London Letter: Paying a fortune to wallow in mud

DOWN south you may have heard of Glastonbury, the biggest outdoor music festival in the world, and among the hipsters, you have not lived until you have been there.

Indeed, it is considered a mandatory rite of passage to being cool.

I must confess Glastonbury comes and goes each year without being troubled by my presence. I reckon that’s a good thing because it would take a miracle similar to Lazarus walking to make the hipsters consider me cool.

The main picture to emerge from this year’s festival in Somerset, the south-west of England was of a group of inanely-grinning dudes having hippie-crack – laughing gas to you and me – for breakfast. That about sums it up.

Sure, they have great acts; David Bowie, Mumford and Sons, Van Morrison, Oasis – even the ageing Rolling Stones and The Who have headlined there.

The Who starred this year and I watched them on TV in my hipster-free home performing Baba O’Riley. It was great – except 71-year-old singer Roger Daltrey sounded like a tenor Leonard Cohen.

The funniest thing about ‘Glasto’ is that all the lawyers, bankers, accountants and IT millionaires who go there think they are part of the hippie counter-culture the moment they enter the tent city in their designer denims.

Glasto is now 45-years-old and was inspired by the ethos of the hippie free festivals movement in 1970.

In the early days entrance cost £,1 but most hopped over the fence rather than put their hand in their pockets. It was only when there was a punch-up between new age fence hoppers and security guards that the organisers had to do something radical.

Today the festival is surrounded by a ring of steel encircling 175 000 people paying the equivalent of R4 000 for the privileged of wallowing in mud, overflowing toilets and slurry from nearby dairy farms.

It’s a snip at the price for urban counter-culture warriors who switch from being stockbrokers selling blue chips the day before to anarchists demanding world change NOW or else we’ll be ‘vewy, vewy cwoss’!

Splashy Fenn

As I say, I have not darkened Glasto’s doorstep, although I once did the South African equivalent by going to Splashy Fenn in the Drakensberg. And despite my misgivings of new age bashes, I loved every minute of it.

Among my finer memories are dictating a newspaper piece on behalf of one of my friends, who had scoffed some cookies for breakfast and wasn’t quite sure which planet he was on, let alone which festival.

Then the organiser gave a 10 minute long speech on not using shampoo in the local stream because it messed with a trout’s tiny gills. Every second word was a profanity – yet it was so hilarious that I was weeping, mainly because I don’t think any of the 2 000 people (a lot more go nowadays) there had any shampoo with them.

Then our neighbours in the campsite, all dressed in Carnaby Street top hats and tails, tried to cook some wild hare roadkill they had run over en route. I had a mouthful and the tequila marinade had the same effect as gun powder.

I have no idea of what bands played, but the music was great. One band sounded just like Ladysmith Black Mambazo – in fact it may even have been them. None of us remembered.

The weirdest thing was my girlfriend at the time and I camped out one more night on the grounds after everyone had left. It was ghostly surreal – such quietness and tranquillity after three raucous days that I got a seriously spooked.

I also was a little concerned that marauding gangs may come down from the mountains to sift through all the rubbish left behind and we were the last tent standing.

To say we were sitting ducks is being bland.

However, those hugely fun three days will take a lot of beating, particularly if the alternative is a pretentious bash with 175 000 middle-aged counter-culture elitists.

So ‘Glastonauts’ – put that in your pipe!