Glastonbury Tories
Andrew Brown
So many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Under the marijuana fog of a summer evening a crowd flowed through an African city of tents and stalls erected on a Somerset hillside. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes upon his feet, shuffling among the beer cans and squashed wax paper cups, trying to avoid the cowpats. In the steep valley below a line of pylons stood a shining grey pyramid erected above the stage, and flanked by two walls of 64 loudspeakers. A record was playing, very loud indeed; it finished as I passed the CND tent, and canned applause broke out. Then I saw arms waving in front of the stage, and realised the music was, as they say, live.
It was the Glastonbury CND festival, a three-day celebration of drugs, music, and chemical toilets, and the biggest single fundraiser of that organisation for the past three years. The choice of musicians Joan Baez, Fairport Convention, the Band — suggested an enjoyably reactionary weekend, but as I hurried through the rain downhill towards the stage, I was charmed to hear what appeared to be a Scottish folk song about transvestism: 'I know he's a Lassie, Aye'. This chorus, constantly repeated, eventually resolved itself into a less intelligible Rasta chant — 'I know he's Selassie, I'. The music paid careful obeisance to tradition: the guitarist, a black Jamaican, was playing lines that white Englishmen had learned from black Americans, and which must now be taken as the last word in Caribbean authenticity.
`Is everyone against nuclear war?' in- quires the singer. A damp murmur rises from the audience. 'Let me hear you say "Yeah".' After three shots at this — the rain is pouring down — he gives up and shouts `Rastafari' with the exact intonation of the late Bob Marley. The audience seem more animated to hear something they recognise from a record that most of them must own; the band starts up again: 'Guess who's coming to dinner? Natty Dreadlocks!' (repeated endlessly).
Only when the singer doffed his two- storey leather hat to release dreadlocks that hung down to the bottom of his ribcage did "Young Fogeys" I call them!' really heartfelt applause break out. The wild man from Jamaica was what the au- dience had come to see. Realising this, he stopped dancing, and embarked instead on a sort of Duke of Edinburgh stalk around the stage, with his hands clasped behind his back, and his body bent forwards from the waist, waving his locks gently while the rhythm section played on and the guitarist drained a can of beer.
From the market area on the hill above it was easier to appreciate the extraordinary conservatism of these people, and their refusal to see or hear anything that they were not expecting. One badge on sale showed 'Fat Freddy', a popular cartoon hippy mumbling — he could only ever mumble — 'F._ the Eighties, let's go back to the Sixties.' These people were not merely reactionary, but Tories: a whiggish examination of their own society would have seemed foolish blasphemy to them: they were quite prepared to live — and die — by its organic laws.
Before reaching the festival, I had walked round the town of Glastonbury, where I had not been for 12 or 13 years. My memories of the town had the hideous graphic banality induced by dangerous drugs; they were neither happy nor topographically accurate. But at length I found the building which had once housed a commune where a friend of mine had been engaged in the manufacture of a sort of geodesic dome that was going to revolu- tionise the world. The building was now a British Legion club, the windows filled with Army recruiting posters. It was hard to im- agine and harder to forget the staircase within, down which I had once helped to carry a dying hippy.
He had been caught without shelter one cold night, and tried to clamber into a con- crete, deserted pigsty for shelter. Weakened by malnutrition he had fallen from the wall and broken his leg. He lay there, unable to get out, for three days, until discovered. The leg was mended in hospital, but he was released with galloping TB, and lay in an attic room at the commune until he was too weak to walk. So I carried his feet down the stairs, while a Glaswegian girl who thought she was both a social worker and a witch carried his shoulders; but all I clearly remember was his foetid, choking breath. He died some weeks later, in hospital.
That happened — I think — in the year of the first Glastonbury festival, then known as the Fayre; and considerable in- telligence and experience has been applied to ensure that such things won't happen any more. Though the bookshops in Glaston- bury still sell the most extraordinary rub- bish — The Spear of Destiny: 'The Occult
power behind the spear which pierced the side of Christ... and how Hitler inverted the force in a bid to conquer the world' they prosper on it, and in the shop where I found that book, closed circuit TV was used to catch shoplifters.
The same sort of thought and organisa- tion was apparent at the festival itself: 30,000 people paying £15 each will pay for quite a lot of good ideas. There were 100 doctors, nurses and welfare workers to pro- vide an emergency service. I was told that they mostly dealt with sprains and cuts; but I saw one quite obvious casualty of psychedelic drugs (those are pearls that were his eyes) being led from the shelter with heavily bandaged wrists, hugged and encouraged by one of the staff. But con- sidering the opportunities for disaster, one casualty among 30,000 seems a very respec- table score indeed. This was hardly the sort of crazed and squalid bacchanalia enacted every year at Stonehenge. There were many children there, and all 1 saw were thriving.
Late in the night, Ian Drury came on to play. You'd have thought that five years after the song had come out, the audience might have learnt at least the chorus to `Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll' — that's it: but when he tried to get them to sing along, they could hardly even raise a noise on `drugs'. Ah well, Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.
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