Episode Two

NOW – 3/4/06

It’s hard to gather together some decent recollections of a hot summer weekend in the mid-1990’s on a dark night somewhere on the edge of spring a decade and more later. It’s not hard to look at the photographs, listen to the music, or read the diary entries of the time – and I’m pretty much doing all three of those things right now – but it is difficult to capture the ambience, the feelings, the vibe, if you forgive such an out-dated expression. But damn it, I’m going to try.

This is the story of the Glastonbury Festival in the distant year of 1995, or to be more accurate, the story of what happened when my friends and I went to the Glastonbury Festival in the distant year of 1995.

THEN – 21/06/95 onwards…

Wednesday

Because of work commitments, and a hay-fever inoculation jab, Steve wasn’t making the trip to the festival until the following day. Kate was travelling with him, although it is lost to time whether this was due to it being her last day at Burleigh Community College, or simply because she wanted to travel with her boyfriend, or for some other reason entirely. Suffice to say, it was just after eleven in the morning that Alex arrived at 19 Burton Street to pick me up, and that it was at half past the hour that he and I departed Loughborough for Glastonbury in his blue Austin Metro, a vehicle nicknamed the Nugget-mobile in some kind of affectionate tribute to our mutual fruit machine habit - “nuggets” being slang for the pound coins we copiously invested to little return in the one-armed bandits.

In the true spirit of the era, we hadn’t really taken the time to plan a route, or check a map in detail to make sure we knew which way to go. Instead, we had a rough idea of the direction in which to head, a vague notion of which roads to take, and a confidence in ourselves to get the better of the geography of the south of England and find our way simply by using a Great Britain road atlas, and by following the odd road sign and our own instincts. Inevitably, this was our first mistake. Our second was not knowing what the following light meant when it suddenly lit up on the Nugget-mobile’s dashboard.

I can’t remember exactly where we were on our journey when this light started to flicker on, then off, then on again, then off, and then on for a longer period, then off, and then… on permanently. I think I’d already had a couple of cans of lager to get into the festival mood – I had a supply kicking around in the passenger foot-well, of all places - and was all for not worrying about it lest it delay our journey. However, Alex, as he was driving, and because it was his car, was rightly concerned about the light, and what it may mean, so eventually I capitulated to his requests to dig out the car’s handbook from the glove compartment. I think we were somewhere on the M5 when I finally found out that it meant that either the car’s brake pads were fucked, or that we were perilously close to running out of brake fluid. Either way, it was a situation that needed remedying as quickly as possible, and in a mild state of automotive panic, we headed off the motorway for the nearest place that we knew must have a garage, somewhere – and that place was Cheltenham.

Locating a service station on the outskirts, or possibly, knowing us, somewhere in the middle, of this pleasant Cotswolds town proved none too difficult, but after we’d pulled up on the forecourt of this faceless outlet of Shell, or BP, or Mobil, or whatever it was, locating the brake fluid tank underneath the car’s bonnet was another thing entirely, despite the engine diagram in the trusty Metro handbook. When we’d found something that seemed to be what we were looking for, I trekked into the garage’s shop to find the fluid in question. Unfortunately, the handbook insisted we use a certain type, or brand, of brake fluid, I’m not entirely sure now which, but I do know that it was conspicuous on the shelves of the shop by its absence. However, there were several plastic bottles containing some kind of brake fluid, and I reasoned that one kind of brake fluid was pretty much the same as another. Such highly flawed logic from somebody who had had precisely X driving lessons and possessed no mechanical knowledge whatsoever was probably not the best to follow. But we did anyway.

Fortunately, when Alex started the engine, nothing blew up, the brake fluid indicator light stayed off, and our journey to Glastonbury resumed. However, our rejuvenated optimism was shortly to take another blow as we realised we were trapped in the one-way-system from hell that is – or was – Cheltenham. For what seemed like hours, we drove round and round trying to get back onto the M5, which would, the road atlas told us, take us to the M4, and somewhere near Bristol, and then south to Shepton Mallet, Pilton, and the Glastonbury Festival itself. I don’t know why it was so difficult, but it sure as bloody hell was, and it was well into the latter part of the afternoon, and after a catalogue of missed exits, and missed entrances, on motorways, A roads, B roads, and country lanes, that we found ourselves in the long queue of cars trying to get onto the festival site. It was hot, sticky, and the Nugget-mobile’s tired engine was stretched to breaking point by the snail-like pace of the traffic as we crawled down to one of the vehicle entrances. Eventually, after at least one eternity had passed, we were driving over dry mud and grass in what looked like the world’s biggest countryside car lot, and, after another eternity had come and gone, we found a place to park. We then had to get our bags, sleeping bags, tent, consumables, and my battered old acoustic guitar, into the camping arena. Perhaps mindful of the likelihood that such important things as house and car keys could easily be lost amid dancing, drugs, and drinking, particularly when all three were combined, I suggested leaving everything except the Nugget-mobile’s spare ignition key in the car itself. Although it seems strange now, these were still the days where cars of a certain age had separate keys for the doors, and the ignition, and although leaving the actual door key in the car seems ridiculous, there was method in this particular brand of my madness.

At some point in the recent past, Alex had been out driving and ended up at one of our favoured occasional night-time destinations, Leicester Forest East, a service station just south of the Loughborough junction on the M1. Unfortunately, he left his keys in the ignition, slammed the door and only realised his folly when, from the café on the bridge over the motorway, noticed his lights were still on. Arriving back at the Metro, he couldn’t find his keys in his pocket, and looking through the driver’s window, spotted them dangling from the ignition – door key and all. A frantic phone call to his house saw everyone looking through drawers to find a spare door key… to no avail. However, the search wasn’t entirely fruitless, as a spare ignition key turned up and with some vain hope in our minds, Steve and I drove out to Leicester Forest East hoping that it could be of some help. And you know what? It was. When we got there, and with the use of some latent Grand Theft Auto powers, I found that I could open the boot with the ignition key, and after a clamber over the seats, the day was saved. Shortly afterwards, I found that not only was the boot accessible with it, but so were the passenger doors, and although it was to be six months before I was legally able to drive the Nugget-mobile, I kept the spare ignition key on my key-ring from that day onwards. Just in case of accidents.

I stashed my key-ring, and Alex’s, in the passenger door compartment of the Metro, and attached the spare ignition key to one of the lace-holes of my Doc Marten’s. The car was secure, and we ferried our stuff into the camping area, where we encountered some friends from Loughborough, and from school – Vicci, Eddie, Danny, Luke and his girlfriend Charlotte. They were attending with another former school colleague, Simon, who was the son of one of the vice-principals back at Burleigh, and someone who at best could be described as an acquaintance, although I think we used a slightly different description at the time. But that’s not important anymore – what strikes me now as amazing is how we met them, and all the other people we met that we knew at Glastonbury that year, amid the seventy-odd thousand people. We knew they’d be there, but we had no idea exactly where to find them. Nowadays, it would be easy-peasy – you’d just phone or text whoever you knew was going, and arrange to meet them somewhere. But this was in the pre-cellular era, or to be more precise, in the early dawn of the cellular era, where you might know somebody who had a mobile phone – and a big, chunky brick of a mobile phone at that – but you certainly didn’t own one yourself. A company called Orange existed, and provided pay-phones at a certain area of the festival that year for people to call home, a facility I believe that was making its debut at the 1995 festival, but the company name certainly wasn’t as commonplace as it is now. The mobile phone was still very much a thing of the future back then, and meetings weren’t arranged by a call or a text message. Somehow, they just happened.

Alex and I erected our tent – not without a great deal of time and effort - and stashed our gear inside it. Vicci, Eddie, and the others had half set theirs up when the aforementioned Simon Bos appeared, and said he had found a better site elsewhere, and suggested that everyone up-sticks and move there. The others decided to move, but Alex and I – possibly because we couldn’t really be arsed to take the tent down having spent so long getting it up in the first place, or possibly because we found the dubious charms of Simon, the deputy head teacher’s son, highly resistible – decided against it and said we were staying put. We just let the evening roll across us, as we lay on the grass drinking beer, while the others packed up their stuff, and disappeared off to wherever Simon had set up camp. We said we’d see them later, but as it turned out, we didn’t see them again until we got back home. Considering what was to happen to us over the next couple of days, it would have been far more advisable to go with them, for reasons of personal safety, and the safety of our stuff – but hindsight’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Thursday

I don’t know exactly what Alex and I spent the majority of our first full day at Glastonbury doing. I suspect we slept in until some ridiculous time after going to bed late the night before. I do know that in the afternoon I was offered some amyl nitrate by a dreadlocked gentleman as we wandered around the vast expanse of the site. For a number of years, I’d had a sneaking affinity for the small bottles of “liquid gold” and the effect their contents had on me. The seller, as was customary in these situations, advised me under no circumstances to inhale directly from the bottle. I customarily concurred that I would of course do no such thing. Formalities out of the way, money changed hands and I was in possession of some “poppers”, from which I proceeded to enjoy some brief bursts of accelerated heart rate, the rushing of blood to the head, and a feeling of warmth and dizziness several times over the next couple of days.

Less successful in its mood-altering capabilities was a pill that I purchased off a bloke who came past our tent as we sat outside it later on in the day, claiming to have pills, acid, whiz, and anything else we may or may not desire. Despite having never touched amphetamines, E, or hallucinogenics before, I was gripped by the festival spirit and the want, or need, to have a full Glasto experience – I wanted, to use a quaint old expression, to blow my mind. I asked the man for a “trip” – LSD – and in exchange for a fiver, he gave me some small pill, which a few minutes later I dutifully popped. Full of expectation and excitement, and with the thoughts of Jim Morrison’s first experiments with acid whilst sitting on a rooftop in Venice back in 1965 in my head, I lay back on the grass in the July Somerset sunshine, and waited for something to happen.

Eleven years later, and I’m still waiting.

Acid? Possibly an antacid for indigestion. Or a paracetamol. Or just some crushed up soap powder. Whatever it was, it wasn’t narcotic in any way whatsoever, unless my body is so powerful it just rejected whatever was in the pill that was trying to fuck up my sensory perception. I doubt that this last explanation is the correct one, though – I suspect that I was one amongst the many million gullible idiots down the years who have bought a dud and waited forever for it to have some effect, whilst the dealers laugh at the naivety of such people and count their profits. It was a lesson learned, I suppose, but I was pissed off to high heaven for a while.

Meanwhile, back in Loughborough, Steve had been having a hectic morning getting his tent, and his and Kate’s gear loaded into his van, and getting himself an inoculation against the annual unpleasantness of hay fever. Finally, he and Kate set off at half past three, with the intention of meeting Alex and I in front of the Pyramid stage at six o’clock. Although they didn’t suffer the same brake fluid trauma that we had experienced, and subsequently didn’t get lost driving around the suburbs of Cheltenham, they did however find themselves in a similar sort of traffic jam in the winding lanes that lead up to the festival entrance. Arriving at quarter past seven, they didn’t actually get the van parked for a further ninety minutes, by which time me and Alex had started to wonder a little as to their whereabouts. Thanks to the already detailed Orange payphones, I called home and spoke to Beth, who said that she hadn’t seen Steve, nor knew where he was. She left him a note on a piece of cardboard saying I’d called, which sadly he didn’t get until we got back home a few days later. As a brief aside, the message also mentioned that our rugby playing student flat-mate from Wigan Tony Heaton had moved out, taking his pornographic playing cards, his facial injuries, and the mystery of the girl whom he claimed was his “sister”, with him. I don’t know if there’ll ever be a time or a place to tell the full story of Tony, and the extent of his bizarre behaviour and lifestyle, but I hope there is. Alas, it isn’t here.

By the time I made this phone call, we’d already learned through signs posted on many stalls that John Major had resigned as Prime Minister and had celebrated the collapse of the hated Conservative government, even though in reality he had done nothing of the kind. We had looked for Anna, Kate’s best friend, and a girl whom Alex had fancied for a long time - somebody whom I had fancied for a long time the previous year – but we never saw her. I was convinced we’d bump into her at any moment, simply because this was Glastonbury and this was how it was supposed to happen, but we didn’t. However, we did meet my ex-girlfriend Jessica by the Pyramid stage, but conversation was awkward and stilted. This was probably partly because of the typically rubbish nature of the way I’d broken up with her, but it was equally due to the fact that she seemed a little bit “relaxed” in one way or another, and she soon drifted off into the distance. Apart from when she appeared as one of the contestants on the Channel 4 television series, “Shipwrecked”, in the year 2001, I haven’t seen her since. We’d also bumped into Rachel, another friend from back home whom I’d had a crush on, on and off, since the previous year. We’d even been on a coffee date several months earlier… or at least, I had. I sat waiting for her for ages in the Coffee Pot, Loughborough’s finest café, with the initial excitement anticipation gradually turning into wonder, worry, and finally bitter disappointment when Liz and her friend Anthony came in, to tell me that Rach had called our house in Burton Street to say she couldn’t make it. If there was ever a time to retrospectively lament the non-advance in cellular phone technology back in the mid-nineties, this is it. One text could have saved ages of waiting, worrying, and woe.

Similarly, the mobile phone would have been advantageous in tracking down Steve and Kate as we waited for them, but eventually, at about ten o’clock, with the day’s hot sunshine having all but faded into a warm summer’s night, the four of us were re-united in front of the Pyramid stage. There was a slight ache amongst us that Kim, the fifth member of our little quintet, wasn’t there with us, but there was a great feeling of warmth that was part relief, part joy, but mainly simple happiness that we’d made it to Glastonbury, the team was together again, and we were ready for a fantastic weekend. And it nearly happened.

Friday

…was even hotter than Thursday had been, and this was only partly due to the blazing sunshine. All of us were getting hot under the collar at the prospect of seeing Oasis headline on the Pyramid stage, and the whole day was geared up towards this unmatchable climax. Since the Stone Roses had pulled out due to John Squire breaking his arm a couple of weeks previously in a biking accident in America – and didn’t we curse the careless tosser to high heaven for denying us the opportunity of seeing the Roses in action? – Oasis were the band that we most wanted to see, the band that had soundtracked our lives since “Supersonic” had come out the previous summer, the band whose songs we learned to sing and play along to, the band that seemed to sum up all of our other favourite artists and distil them into one sprawling, brawling mass of emotion, energy, and pure bloody rock ‘n’ roll. It seems trite now, now that the Gallaghers have become a music cliché, two outdated rock dinosaurs still trading on their glorious past through a series of albums that really don’t bear comparison with the first two, still leading a band that apart from their presence bears no resemblance to their heyday, except through songs that are pale rehashes of past glories. But back in 1995, with their long drawn-out fall from grace yet to happen, Oasis were the best thing on the planet – for us, and for thousands of other people too. And we were going to see them play! It certainly wasn’t trite or meaningless back then. This was something indescribably special.

I don’t remember much of what happened before 9pm, when Oasis finally arrived onstage. I know that once again we had expected to meet Anna, but we didn’t. I know that we tried to keep ourselves cool in the barely tolerable heat, and we played some guitar, and we smoked some cigarettes, and I twatted around with my camera and infused myself with amyl nitrate on the grass by mine and Alex’s tent, and Kate and Steve’s tent, which they had, as one might expect, erected right next to ours. We may even have been to see some other bands, but I can’t really remember. Good as they may well have been, they were but sideshows in the light of the main event of the day, and as evening slowly began to fall, we made our way to the Pyramid stage to experience a bit of what we hoped and dreamed and believed would be a moment of history, both in the world of popular music, and in our own lives.

Steve and I decided that we wanted to get as close to the front as possible. Alex and Kate decided they’d come a little way into the crowd, but didn’t fancy getting crushed in the mosh-pit that was inevitably going to form as soon as the band started playing, so they hung back and we said we’d see them later. We forced our way through the crowd which was, with no exaggeration at all, electric with anticipation. It was the first time I can remember experiencing such a feeling and realising that it wasn’t a meaningless cliché to describe a group of people in such a way. I looked around and saw it in everyone’s faces, in the people in front, behind, and to either side of us. I looked right, I looked left, and… there was Anna, almost right next to me. I shouted out, and she looked round, and we pushed our way through to her and she and Steve and I exchanged hugs and screams of shock and excitement. It was uncanny, almost spooky, to finally meet her at this of all moments, but it seemed completely perfect, utterly right, for it to happen then.

Then the lights dimmed, and the band came onstage. And the world changed. For a little while.

History tells us that Oasis were crap that night. They were stilted, sloppy, and they played too many new songs, Liam wanted to fight Noel, the audience, and quite possibly himself. Robbie Williams invaded the stage and made a twat of himself. It wasn’t the perfect moment, the apotheosis of their unstoppable ascent to what John Lennon referred to, albeit sarcastically, as “the topper-most of the popper-most”. It was desperately average. Not for the first time, history is telling us a lie. Maybe, just maybe, analysed in the cold light of day, listening to tapes or watching a video of the band that night, the show could be described by the most clinical musicologist as “crap”. But tell that to the thousands of people who were actually there, and they’d all rebuff the accusations of mediocrity levelled at Oasis’ performance as being a complete load of shit. Because for that moment, for that hour or whatever it was, they were fucking brilliant. The energy, the excitement, the thrill that we all felt coursing through every Oasis song that we’d heard on CD or record or the radio was there in spades, and from the first note of “The Swamp Song”, an instrumental, a new instrumental, and what that musicologist listening the next day would probably say was a crap instrumental, the crowd went absolutely mental, and it stayed that way until the set ended. Steve and I were thrust forward and for a few moments were probably within five rows of the barrier at the very front of the crowd. We were lost in the music, lost in the moment, and it didn’t matter. We lost Anna, and didn’t see her again until the end. Carried on a wave of sound and sweat-drenched bodies, Oasis took us over and we were part of some vast communal entity that comprised love and music, adrenalin and hope. It was an hour or so that seemed both endless, and impossibly brief. But immeasurably memorable.

Meanwhile, some way off, Anna had slipped out of the sea of people in the intense throng at the front, and met up with Kate and Alex. Despite his enjoyment of the music, and the experience, Alex had been standing up for a long time and was in quite a bit of pain from his arthritis, and thus decided to head back to our tent to sit down, and chill out.

Oasis finished their set, the lights came up, and the crowd gradually came back to reality, and slowly began to disperse. Sweaty, knackered, but elated, Steve and I wandered back to where we’d left Kate, and along with Anna, we ambled through the stalls, the other music tents, and the hundreds upon hundreds of people, back in the general direction of the camping area, and our own tents. When we got back, it took precisely one sentence from Alex, who was sat in our tent, white as a sheet and shaking, to make our feelings of euphoria and joy evaporate completely into the darkness:

“I’ve been mugged.”



To be continued…