From: flipper@zion.idiscover.co.uk (Fingers McPhee)
Newsgroups: uk.music.rave
Subject: Things that make you go *splot*.. Glasters 97.
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 1997 23:40:00 GMT

Glastonbury '97 was MASH on acid. Tents, camo, casualties and a lot of
laughter. It was doing things for other people. It was an examination
of plur under trickier out-of-club and out-of-head circumstances which
I'm not at all certain I passed. It was a painful slog. It was a real
blast. It was a Damn Strange Thing.

For, Lo, on the first day the heavens did open and giveth forth their
fruit, and it did rain one day and one night and the seas did rise and
the earth was covered in mud, even unto the hills. And the people did
get royally munted and thus they spake: "Fuck it." 

It seemed that things quickly turned into a munting mission. One guy I
ran into was looking for Fly Agaric mushrooms for sale. "Doesn't that
make you chuck buckets?" I asked. 

"Yeah, but it gets you *really* fucked up," he replied with an insane
giggle.

But UMR was beyond the grossness of "getting fucked up." Instead,
people got bombed, blitzed, munted back into the stone age, trashed,
trollyed, out of their gourds, wrecked, scuttled, utterly whacked,
blasted, blown, ruined, rammed, smeared, plowed under, hammered,
discorporated, flayed, obliterated, unhinged, scuttled, done in, sunk,
smashed, hopped up, utterly obliterated and generally placed in a
superior state of spiritual awareness. This was not mere escapism,
this was a mass evacuation from reality. A refugee camp that actually
floated above the mere grossness of "mud", for four days I had seven
league boots that scorned water and earth before the inevitable
downward spiral of reality.  Or something.

What did I see? Lots of things, some of them I may even remember one
day. The Aphex Twin for one. But the best of times (and these were
utterly brilliant) were to be had at John Graham's caravan/tent, where
a tape deck and friendly warmth had everyone dancing madly until 10am
(barring a gently snoozing Juppy). They were to be had at techtonics
as the sun came up or at the amusingly named Tribe of Twats sound
system, or just grinning inanely at people you stumbled across. Or
over.

Or suppressed giggling in a landrover with Juppy and Doug on the
return from a mission after the kindly steward leant over as we drove
past the dance tent and said: "See that? Those are the headbangers.
They have lots of waterpoints there, see, because they get dehydrated
a lot." Indeed.

Which reminds me. Mels and Erics' tent - The Glastonbury chill-out
room, the black hole which sucked in UMRers from across the site and
then folded time and space to engulf and enwomb them all for hours, if
not days at a time. The pivot around which the UMR Glastonbury swung.
10,000 thank-yous are due (again).

Normal theories of time and space flung up their hands and wandered
off to dance at Techtonics, Mels's tent was a black hole, a canvas
guide to alien abduction; your experience started with the hollow
zzzzip of the tent irising shut (or whatever), then three minutes
passed and suddenly it was six hours later and you couldn't stand up
properly.

Sitting inside, surrounded by fluff, you might hear the big strings of
Unfinished Symphony drifting into the tent, mixed with the tight
chords of Spanish guitars from the Caffeine Club tent across the mire,
which folded into the lazy murmur of chat from the thousands of other
pockets of canvas civilisation across the fields and the continual
thock-thock-thock of feet crossing the mud. Once I could hear it, I
couldn't shake the feeling that I was surrounded by millions of rice
krispies in treacle, or a vast group of particularly stoned tree
frogs. 

Guru Alien Jim summed things up nicely over the course of the
festival. On Thursday, his mantra was the charmingly practical
"pretend that the mud is snow, it's much better that way".

By Friday, the philosophy had mutated and hardened: "There is no mud.
There is no outside. There is only The Tent. Nothing else exists."

And all else was irrelevant - except when you went outside (and
everybody did at some point). The legions of the fucked wandered
mud-spattered along deep ruts and submerged duckboards. Every
imaginable shade of colour was represented, so long as it was brown.
Big grins, waves, smiles all round. I didn't speak to anyone who 
wasn't loving it. 

Huge cheers and shouts to TechnoGrandad, who provided tea and
encouragement to the blabbery, twitching, farty mess that was me on
Friday night; to Dave who provided guidance to the blabbery, farty,
twitching mess that was me on Saturday (or was it Sunday?) night; to
Welsh Doug who provided spiritual guidance to the blabbery, twitching
farty and Qat-paranoid mess that was me on Monday morning, and all in
Mels and Erics's tent who were floppy pillars of fluff.

A big grin also to Matt, James LeNoel and Ysyllt and all the other
UMRers whose paths I crossed. Oh yes, mystery solved. The owner of the
mysterious green banana T-shirt was Marcus (I think). So now we know.

These are the lessons that I consecutively learnt from Glastonbury. 

1) Nothing exceeds like excess.
2) You've got to laugh, haven't you?
3) Esheeds like nuzzing exshess. 
3) Don't take Qat. Qat, no. No no no. 
4) Aieeeee!!!

On Monday night, there were stars strewn across the sky and the clouds
had largely cleared. I could see a low earth-orbit satellite tracking
its lonely path  - it was clearly the same same government
weather-control device that had brought down the rains the week
before. It made perfect sense.

A near-fruitless search for a sound system brought more mud on boots,
ketamine freaks, a vegan meal and so to bed, only to find that someone
had lifted Andy P's tent (they'd nicked my bag the day before). There
was nothing left to do but laugh quite hard.

Looking at the blasted and rubbish-strewn wasteland that the 100,000
or so had left behind I suddenly had this huge and ridiculuously warm
feeling that everything was, like, basically okay. Maaaan.

And the thing is, they are.  :) :)

Have a good one in Wales this weekend, those of you who are going.


Fingers McPhee.