field, stopping for a much-needed pee on the way. We were merrily rambling onward towards the music tent when, from a young woman nearby, there came an ear-piercing screech: “THERE ARE EYEBALLS IN A TREE!”

I turned to look, and very nearly jumped behind T and yelled “GAAHH!” Because there were, indeed, giant eyeballs in a nearby tree, which is quite a freaky sight when you aren’t expecting it. We stared at them for several minutes, wondering why on earth anyone had put eyeballs in a tree. The only conclusion we could come up with was that someone at Glastonbury hates the inhabitants of the Dance Field with a vengeance, and decided to put up something that would give anyone in an altered state paranoid visions for the rest of the festival. If this was so, I can understand their motivation (see my earlier comments for why).

We made it to the tent, and the band were on, and hugely popular (it looked like everyone else had read the Guardian Guide, too). The tent was jumping with happy people in costumes clutching drinks and glowy light sticks, and we merged into the crowd, pausing only so that T could get her photo taken with a young man and his girlfriend who’d come dressed as “Where’s Wally?” and his girlfriend Wallette. We drank, we waved our hands in the air, we jumped around, and when the band finished at half three in the morning, we weaved our merry way back home, having a good-natured drunken debate with two lads in a similar state of inebriation, about something which I entirely cannot remember. I couldn’t remember it the morning afterwards either – it’s not the passage of time to blame. Quite possibly the best single day I’ve ever had at the Glastonbury festival. What was to happen next?

Winter Comes

The wind howls around the corridors, nibbling at the office workers.
The stripy jumper is fetched from the back of the wardrobe.
The puddles glint, and the bicycle takes corners more slowly instead of being flung around them with gay abandon.
The latest Silly Hat Trend appears upon the heads of students, and at the stall that sells Smelly Balls outside the Northumberland Street branch of Dixons.
Hat and gloves become an automatic reflex, and Doc Martens cease to peep shyly from beneath the bed, and stomp merrily about the streets, insulating their owners’ feet.
Christmas decorations cease to become a source of vague it’s-too-damn-early-we’ve-not-even-had-Halloween-yet irritation, and instead a reminder of joys to come.
Hot chocolate becomes a necessity not a luxury.
Women don their skimpiest clothing for going out at the coldest time of the year.
The populace scoff currywurst and slurp mulled wine whilst contemplating buying a sponge soap and a trapper’s hat from the Continental market.
Marks and Spencers devotes its attention to fattening the populace now, that it may sell them diet ready meals in the New Year.
Winter comes to Newcastle.

Glastonbury Day 4: "Play Something We Know!"

Day 4 dawned hot and sunny, again. We had our morning routine worked out by now: arise, open tent / crawl out of tent, get up and shower whilst there was no queue (if feeling organised), kip no. 2, awake, eat breakfast together, gather in the shady spot. T, C and L had done sterling work and found the only really cool spot in the entire WBC campsite. It was in the shade of the toilet block, but we didn’t particularly care, since there was no smell, a nice breeze, and it was a big enough patch of shadow to hold all of us. We settled in for a natter before we all decamped to watch Rolf Harris officially open Glastonbury 2010 on the Pyramid Stage.

The heat, the heat… it felt like walking through an oven. And in answer to the obvious, yes, I preferred it to staggering around in mud and having to pull on a full set of wellies and waterproofs in the morning before I could go for a pee, but a dusty field with little shade and no nearby water to jump into to cool off in isn’t that much fun, either.

On the other hand, I was easily distracted by C’s incessant complaining about Rolf Harris. For almost the entire 20 minute walk, he kept up a running monologue of “I’m not going to see Rolf Harris. Rolf Harris is crap. Why do you want to see him? Why are we doing this? This is stupid.” All the while being pulled along by L, who was refusing to give him any choice whatsoever in the matter. The “almost” is because at one point we encountered a woman who may have been a survivor of the original Glastonbury festival in 1973 (I’m not trying to be uncharitable here, but it kinda looked like that) and who was wandering about topless, and this stunned us all into silence.

I brought up the rear, hoping vaguely to find a stall selling sachets of suncream. Not giving yourself backache at Glastonbury involves a fine judgement of carrying precisely what you need for the whole day (to prevent unnecessary-foot-aching journeys back to the tent), but only what you need (to prevent throwing your back out). I wanted some suncream I could stick in the top pocket of my shirt, but alas none was forthcoming, so I decided to go for Option B, and just nick suncream from other people as and when I needed it.

We arrived at the Pyramid Stage to find a massive field full of people wearing straw hats and shorts, excitedly awaiting the arrival of an octogenerian Antipodean. I was actually caught in the Great Rolf Harris Crush of 2009, when the organisers foolishly put him on the Jazz World (now the West Holts) Stage, and huge queues of people clogged the pathways surrounding the field. We turned around and went back, because it was obvious we would get nowhere near the stage, and I reflected on the fact that only at Glastonbury would you see people forming a massive queue to see Rolf Harris play the digeridoo.

Sensibly, this year the organisers had put him on the Pyramid Stage and made him the festival opener. As we arrived and fought our way into the crowd, Rolf opened up with a blast on the digeridoo, and a cheerful insult for a member of the stage crew who failed to throw him a bottle of water: “You could play cricket for England, mate!”. Rolf went through all the classics: “Jimmy My Boy”, “The Ladies at the Court of King Caractacus”, “Tie Me Kangeroo Down”, “Waltzing Matilda” and, of course, “Two Little Boys”. I recently learned that “Two Little Boys” was inspired by the death on the battlefield of Rolf Harris’s brother during WWII. Apparently his father was in a different regiment, and believed for the rest of his life that, had he only been in the same regiment, he could have pulled his brother to safety, just as in the song. When Rolf Harris played “Two Little Boys” to his grandmother, she listened all the way through, then said at the end “Please, never play that to me again”.

I didn’t know this at the time, so I simply joined in the communal singalong. So did C. I have a hilarious video of the five of us boogieing along to Rolf singing “Waltzing Matilda”. And yes, we did get him to admit afterwards that he’d enjoyed it. We had different shifts and different things we wanted to see, so the five of us went our separate ways and planned to meet later for a drink.

As the day wore on, the heat became increasingly oppressive. I took shelter from it in the Circus Tent. Always a favourite of mine at Glastonbury – there’s so much more to the festival than the music stages. This turned out not to be so much a tent as a communal sauna. Fortunately, I’d been at Glastonbury for over three days now, and was sufficiently in the festival mindset that lying about in a tent clad only in sweat, my bra and some shorts, in the presence of lots of strangers seemed like an entirely rational response to the situation. (I did keep my bra on though – I wasn’t feeling that relaxed).

At 2pm, mine and N’s six-hour shift started. An experience I can best compare to serving beer in a canvas sauna. At least we had access to drinks and ice, and as the afternoon worn on, the heat slowly bled from the day, reaching the ideal point around 6pm. From there it began to drop cooler and cooler. After a certain amount of experimentation, I’d found the ideal combination of stuff to take with me to the tent. As the shift ended, on went the leggings under shorts, long-sleeved t-shirt, jacket, and socks under sandals. (Yes, I know. Fashion faux pas. We’re in a field, who gives a fuck?)

Also as the shift ended, off went N and I in search of some decent food. We found it at a nearby Thai Curry stall which had apparently won lots of festival food awards. We wandered off in search of seats, and found some in front of the bar we’d been working in. Which was, conveniently, in front of the Cider Bus.

It was also, less conveniently, next to a passed-out drunk slumped on a bench, whom N preferred not to sit near. I wondered what it said about me that my eye had scanned Passed-Out Guy and decided he posed no threat. And yes, that’s heartless, but what could I have done for him? Put him in the recovery position? Woken him up? Either would probably have resulted in cursing and vomit, and I wasn’t wearing wellies. Instead, I thoughtfully ate my curry, and listened to Dizzee Rascal on the Pyramid Stage. N not being a fan of Mr Mills, we went off in search of more tuneful music on the nearby bandstage, then headed back to the Pyramid Stage to see Gorillaz headline.

Ah, Gorillaz’s headline set… Mmm. It’s a tricky one. If you’ve ever read any of the reviews for it, you’ll know that it was not widely regarded as a success.

Which in some ways is a shame. There was a lot of anticipation before the Pyramid stage that evening, and when screens came on to show Snoop Dogg rapping “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach”, cheers came from across the field. I remember the first twenty minutes of the set as being pretty damn good, maybe not in the very highest bracket for a Glastonbury set, but definitely up around the four-star mark, as the band went through the first half of “Plastic Beach”. Damon Albarn swapping between piano and lead vocals to sing “Rhinestone Eyes” was a particular highlight, seeing Bobby Womack join in on “Stylo” was amazing, and when they played “Melancholy Hill”, it was one of those moments where you hear a song for the first time and instantly fall in love with it. When it happens in the middle of a field in the evening, surrounded by thousands of other people, it is the sort of transcendent experience that causes newspaper music reviewers to reach for the phrase “Glastonbury Moment”.

And then things started to unravel. Now, I actually admire Damon Albarn’s determination not to give the public what they want, which takes some balls if you’re the opening day headliner at just about the biggest music festival in the UK calendar. However, I question the wisdom of doing this by employing the Syrian National Flute and Drum Orchestra (I think) to play a musical interlude for what felt like about 15 minutes, which is far too long when you’re in front of a crowd wanting hit songs to sing along to. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the Pyramid Stage is about, and I couldn’t help wondering if Gorillaz might actually have worked better on the Other Stage, where the crowd is a wee bit more alternative and open-minded. The Pyramid Stage crowd wanted songs they knew, or at the very least, songs they could jump around to. As the Guardian’s music critic put it: “There is a time and place for spotlighting virtuosos in unfamiliar disciplines but this emphatically is not it”.

As the show continued, it became painfully obvious that Gorillaz didn’t, quite, have the big repertoire of songs to draw on to fill the entire slot. I think people would probably have still been happy, though, if they’d stuck to a set of continual pop songs with an ever-changing line-up of People Who Are Famous Enough That You Know Them, like Lou Reed – watching him onstage alongside Damon Albarn, Mick Jones and Paul Simon was one for the rock geeks. “Dare” was a highlight, too, but unfortunately its very popularity only pointed up the fact that people were jumping around because they knew it, and once it was finished, they went back to going “Huh?” at the stage. Particularly at what I remember as being one of the most painful moments to watch, “Plastic Jet”.

“Plastic Jet” is a song about… well, it’s not 100% clear from the lyrics, but in the context of the whole album, it’s about alienation from the natural world and wasting our resources (or something along those lines). I seem to remember watching the band sing it against a backdrop of some of the goriest footage of whales being slaughtered that I ever hope not to have to see again. Damon Albarn then tried to get the crowd to learn the chorus and sing along.

Since the chorus is: “It’s all good news now / Because we left the taps running / For a hundred years / So drink from the cup / The plastic cup, drink / Drink to the purple, the people / The plastic-eating people”, this was not destined to go well. Some of us did give it our best shot, but it was actually quite painful to watch Damon Albarn wheedling “Oh come on, please?” to a crowd who were clearly not up for it – especially if you, like me, had been there when he broke down in tears at the overwhelming warmth and support from the crowd when Blur headlined on Sunday night last year.

The next high point came when Albarn and the Japanese artist Little Dragon sang an exceptionally lovely ballad together, which would later cause me to scratch my head in bewilderment at why on earth Albarn cursed one of the most romantic songs he’s ever written with the godawful title, “To Binge”. For me, the high point after that was the tribute to the recently-deceased Dennis Hopper, “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head”.

Now, my tastes in music are weird, and I usually like the tracks on albums which nobody else likes. “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head” is a spoken-word parable of environmental catastrophe on Gorillaz’s second album, “Demon Days”, with Dennis Hopper providing the narration. Spooky and compelling, it was a real treat for me – but not, alas, for the two men standing next to me, who yelled “Play a song!” “Play something we know!” at the stage, and voiced the desires of many.
Albarn apparently heard their call and answered it, as Gorillaz ended their set with their biggest two songs, “Feel Good Inc” and “Client Eastwood”, with Snoop Dogg joining in on the rap sections in “Client Eastwood”. Mollified, the crowd got on down and boogied, ending on a happy note, although later on the way back to the village campsite, C and I would compare notes and agree that it was a shame he didn’t use the original rap from the song. I guess when you’re a Big Star you want to put your own stamp on things, but the rap in “Client Eastwood” is what people were wanting to hear, and it was a bit of a shame not to get the original lyrics. Still, it was a good first day to the festival. And the pints of beer and cider in the Village bar that ended it were very welcome. Onward to Day Five…