Here they come, up hill and down dale. The hippies, stoners, ravers, ecos and new agers, traipsing through the Vale of Avalon on their way to the biggest date in the counter-cultural calendar. They're here to pay their respect, continue the tradition and participate in one of the few remaining radical events in an arts and entertainment world blanded out by PR press releases, corporate boxes and VIP guest lists.
Recent archaeological digs have revealed that midsummer festivals have been held in Glastonbury since 500 BC (those veggie burgers and Rizla papers were a dead giveaway) and this year's record attendance of 150,000 celebrants suggests that the beat - and indeed the shamanic journeying - goes on. It could be that it's just a mix of the Islington dinner party set slumming it for the weekend, ageing punk rockers pretending there's a battle still to be fought, and eco warriors trying to stir things up anew. However, you sure don't get that feeling at 5 a.m. on Saturday when you're standing in the Sacred Space, looking down on the largest greenfield festival in the world, being vibed out by an Avalon dawn and taking in this huge tented city spread over 800 acres, with the words of a nearby crustie echoing around your Scrumpyaddled head: "Wouldn't it be great if it could be like this all the time?"
It's been like this since 1971 when the first "Glastonbury Festival of the Performing Arts" opened its fields in 1971. In a timely new book, Glastonbury: A Very English Fair, author George McKay pinpoints Glasto's place in festival culture, writing that "it's about idealism, anarchy, being young, getting old disgracefully, trying to find other ways, getting out of it, hearing some great and some truly awful music."
The key features of festival culture for McKay are a youthful audience, open-air performances, popular music, the development of a lifestyle, camping, local opposition, police distrust and even the odd rural riot. For today's kidz it might seem quaint for McKay to elaborate on "the importance of post-1960s festivals to ongoing radical protest" or even "to position festival culture within a political praxis and discourse". These notions belong somewhere between their mothers' warped Joni Mitchell records and their fathers' old "Ban the Bomb" poster, but even the most apolitical dot.com-share-holding, Nokia-wielding adolescent who thinks Revolution is a song used as the soundtrack for a Nike ad, would find common currency in McKay's finding that festival culture is "a politics which admits pleasure, pop and rock music, temporary community, landscape, nature, promiscuity and narcotic".
Pivotal to Glasto's charm and longevity, and totally out of step with most every other beer/ trendy magazine/financial package-sponsored festivals, are the various political campaigns it has promoted and endorsed since 1971. From CND to Greenpeace, to Oxfam and Water Aid, it prides itself on having an "ethos" and a "conscience". Rather anachronistically, it is a non-profit-making exercise, and this year almost £1 million will be raised for the causes it holds close to its hippy heart.
Although state-of-the-art dance, hip-hop, rock and indie bands are always the mainstay of the musical programming policy, Glasto still feels like a folk festival - even if you're sitting in a field listening to a bunch of gangsta rappers on stage singing about drive-by shootings in downtown Harlem. The folk connection is fitting, as that genre has always been an arena of political engagement (in the 1950s, folk and the communist groupings were mutually consenting bed partners), and Glasto proudly admits to modelling itself on the Sidmout, Devon Folk Festival and the manner in which festival, music and radical politics coalesced in the folk field.
These links have been strongly maintained with "rave" culture, which Glastonbury embraced in the early days. Whether it was crusties, suburban ravers or Eheads, acid house became the new folk, and if the political message was blurred somewhat by the amount of chemically-induced faux-pagan spirituality, it was still a receptacle for the radical, out-on-the-fringes type of movements which are usually dismissed as being a mere blip on the electoral radar.
The warehouse parties, the underground raves and their attendant levels of activism, not least against the Criminal Justice Bill (which outlawed "the performance of repetitive beats played to more than two people") all helped explode the myth of Thatcher's children being depoliticised and emasculated. And while guitars and drum kits still outnumber DJs and sound systems, it won't be for long. After all, disaffected youth will turn quicker to the Clash-style polemic of Asian Dub Foundation than to the radio-friendly warblings of Travis. The anarchic energy of the original free festivals can be felt again in the actions of the heroic Reclaim The Streets movement, which has tied together the energy of the rave scene and the cheek of the direct action road protest movement of the early 1990s. Or, in Reclaim The Streets' own words: "the great revolutionary movements have all been enormous popular festivals. A festival celebrates temporary liberation from the established order, it marks the suspension of all hierarchy, rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Crowds of people seized by a sudden awareness of their power and unification through a celebration of their own ideas and creations . . . "
WHERE all this leaves Vincent Bethell is debatable. Bethell's Protest Naked campaign made the front pages of the internal Glastonbury Festival press this year. His one-man campaign to "legalise peaceful, non-sexual public nudity" by walking around naked carrying a sign saying "Self Aware" is probably not the sort of political praxis envisaged by the original festival dissenters but hey, it gave everyone a laugh and prompted a few less-than-earnest debates about the state of today's political radicalism.
Further laughs were to be had by event organiser and owner of the farm, Micheal Eavis telling Brit art icon Damien Hirst to "get your eyes off my cows" and Justine Frischmann from Elastica telling her audience to turn their backs to the band and instead gaze out at the beautiful Somerset scenery. Which we did.
Musically, the weekend's surprise guest, Macy Gray, lifted the crowd higher, while The Chemical Brothers completed their transformation from underground dance act to mainstream favourites, thanks to their showstopping headlining appearance on the Pyramid Stage on the Friday night. Moby, Fatboy Slim and Leftfield all kept the dance flag waving high, while the arch English humour of the Pet Shop Boys kept everyone stocked up on good vibes on the Saturday. This year, the Acoustic Stage might well have been re-named the Irish Stage, featuring as it did, in the course of one day, performances by Leslie Dowdall, Sharon Shannon, Paul Brady and the Hothouse Flowers. And hats off to Jack Lukeman (Jack L) who made festival history - no mean feat - by being the only act ever asked to play three different times over the weekend.
Throw in the biggest open air cinema in the world, more theatre and performance art events than are probably good for a person, astonishing live sets from Hank Williams III and Asian Dub Foundation, solar-powered showers (hurrah!) and the sort of instant karma that you can only get from standing directly on a ley-line listening to Leftfield, and you're talking about magnificence in the real sense of the word.
Glastonbury is the town, the well, the Thor, the claims and legends, the "thinning of the veil", and most of all, the unofficial festival motto: "You're never too old for a happy childhood". In a time of focus groups, contrived consensual politics and the medium being more important than the message, festival culture is the last chance saloon for radical political action. Rave on Glastonbury, rave on.
