My Glastonbury Festival Memories: Chapter 17, 2000

Chapter 17. 2000

A few weeks after the festival in 99 Kim and I were back in Glastonbury for the Extravaganza at the abbey which Michael had organised. He does this every year to thank the local people for their support and the profits help towards the up-keep of the abbey. We stayed at the George & Pilgrim which is just across the High Street from the abbey grounds. It is about 600 years old and originally it was an inn for pilgrims going to the abbey. It is also reputed to be haunted. Our room was brilliant, we even had a four-post bed which Kim thought was great. The concert was the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with guest soloist Evelyn Glennie. We brought along two fold-up chairs and a little table, lots of nice food and a bottle of champagne and had a picnic. Kim was in her element, she liked this sort of thing, she thought it was posh. They even had the local boy scouts there with wheel barrows to carry your stuff to where you wanted to sit. I spotted Michael Eavis as soon as we arrived, and I wanted to go over and thank him for the tickets. Kim refused though because he was talking to people, and she didn’t like to bother him. On the Pimm’s stall who should be serving? none other than Arabella Churchill, Sir Winston’s grand-daughter. We had a bit of a chat with her. What a nice lady she was. Along with Michael, Jean & Emily I think she was one of the main reasons for the success of Glastonbury with her founding Children’s World which evolved into the Kidz Field, also her developing the theatre & cabaret side of the festival.

The concert was fabulous. This was the only time in my life that I ever saw a world-renowned classical orchestra. I’m not an expert on this type of music at all but I particularly enjoyed the Karelia Suite by Sibelius from Finlandia. They even had water features shooting up fountains of water in time to the music. The percussionist Evelyn Glennie was wonderful, especially when you realise that she has been profoundly deaf since birth. She doesn’t hear the music, she feels it. A great evening came to an end with a spectacular firework display. Since that night, I have been back to the extravaganza quite a few times, to see Van Morrison there on three occasions, also Robert Plant, George Ezra, Ray Davies and Brian Wilson. If you want a great night out in beautiful historic surroundings, then go to Glastonbury Extravaganza at the abbey.

I’ll always remember Glastonbury 2000 as the year of the brand-new Pyramid Stage, David Bowie and it being the year I got robbed. The weather was glorious when we set off from Westbury in a two-car convoy. Me, Kim and Kim’s niece Lisa in our car and our friends Andy and Alex in their car. Unfortunately, by the time we got as far as Frome we had lost them in the traffic and didn’t find them for another two days. I think this was probably the biggest Glastonbury of all. We will never know the true figure of how many people were there, but I reckon it could have been as many as 250,000. You could tell that by how crowded it was. If you got there late it would have been nearly impossible to find a space to put up a tent. Everyone in the country knew by now how easy it was to get in for nothing and with the good weather as well, people just poured in. That was a huge problem from a health and safety point of view. This was the year of the disaster at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark when nine people were crushed to death in front of the stage. Glastonbury was lucky that the same thing didn’t happen there. I think the biggest danger was when one act finished on a stage and their fans would be leaving and meet other people arriving to see the next band and a human traffic jam would be created which was potentially lethal.

The other major problem facing the festival was the thieving which had got totally out of hand. You could see gangs of robbers going from tent to tent and if a tent was empty they would be in there robbing whatever they could find. They called themselves ‘The Scally’ but they were just scumbags who were ruining it for the vast majority of peace loving honest people. There simply wasn’t enough police and security to cope with it. The police did have one good idea though. They put up lots of bogus tents and quite a few thieves got busted trying to rob ‘police tents’. I always thought it would never happen to me because I was always careful not to leave anything valuable in my tent. In 2000 I got robbed though on the very first night we arrived. If it had happened on the Sunday night, it wouldn’t have been as bad because I would have spent most of my money by then but on the Thursday night I was still pockets a jingle. It was about 1.00 in the morning and I was wandering back to camp from one of the beer tents and these three characters came along shouting, “Four cans of Stella for a fiver”. “That sounds like a good deal”, I thought to myself, “I’ll take them back to camp”. Like an idiot, I got out my wallet and was looking in it for a fiver when in a split-second I was staring at my bare hands. They had snatched my wallet and ran off in three different directions into the crowd. It was pointless giving chase because I didn’t know which one had my wallet and I would never have caught them anyway. I had lost £200 and my credit cards.

I felt like such a fool when I got back to camp and had to announce that I had just been mugged. Luckily there was an on-site bank and next morning I went up there with Kim’s niece Lisa and cancelled my cards and Lisa lent me £100 which was kind of her. Then we went to the Police Headquarters and reported the theft. Not that it did any good. There was a huge queue to report crimes. I think there was 900 reported thefts that year. I bet the real figure was more like 5000 because most people wouldn’t have bothered reporting it. The police asked me for a description of the robbers, but I couldn’t tell them much except I knew where they came from because I recognised the accents, but I know everyone from that area isn’t a thief. It taught me a lesson I can tell you.

Let’s talk about more pleasant things because we still had a great time in 2000 despite that bad experience. It was the year of the brand-new Pyramid Stage. The gleaming silver structure had been christened by Robert Plant when he visited the farm a couple of weeks earlier. He christened it with some of Worthy Farm’s own milk. It was great to see the Pyramid back again and it is the same stage that is used today and makes Glasto recognisable around the world. 2000 was also the first year of The Glade which pumped out dance music among the trees non-stop from Wednesday till Monday morning.

Before I talk about the music I just want to tell you about one funny incident. Me and Kim were walking through the Theatre/ Circus field and we were approached by this dodgy looking geezer. He was wearing check trousers and a nasty coat with a fur collar and he had greasy combed back hair and a little mustache. He reminded me of Private Walker from Dads Army.

“Scuse me mate”, he said, “Would you be interested in buying a car?”

“Not really”, I said, “We’ve got one, where is it?”

“I’ve got loads of them for sale”

“Well, where are they then?”

“Here they are”, and he opened his coat to reveal lots of little dinky cars sewn into the lining of his coat. It was hilarious. He was part of the street theatre that wander about in that area of the site. That is why you don’t need drugs at Glasto because reality is weird enough.

It was a good year musically in 2000. On the Friday night we saw Macy Gray. What I remember most about Macy’s set was that the security allowed two naked people to climb over the barrier and run across the front of the stage. This prompted Macy’s two backing singers to remove their knickers to show solidarity with the nudists. It might have all been part of the act for all I know but it was very funny. Later that night we saw some of Cypress Hill. They are an American hip-hop rap group from California. This isn’t usually my type of music, but I thought they were good. When there was all the furore about Kanye West headlining at Glastonbury a couple of years ago, people were saying that this isn’t suitable music for Glastonbury, but they forget that this type of music was on the Pyramid Stage many years earlier. Don’t forget the success of the dance tents either which played a lot of hip-hop.

The main act I remember on the Saturday was seeing David Gray on the Other Stage. I had discovered his music the previous year at the Fleadh in London and had bought his album White Ladder. The next day Burt Bacharach was supposed to be playing but he pulled out and David played another set on the Pyramid Stage which made him a superstar overnight and White Ladder shot up the album charts. You can always tell who was a big success at Glasto by looking at the charts a week later. People can become world famous overnight. The only band I watched on the Pyramid that day was Ladysmith Black Mambazo. When we were around the campfire that night I was singing the song Homeless which they recorded with Paul Simon, but I changed the song to Hopeless and was leaping over the fire which seemed quite funny at the time. Some of the best fun was around the fire, drinking and telling jokes. When people are really spaced out after partying for days and with sleep deprivation they will laugh at anything, such as, “What do you do if you see a spaceman?” “Park in it man”, and other silly stuff like that. The Pet Shop Boys, Reef, Ocean Colour Scene, Semisonic, Brand New Heavies, Travis and Asian Dub Foundation were also on that day, but I don’t remember any of that. A lot of those bands slipped back into obscurity. I don’t think the Saturday line-up was that great in 2000. One good thing though, that evening we bumped into our friends Andy & Alex who we had lost two days before, so that was good.

Sunday was a lot better musically. Sharon Shannon was on the Pyramid Stage and a bit later it was American country music legend Willie Nelson. I know his importance in the history of music, but I have never been a big fan. He was good, and I recognised quite a few of the songs. I insisted that we leave before the end of his set though because I wanted to see someone whose music I had discovered around that time which was Kate Rusby aka The Barnsley Nightingale who played on the Acoustic Stage. She was great, this was the first time I had seen Kate and I’ve seen her lots of times since. My favourite song of her performance was her version of Iris Dement’s Our Town.

The highlight of the whole festival was David Bowie’s performance. This was his second Glastonbury. The first was in 1971 when he was relatively unknown and now he returned 29 years later as a music legend. It was the second and last time I ever saw him live. The first time was in the mid 70’s when he was the thin white duke and Station To Station was released. He seemed really pleased to be back. I can’t remember all the songs, but I know he began with Wild Is The Wind because one of our friends Alex was a huge fan and was really pleased about that. It was mainly greatest hits set including China Girl, Changes, Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes, Rebel Rebel, Golden Years, Fame, All The Young Dudes, Man Who Sold The World, Station To Station, Starman, Under Pressure, Ziggy Stardust, Heroes, Let’s Dance and many other songs that I can’t remember now.

That brought Glastonbury 2000 to a triumphant end. There was no festival in 2001 and when it returned in 2002 the huge problems of gate-crashers and thieving would finally be addressed.