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Feeling Pretty Groovy At Glastonbury
It started around three in the morning and was to last for eight solid hours. I have witnessed a lot of thunder and lightning in my life and, living in Ireland (the greenest sponge on earth) obviously know something about rain. But I never experienced anything like the weather we had during those early hours last Thursday/Friday.
The earth shook beneath you, the thunder was so powerful and close overhead. After one powerful tremor I heard a woman scream in fear – probably when her boyfriend, short of a mother, squeezed her too hard. It was like a bombardment from the First World War.
The valley lit up with lightning and appeared to discharge itself like the blades of a knife between the fingers of the tents - and miraculously injured no one.
But around eleven in the morning a cheer went up and gathered voice across the 900 acres that is Worthy Farm in Glastonbury. The rain petered out and although many tents had been washed away and we were to be in muck until Sunday’s perfect sunshine, the worse was over.
When I was nineteen I use to watch ‘Top of the Pops’ on a black and white TV in an internees’ hut in Long Kesh, along with my comrades, the majority of who were also young. Most of the older men, from a more traditional, cultural orientation, frowned upon our love of British pop music. I am sure they thought it – and the huge following for soccer – would be the end of Irish republicanism. They were wrong. Movements which can’t adapt, can’t absorb and assimilate the life forces in the society around them stultify and die.
My generation grew up on The Beatles and ‘ Coronation Street’, not ‘The O’Riordans’. The majority of houses couldn’t receive RTE television. But Irish games, Irish music, persisted, and nationalism/republicanism, although suppressed, was resilient. To say that the division of this island did not create partitionist mentalities would be wrong. Actually, partition created a multitude of mentalities and attitudes. We are all hybrids and we absorbed the influences around us and amended them without surrendering the convictions at our marrow.
Watching ‘Top of the Pops’ in Long Kesh I use to resent how oblivious those young British people were to what was going on here in their name. They were living what we so desired – normal lives. I was also angry that the more progressive among them could be opposed to the Vietnam War, would champion Castro and Guevara, but would run a mile at the mention of Ireland. Certainly, all struggles, all conflicts, are complex affairs, and ours did not really play on the international stage until the hunger strike. Bobby Sands is an icon throughout the world as the resistance prisoner. And Gerry Adams is viewed as the leader of an anti-imperialist struggle.
Fast forward twenty years from 1973 to the 1990s and I was back in jail when my brother Ciaran, sixteen years my junior, joined me after being sentenced to 26 [?] years. On television we watched – in colour! – the Glastonbury Festival. I said to him, more in hope than chance, that when he got out we would go to Glastonbury. He was released early under the Belfast Agreement and annually we have been to this incredible festival ever since.
Getting to and from the place can be a nightmare but when you arrive it is awesome. I remember asking someone what were those colours across the valley and she said they were the tents of other campers. I couldn’t believe it. They seemed miles away. It takes over an hour to cross the enclosure, its ‘streets’ of shops, food outlets, stages, marquees, theatres, play parks, athrong with up to 200,000 people, if one includes among festival goers the workers, traders and roadies. The people in the beer tents work voluntarily – their wages going to various causes, including Oxfam and Greenpeace.
The friendship is powerful and hippy. We camped beside a London couple who were former soldiers. We met up with some people we befriended last year. I even ran into two neighbours from my own street who were there with their teenage daughter. And there were even people there older than me!
The politics of Glastonbury are radical and progressive – anti-globalisation, anti-war, anti-GM foods, pro-environment, pro fair trade. There is an area called the Left Field where sits a huge marquee. Here there are debates, discussions, Q & As, with guest speakers, including Tony Benn.
George Galloway, fresh and refreshened from his encounter with a US Senate committee also addressed a large crowd. Petitions were circulated and support garnered for the Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh this weekend.
The music is phenomenal, and overwhelming, from raves in the dance tents to modern pop, from cabaret to goldie oldies to jazz, blues, folk and country. Coldplay were brilliant as were New Order: and Nigel Kennedy played a set which could have come straight out of The Mothers of Invention! The radical band Seize The Day sang one of their founder, Theo Simon’s protest songs about Guantanamo Bay, ‘Do The Shackle Shuffle at Camp X-Ray’ with the lyrics:
“All you’ll need to get in is the beard on your chin,
An indefinite stay and you don’t have to pay…”
“We’d a pipeline to lay, but you got in the way,
So we sacrificed you to the needs of the few…”
The act which stole the festival and attracted the biggest crowd at the Pyramid Stage was Brian Wilson, the prodigiously talented and troubled singer/songwriter of the Beach Boys. His concert was beyond superlatives and even the very young appeared familiar with ‘Sloop John B’, ‘Help Me Rhonda’, ‘Californian Girls’, ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Good Vibrations’. Everyone was in stitches when during his performance a fella and a girl surfed the crowd on real surf boards! His rendition of ‘Heroes and Villains’ was brilliant:
“Stand or fall I know there
Shall be peace in the valley
And it’s all an affair
Of my life with the heroes and villains.”
Many stayed out late into the early hours of Monday morning, squeezing every available ounce of energy, postponing fatigue. It was a hot night and when people did drag themselves back to their tents many decided to sleep out in the open.
There is a great scene of solidarity and loyalty towards the end of the film ‘Spartacus’ when Crassus and the Romans have the former slaves surrounded after great carnage on the battlefield. Crassus attempts to determine who Spartacus is, but the prisoners will not identify him. Many make the claim of, “I’m Spartacus!” The Romans realised they hadn’t crushed the idea of freedom and as punishment the survivors are crucified on the road to Rome.
Towards dawn some wag, viewing all the bodies lying in the fields of Glastonbury, shouted, “I’m Spartacus!” Another male, half a mile away, sat up and replied, “I’m Spartacus!” It went on like this until another voice, that of a woman, shouted, “I’m Spartacus!” and she was greeted with a massive cheer.
It was a wonderful weekend in a wonderful world where we were all speaking the same language.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison