Britain, summer 2007, and the music-festival season is in full swing. Most of
the nation’s young people have deserted the city centres and headed for
nature, leaving old folk to blow like tumbleweed past boarded-up record
shops and empty fried-chicken outlets.
“The thing we love about festivals is that they represent a true cross section
of society,” bleat the latest converts to the scene at their midweek sea
bass and Sancerre parties.
But hold on a minute. Who are they really, these fabulous festival-going
mentalists? Last weekend, at the most famous festival of them all,
Glastonbury, Style braved mud, loo queues and miniature solar-powered
bicycles to find out exactly what it is that makes the modern festival
funster tick.
Georgia Homeboy
What is that in the corner of the dance field on this cold, damp, grey Monday
morning? Is it a dead sheep? Is it a pile of rubbish? Surely it isn’t a
person? It is a person – Georgia Homeboy, the 42-year-old wunderkind
account director of an important global new-media company.
When Style wakes Georgia from her slumber, she takes a bit of time to get her
head together. “Where am I?” she says, climbing up out of the ditch. “What
time is it? Shit! I was supposed to be at a board meeting three hours ago.”
But Georgia, what of the festival? Did you have a good time? “A good time?”
she says. “You could say so.” Indeed this, Georgia’s 79th Glastonbury, was
the best so far – a grand reunion of the original gang. Let’s just say that
what Georgia, Jack, Charlie, Adam, Fuzzy, Kay and Bean had intended as a
relaxing weekend of good times morphed into a three-night bender of epic
proportions.
Nope – being middle-youthed wasn’t cramping anyone’s style. Wicked moves,
wicked beats, wicked vibe, wicked gear. Together they grinned, swigged Fiji
water and chewed Extra, grinned, rubbed each other’s backs, grinned,
marvelled at the multicoloured lights, grinned and got lost in the beats
like it was Castlemorton all over again. Until Georgia got a bit overwhelmed
and had to go and chill out outside. From where she spotted Jack, baby
strapped tightly to his chest, legging it towards the dance tent as the
first chords of Voodoo Ray kicked in.
But the best thing of all was the bonding. Sitting around the campfire
watching the sunrise, in the shadow of their customised camper vans, they
talked and talked. About the old days travelling in Thailand. About possibly
merging all their new-media companies into one giant one, named simply
Leftism. About whether they really were out of Rizlas.
Most of them were planning to swing by the Big Chill in August. Georgia, who
couldn’t make it, as she would be in Ibiza, vaguely remembered typing a
reminder into her BlackBerry as she’d said her goodbyes. Yes, they’d all do
Sunday lunch. Soon.
Petunia Bryanston-Morely
She’s been putting a brave face on things all weekend, smiling though her
heart was breaking, but when Style finds Petunia Bryanston-Morely nibbling
on a Pieminister minty lamb gourmet pie and asks her how she is, she just
can’t hold it in any more. “To be honest,” she sobs, “it’s been an utter
’mare.”
According to Petunia, it all began with the tepee. She and her husband, David,
had rented one in the organic apple orchard of a farm adjacent to the
festival site, owned by some friends of friends, a couple of ex-QCs. At only
£6,000 for the weekend – including tickets to the festival, Moët on arrival,
real Asian wall hangings and cows mooing gently in the distance – a Karma
tepee had seemed the perfect way of immersing themselves in the Arcadian
trendiness of an English festival while not getting dirty.
And it would have been, had disaster not struck. She and David were just
pulling up at the farm in their Volvo when the ex-QCs emerged from the
farmhouse with worry written all over their faces. They’d just had a call: a
couple of American hedge-funders had heard about the festival from someone
on a superyacht on the Med, and had decided to make a flying visit by
chopper. They’d offered £5,000 above the asking price for the teepee; the
ex-QCs were “terribly sorry”, but they’d had to accept. “I wouldn’t have
minded,” says Petunia, “but it was the second time this year we’d been
gazumped.”
Left completely in the lurch, but reluctant to tell friends at home that they
weren’t, after all, “festivaling it”, the Bryanston-Morelys thanked the
ex-QCs for their offer of a Cath Kidston tent and made off for the public
camping area at the festival site (aka “plebsville”). And of course Petunia
had done wonders with the interior of the tent, creating an English
paradise, with flowers, candles from The White Company and organic food from
Waitrose, that would have impressed her mother and the sort of people who
go to Babington House. And of course she’d coped brilliantly with the
toilets by holding her nose, shutting her eyes and sticking cotton wool in
her ears (not that she’d had the choice, David having unchivalrously gobbled
every last sachet of her emergency supply of Imodium to avoid having to use
them at all). She’d put up with the people in odd outfits. And the hippies.
And the horrid chips. Even when she’d spotted her perfidious ex-boyfriend
Albion romping naked in the Healing Field with his pretty, 22-year-old
trustafarian wife, she’d kept her brave little chin up.
No, the event that finally finished her off, made her swear never to set foot
in another festival ever again in her whole life, was one of those things
that probably seems quite small to some people, but was actually rather
important to her. Sometime on Sunday afternoon, while listening to Shirley
Bassey and, for the first time, actually enjoying herself, someone slipped
into the tent and stole her Daylesford Organic geranium and neroli hand wash
– and for that, everyone would be very, very sorry.
Brenda D’list
“Are you press?” asks Brenda, a blonde Chantelle Houghton lookalike Style
bumps into while trawling the backstage area for Kate Moss. “Because if you
are, you’ve come to the right place.”
Ever since Brenda got into the last eight of one of Britain’s most successful
reality-telly shows, she’s known that the next step on the road to
fashion-icon status was to be photographed by paparazzi at a music festival.
She was cock-a-hoop when a well-known toothpaste company invited her and a
clutch of other young celebs to the world’s most prestigious one.
Less pleased when she saw Rachel Stevens in the same high-waisted denim
shorts, especially considering how meticulously she’d planned her festival
wardrobe. “I like a retro style,” she says. “Retro rock’n’roll hippie.”
Privately, she knew her thighs were hotter (and younger) than Rachel’s.
The shorts worked best with her new Topshop gold-plated flip-flops, so it was
sad when they were lost to the mud almost as soon as she stepped out of the
chauffered car. The Stop Climate Chaos posters plastered everywhere were
obviously just wishful thinking on behalf of the organisers. “If they’d just
been honest about it, I’d definitely have worn my limited-edition fur-lined
Hunter-wellies look instead,” she sighs, texting the press liaison person to
complain. They shouldn’t get people’s hopes up.
Oh, well, at least all the celebs were in the mud together. Brenda had been
looking forward to being with her own kind backstage for weeks. So much so
that when someone suggested going out into the actual festival, she had a
mini-paranoia attack. For a start, she hadn’t spotted Sienna yet, and what
if she missed her? Also, the electrics in her Winnebago were on the blink
and she hadn’t straightened her hair.
By Saturday afternoon, Sienna still hadn’t turned up, but the latter problem
was resolved: a roadie called Jimi Hendrix let her plug her tongs into the
Pyramid Stage lighting rig in return for a snog.
It wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. She knew that the big thing right now
was a bad-boy indie-rocker boyfriend/fiancé. She fancied the lead singer of
the Fratellis. He was hot, and it was love at first sight, literally. Then
she got very drunk on Somerset cider and spent the rest of the night
vomiting into her faux Louis Vuitton laundry bag, citing “exhaustion”.
Marks out of 10 for the festival so far, Brenda? “If I’m honest, I’ve been a
bit disappointed by the lack of press coverage,” she says. True, apart from
the person who took a picture of her with their mobile (that Brenda made
them swear to text directly to Heat mag), both the paparazzi and civilians
seem more interested in having a good time than in rubbernecking . Weirdos.
Kayley the psycho fairy
Style’s had a tip-off that the person to talk to about all things esoteric is
someone called Kayley. A man in a pixie hat, who has lost his trousers,
points towards a yurt in the corner of the field. But where is she? There is
nobody inside the yurt. She has vanished.
“Peekaboo!” says Kayley, the Fairy Queen, popping up out of a giant
papier-mâché toadstool and blowing bubbles straight in Style’s eye with a
giant green bubble gun.
By the sound of it, Kayley has spent most of this weekend talking to the
woodland spirits in the Other Dimension. The toadstool is a portal into it.
She and some local schoolchildren built it together on Friday using recycled
Tesco delivery boxes. After the craft-making session, in which they’d also
done some basket-weaving, all the children had sat in a circle as she’d told
them tales of the ancients.
At 37, Kayley finds it easy to relate to children, because she is one. Growing
up in sight of Glastonbury Tor (well, a picture of it on her bedroom wall),
she never went to school, and when she was nine, she joined a peace convoy.
“It were the school of life,”she says in her gentle Bristol burr, recalling
1985’s Battle of the Beanfield, the year she first grew armpit hair. “It
were mad, like.”
Boing! Boing! Boing! As if on cue, who should bounce up in a medieval pink
rabbit outfit, but Merlin, Kayley’s great friend from back in the day, a
vegan anarcho-punk, animal rights-supporting, anticapitalist, feminist,
working-class hero and notorious billionaire Hackney landlord? Merlin
wonders if Kayley will “lend him a fiver”. Kayley shakes her bunches
angrily. “No, mate, not this time. I’ve got some crystals to buy, and
anyway, you still owe me a tenner from 1992.” Deflated, Merlin mutters
something unrepeatable to Kayley and shuffles off.
Unfortunately, the contretemps with Merlin couldn’t have come at a worse
moment. It is day 25 of Kayley’s psychedelic trip, and the relentless
fire-bombing of her brain is finally starting to play games with her grip on
reality. Sure, she had a good time at Sunday’s sunrise, when she got a
cuddle off a gnome she sort of remembers sleeping with at a squat party in
Berlin in 1989. And, later on, she and Acid Mike threw some great pagan
butterfly moves.
But now – now is different. Kayley is regaling me with her favourite
recipe for dandelion and cow-parsley soup when she gets a strange look in
her eye, picks up her wand and breaks into a fast sprint across the field.
The last time Style sees her, she is 100ft up in the branches of an old oak
tree, shouting terrible jokes at the assembled crowd using a megaphone she
has fashioned out of old crisp packets. Everyone else might be starting to
think about making their way home, but it’s clear Kayley isn’t going
anywhere for a while.
