Glastonbury 2014

Just back from Glastonbury. Well, been back two days now but it does take a while to get over. Other festivals have ‘goers’ or ‘punters’. Glastonbury has survivors. There’s something about the way it’s bigger - geographically, with more variety, 24/7, and of course longer - that wrings out all the fun you can have.

This write-up comes with the disclaimer that, like the telly coverage, it focuses on the big stages and things that are that’s easy to name and describe rather than the million little moments you find everywhere, the levity, camaraderie and absurdity. Like a toddler who plays with a box as much as the present it contained, over and over again you see people delight in the spontaneous and daft things as much as the resource-intensive prepared spectacle. The people carrying a table round site and getting people to do table wrestling always had a big enthusiastic supply of competitors and a bigger crowd of encouragers. Entertained by a table! 

There was definitely a lot more going on during Wednesday and Thursday this year. The Green Fields stages, particularly, were busy.

There is also a noticeable growth of the twisted dystopian aesthetic. Since Lost Vagueness was swapped for Shangri-La, and then the Unfair Ground and Block 9 were added, it’s taken root. But the huge spectacle of Arcadia – whose 20 foot mechanical spider that shoots fire draws people in from afar – has moved to the opposite side of the site, and with Mutoid Waste being separated too it feel like this uneasy oddness is spreading out into the whole festival. Like the Green Fields stuff, Glastonbury devotes more space to this weirdness than most festivals have for their whole event. 

But having Wednesday’s tequila-tipped overload negate much of Thursday, it was on to the main event. Blondie opened the big stages on Friday, a wonderful piece of billing. A few years back they stuck Bjorn Again on first at the Pyramid which, when you’ve had cider for breakfast, seemed equally inspired; open with a packed field singing along to songs every single person adores.

Saw Blondie on the Pyramid Stage in 1999 expecting that singalong thing and got so much more, the arcing cry in her voice was so familiar but up that loud and after all these years was unexpectedly moving.

Coming on stage last Friday in all black with some sort of full torso white strapped bondage harness with a pentagram in the middle certainly gives us all a model of post-menopausal life to aspire to. Sadly, her voice really can’t fly like it used to. But failing ability is no excuse for failing attitude, and rocking covers of Fight For Your Right To Party and the Misfits’ Hollywood Babylon gave it enough oomph to carry the day effortlessly, which was clearly a real treat for people like this teenager who got to see someone so legendary. Bringing the sunshine out helped too. And being able to belt out an hour of stormers and have us leaving the field listing ones they never played - Dreaming, Sunday Girl, Tide Is High, Union City Blue - is the mark of a rare repertoire indeed.

EARNING MY KEEP

Had to miss De La Soul to do a political performance poetry tag team at Toad Hall with the great Danny Chivers who I’ve done that with a bunch of times and Monica Hunken who Danny vouched for but I only met that day. She’s from NYC and works with Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping. As might be expected then, she combines political nouse with sparky creativity and a seam of effortless theatrical skill, mixing songs and transfixing storytelling that made me feel like such a tailcoat-rider.

Brief pause before Danny did his new one person show Arrest That Poet!, documenting his political awakening, motivation and the weird places it’s put him. He was one of the Ratcliffe 6 whose trial collapsed due to Mark Kennedy’s involvement; he was one of the 146 people nicked in Fortnum & Mason on an protest against the tax dodgers and was one of the tiny number convicted, in his case for a poem he performed in the posh shop; he was up the chimney at West Burton power station for a week; and he was also on Richard and Judy just before a segment about dancing dogs.

As he started thunder rolled in, giving uncannily timed dramatic sound effects top enhance the performance. Then the rain came, like a spray of thousands of high velocity cricket balls on the taut canvas of the marquee, drowning out in terms of noise as well as fluid. Then the overhead lightning that meant every stage on site had to shut down. He redefined ‘trouper’ by gathering the audience around him campfire style and carrying on.

To add a final challenge, the awesome New York Brass Band kicked in with Jungle Boogie and Seven Nation Army in the tent next door yet still he held them rapt to the end. Yep, I’m deffo the coat-tail rider of the trio.

Weirdly ended up seeing only a handful of bands, mostly on the massive stages and in fact the whole five days kind of zipped by. Was with a crew of mates who dragged me to Elbow. The only other time I’ve seen them I was dragged along too, the legendary Duchess of York in Leeds about 1999. I’ve never seen an unknown band who were so obviously going to make it big. Not especially the sort of thing that I want to listen to all day at home, but they had real undeniable class to them.

And so now, on the Pyramid Stage, the sweeping anthemic element suited the golden sunshine and festival vibe – most obviously in One Day Like This - and the band's almost comical unrockstarness provided an opportunity for a distinctive connection with the audience.

SATURDAY

Saturday brought a talk in the Speakers Forum with me and Green Party bod Jenny Jones about Britain’s secret police, well attended and with thoughtful, intelligent questions. It was especially good to make it clear that, despite the shorthand often used, this isn’t about environmentalists but a swathe of political groups, essentially anyone who’s active in politics outside the sliver of the spectrum represented in the House of Commons. This was underlined by the attendance of the tireless Dave Smith from the Blacklist Support Group who are demanding justice for the thousands of construction workers who - with the routine help of Special Branch - were illegally denied a living for their political or safety concerns.

Robert Plant was something truly special. He’s steadfastly refused the megabucks for a Led Zeppelin reunion yet his set had a ton of Zeppelin songs in it. It might seem like a contradiction, but in doing it this way he isn’t playing to overvast audiences who just want to hear the hits but to people who’ll take what he wants to do. Crucially - and this is where he leaves modern blues bores like The Black Keys standing in their tepid puddle of tedium - he gets to do much more interesting arrangements. He’s shed the cock rock but still hits you with his powerful British blues yawp and folky roots, mixed with a swirl of textural subtlety and shimmering dynamics. He is visibly awed by his band members. And with the weaving of this spell he’s forgiven for picking the more ornate, dappled Zeppelin songs like Going To California.

But, at the end of the day, who has ever held a Les Paul and not wanted to whack out Whole Lotta Love at a thousand squigawatts? Who knows the track and wouldn’t want to be on the business end of that same multisquigawatt onslaught? Yeeeeah. That was a proper Moment. Didn't stop him getting the audience to clap Bo Diddley rhythm whilst he sang a verse of the genius pure evil lyrics of Diddley's Who Do You Love, then put Whole Lotta Love's words over the same beat, then took it back into the ultimate riff itself.

Legged it round for the Manics who came on with Motorcycle Emptiness, making the crowd hit the sky and stay there for a hits-heavy set. If You Tolerate This was hugely emotional, with Nicky Wire saying aftewards

We've got no fireworks. We've got no glitter. We've got no floor tom at the front of the stage for me to fucking bang. But we've just sung a song together about fighting fascists in Spain. A number one record with deep-rooted politics - it can be done! And now for some dumb punk fun

And off they ripped into You Love Us. The soaring, melancholic grandeur of their sound propelled the sunset upwards, a fine prelude to Pixies who just hammered us with classic after classic, their sound undimmed by time, like being sprayed with serrated knives.

The borg of friends herded me to the second half of Metallica whose sheer heaviness might’ve rocked, but in an empathogenically enhanced state it turned my chest cavity into a sagging bag of saturated cotton wool and I sharply sloped off to regather my brain.

The South East corner – full of that the dystopian stuff – gets rammed after the main stages finish so it was a great opportunity to have a gawping bimble whilst everyone else waited for Enter Sandman.

DOLLY PARTON

Sunday morning wake up text from my friend Tom recommending a further Pyramid Stage act for breakfast, Toumani and Sidiki Diabate. Tom’s in the unfathomably brilliant Vessels, so his taste should be trusted without question, and indeed he wasn’t wrong. The Diabates are a father and son Malian cora duet, 71st and 72nd generation of their family to play the gorgeous West African harp. Here they are playing in the BBC treehouse up in The Park.

But everyone I’d spoken to all weekend, friend and randomer alike, had said they were going to Dolly Parton. And sure enough, on Sunday afternoon she drew a bigger crowd than any headliner. All the way to the back of the field. Not only that but the clapalong and armwaving normally dissipates as it gets further from the stage whereas this was total participation right the way back. 

She knows you love it for the music and for the kitsch at the same time. Her cultivated folksy persona belies a huge talent for sweeping an audience up. An absolute giant of country music, she was witty, energetic and yet still managed to stay true to the core of country, that cleverly articulated, unflinching unhurried examination of heartache depicted in ordinary settings that everyone can identify with.

But, as she was savvy enough to realise, ‘I can't do a bunch of sad, slow songs, because everyone's drunk and high’. Levity is one thing, but nothing prepared us for her doing the Benny Hill theme on a rhinestone encrusted sax, followed by a specially written song about being in the mud. Fuck the tube train smashed into a five storey block of flats in Block 9 or any of that stuff, THIS was the great unlikely thing to see at Glastonbury. It made Ritchie Sambora’s guest appearance a few minutes later seem workaday. The sense of uplift across the field was amazing, with people bobbing out like they had clouds on their boots.

It was disappointing to see the usually excellent Graham Linehan attack her for ‘mutilation’ of herself and deride feminists who like her. Firstly, a man criticising an individual woman because of her appearance is rarely the basis for a solid feminist position. Especially when it detracts from the fact that she is a woman whose talent and intelligence have been proven and respected over decades, irrespective of her appearance. It can’t help but have some little whiff of being threatened by powerful women – I don’t remember him criticising men who work out in order to fit in with male standards of muscularity.

Yes, Parton actively complies with norms about standards of female beauty. Attacking those norms is one thing but, as someone who’ll never face society’s sanctions for women who don’t comply, he should hold off with the personal criticism. 

Additionally, she has carved out her own space in culture so well that she has something of a unique position. There’s a character she’s created and she’s living it, self-defined and clever and in control. As she said, ‘it takes a lot of money to look this cheap’.

Up to The Park for an even older legend who nobody could accuse of conforming to anything, Yoko Ono. Backed by Yo La Tengo she hammered out a run of the proper noisy tracks with her distinctive challenging wauling. To me it’s like Pixies but from 20 years earlier. Utterly uncompromising, unashamedly poetic and discordant at the same time, no quarter to pop sensibilities yet with a rock basis somehow, a truly original artist. Frankly the shortish set was a blessing though, two hours of it would be like trying to down a bottle of whisky in one chug.

After days of mudwalking the prospect of legging it across to Brian Jonestown Massacre was a bit much, time for cider and a restorative stodge before the impeccably scheduled Massive Attack closed the festival, enveloping, smart and serious. 

WHAT A LOAD OF RUBBISH

On the way home I read carping on social media from people who didn’t go about how it was no good, and from older folks about how it was different back in the day. Well yes, it was coming from a different society. Certainly, it used to have more of a radical political focus and it did something else politically valuable too – it got activists in a space where they networked without the distraction of it being a proper political gathering or conference. That ended at the turn of the century. That was, in part, because the uberfence went up and stopped people bunking in, which most of the activisty folks had done. 

But it also coincided with the decline in the dole culture of the 80s and 90s that the protest movements had sprung from. The online age allows for a harassment of the unemployed that was impossible in earlier times. So three or four million people can be humiliated playing an unending game of musical chairs for half a million jobs now, whereas a generation ago people were left alone for a fortnight between signing-on days that left them free to find themselves and useful activities. 

Nonetheless, Glastonbury still devotes a huge amount of space to political campaigns amidst and even bigger square footage for other uncommercial elements that, taken together, is bigger than many entire festivals. And even though it's on a dairy farm, that includes animal liberation and vegan stuff. Additionally, there’s nowhere else I know where randomers can turn up and, say, challenge the director of Greenpeace in a Q&A, let alone do it in the buff and get taken seriously. Which may actually not be a positive endorsement, so I’ll move on.

Huffington Post did a piece on the rubbish left behind, which looks like a lot, because it is. However, I’ve also been to other major festivals and seen what they’re like at the end and believe me, Glastonbury is comparatively tidy.

Loads of people leave their tents and stuff, but this isn’t about a culture change at Glastonbury. Like the doley activists, it’s a reflection of wider change. We’ve been Argosified, conditioned into unthinking disposability on a stunning scale. When you can get a two person tent, two sleeping bags and two roll mats for 30 quid – manufactured so shitly that they’re not really fit to reuse many times – of course people treat them as use-once items. Some festivals have done deals to buy that crap online and collect at the festival.

I took this photo on the Tuesday after Leeds Festival last year, 24 hours after salvage teams moved in to take away good quality stuff. This is the leftover junk in an empty field.

I estimate about a third of tents had been left up, of which about half were blatantly brand new. Every one of them I checked had usable stuff in; clothes, bedding, beer, food, camping gear. But the need to clear the site means after two days the bulldozers move in and it gets taken to landfill.  Glastonbury, for all its apocalyptic look, is comparatively responsible and tidy.

Another way to look at it would be to go to a city of comparable size like Newcastle or Portsmouth and put all its thrown away material for five days into a field to see what it looks like. The streets of our permanent cities are clean in the same way that a spotless house is clean – because all the mess has been moved elsewhere. At the end of a festival they’re laying bare some of what we do all the time everywhere we go.

IN A FIELD OF ITS OWN

The other thing is how uncommercial Glastonbury is compared to other major festivals. They tweak it with noticeable improvements every year. Not only do they give loads of money away to the major beneficiaries Greenpeace, Oxfam and Water Aid, but they were the first festival to insist that food stalls only use compostable cutlery. This year they did away with portaloos and put up more compost ones.

Of course, there is much more that could be done, as demonstrated by the zero-advertising Beautiful Days, or Shambala’s ban on bottled water and principled avoidance of sponsorship (the psychic peace of a weekend with thousands of people yet no corporate logos is a true balm for the soul).

But still, as I walked around Glastonbury I couldn’t help but think that at T In The Park or V or Reading those flags and hanging baskets would be beer placards, those open spaces to chill would be food stalls, and those food stalls would be generic burger flippers rather than anything interesting. In so many senses, there is simply nowhere else like Glastonbury. It's not about the bands - hence tickets selling out long before the line up is announced. It's Britain's cultural barometer.

As Joe Muggs’ wonderfully vibrant, evocative, point-getting article concludes, 

Glastonbury as an institution – as a giddy, fuck-witted, nonsensical temporary city of 200,000 people – is not built on competitive cultural indulgence, it is genuinely built on hanging out. No more, no less. The fact that it’s there at all is a monument to human excessiveness, but also to our fundamental social nature, to the ties that bind. That doesn’t make it a utopia, because it’s still a rabid, filthy, depraved hypercapitalist clusterfuck. But it does make it an absolutely staggering achievement, and some of the best fun it’s possible to have anywhere in the world.

Stone Circle field, Monday 9am

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today

30 years ago this morning I was arriving home from a lifechanging experience. It was REM's first UK tour and the night before I'd blagged my way into the soundcheck at the Gallery on Peter Street in Manchester. After that I hid in the bogs until the venue opened, not only saving the £1.50 entry fee but more importantly avoided being turned away for being so blatantly underage.

They came on with a cover of Pale Blue Eyes then ripped into their own Moral Kiosk, blowing the power. After 15 minutes of a capella singalongs including If I Had A Hammer they got electrified again, did surf guitar classic Walk Don't Run and continued their set. I spent the night on Piccadilly station and got pulled in by the rozzers.

I already had a strong belief that if I've understood something properly and found it meaningful then I wanted to interact with it, be it politics or music. I see a younger generation doing so readily with favourite bands on Twittter these days, actual two way communication from your teenage bedroom with the poeple who help you make sense of your world. Back then it meant sentencing myself to spending a significant part of my teenage years outside stage doors.

Other bands were important and inspiring to me, but there was nobody else like REM. Their sense of intelligence and mystery was bewitching. By taking a thoughtful, original, oblique angle to their creative work and the world at large they delivered an antidote to the overwhelm of brash commercialism and homogenous strictured suburban tedium. They said it was OK not to get dissolved into the soul sapping meaningless mainstream but hold out for something that I couldn't even name or describe yet.

And don't let the later po-facedness fool you, REM were an exuberant band in the early days who really enjoyed themselves on stage.

When I saw them that night Reckoning had been out a few days but my local shop hadn't got it yet. However we'd had So Central Rain as the flagship single. Here they are six weeks later.

the sinking of the arandora star

Two years ago the freshly elected David Cameron spoke of how Britain owes so much to the USA for its military support during the Battle of Britain.

the fact is that we are a very effective partner of the US, but we are the junior partner. We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.

Robert Fisk writes of how, as the Iraq War began in 2003,

both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

In fact the Americans only joined the war in December 1941. In 1940, Britain stood alone against the Nazis. Facing vastly superior weaponry the Americans expected that, like much of Europe, we would readily fall to Nazi occupation.

Knowing that the immediate future would be one of either occupation or the protracted privation of war, the British swiftly interned all German and Italian men, even those who were here as refugees from fascism, then set about deporting them.

And so it was that around 1,400 of them were crammed into a ship called the Arandora Star. On 1st July 1940 she sailed out of Liverpool and, in the early morning light 72 years ago today, appeared to the commander of a German submarine like a slow moving prize of a troop ship. After the torpedo hit there was barely half an hour before she sank, taking around 800 men to their deaths.

Towards the end of July, as bodies washed up along the Scottish and Irish coasts, only the few whose personal papers had survived weeks in the sea could be identified. Many were buried in services paid for by the communities who found them.

If you want to know more, I wrote a piece about it for the radical history calendar site On This Deity. There's also a really well-written home made documentary on Youtube in four parts starting here.

Last month I visited Islay, one of the westernmost isles off the coast of Scotland, facing out into the Atlantic.

On Islay, as all across Britain, cemeteries usually have a few military graves tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I was surprised and moved to find that Arandora Star passengers - civilian non-combatants and enemy nationals - are also buried in these areas. As such, their graves and headstones are tended in perpetuity out of public funds.

Both of Islay's Arandora Star passengers are Italian. The Italians had been on the lowest decks, under the most barbed wire, and a disproportionate number of them died.

Here is the grave of Andrea Gazzi, a 41 year old from Bardi in northern Italy, buried in Bowmore churchyard. He was found after more than two months in the sea on 6 September 1940. Some 48 men from his small village died on the Arandora Star, and there is now a commemorative chapel in Bardi's cemetery.

Down at Port Ellen cemetery there is an unknown Italian civilian. The inscription says 'Deceduto il 19 Agosto 1940' - died 19 August 1940, which is erroneous. They will have died on the 2nd July when the ship sank and, like Andrea Gazzi, the inscription should say 'rinvenuto', 'found'.

They are both buried with the phrase 'morto per la patria' - 'died for their country'. This appears to be a standard motto on all Italian graves in the care of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

In the case of prisoners of war it is perhaps accurate, but here it has a sharp, almost cynical sting. They did not die fighting for anything. The Arandora Star internees - many of the Italians resident in Britain for 30 or 40 years - died for their nationality, rather than their country.

glastonbury 2011

Many people leave Glastonbury having not slept the night before after five days of excessive drink and drugs. Whilst that was true of me too, I was also among the much smaller number who arrived at the festival that way. That, as you can imagine, is a whole other story.

It was a muddy Glastonbury. But so what? It's not actually cold and as long as you've got wellies there's no problem. Walking is a bit tougher but there's just as much fun to be had. Anyone who says otherwise is a pathological grump.

TRIPOD STAGE

Despite the lack of a Climate Camp this year, their field has been retained as the Tripod Stage with the same frontline political attitude, and amongst the politics there were performances from Get Cape Wear Cap Fly, Chumbawamba and a host of others. I loved the beardy folky band doing Minnie Riperton's Loving You.

It was there that Rabble Rousers - performance poetry triumverate of me, Danny Chivers and Claire Fauset - started off our input to the festival in the Thursday lunchtime sunshine. We began with about six people in front of us but it soon swelled. Everyone's on a bimble on the Thursday and keen to engage. The enthusiasm is matched by the paucity of stuff on the big stages, so stuff like the Tripod Stage and the Bandstand down in Babylon do really well.

And sure enough, cider in hand, we passed the bandstand as the Beau Bow Belles were in full swing. And I do mean swing. Hilarious, theatrical, quirky but underpinned by serious musicianly prowess - god their harmonies! - they're a proper festival band. Why the fuck aren't Madam Laycock and Her Dabeno Pleasures on the bandstand? They would go down a tropical storm.

A huge sweep around the site to the twisted Blade Runner dystopian weirdness of Shangri La, with daylight baring its scaffolding supports made it a bit like seeing the Wizard of Oz as a bloke pulling levers behind a curtain.

During the festival proper it was understandably empty in the day - one daytime band in the Snake Pit had three people watching, blatantly a mum, dad and girlfriend of band members - but on Thursday afternoon the goodtime seekers had congregated and Womp were belting out a manic ska party that made the anticipatory party energy just erupt into the humid sky.

The official schedule is stretching properly into Thursday now. With the increase in punters, Glastonbury keeps adding more acts over a longer period and new stages too. In that way, the festival gets better and better. All those whining turds on the Guardian comments talking about how mainstream it is and why would anyone want to go and watch Beyonce and Coldplay, they just betray their ignorance and can fuck right off. The Pyramid Stage may be the largest, but it has never been what the festival is about.

At, say, Cropredy Festival there's only the one stage so if you don't like what's on then you're stuffed. They guard against that by having Richard Thompson headline the Friday and Fairport Convention healdine the Sunday every year, but still. Being in a place where you can't escape Nik Kershaw is not my idea of fun.

There is seemingly a rite of passage at Glastonbury, loads of people camp within earshot of the Pyramid Stage their first time and then learn to get as far away as possible in future. Indeed, the Pyramid's proportion of the festival is diminishing with all these new stages coming in.

THAT PIANO BAR PLACE

And really, that underground acoustic candlelit piano bar in the Dragon Field is proper, classic, weird, poor health and safety, rollicking festival lunacy.

You go in through a metre-wide concrete pipe into a room mostly underground about the length and height of a double decker bus, and about twice the width. Steeply banked benches run up either side and at the end bands play. They have no amplification so must get the audience to sing along if they're to be heard. When I went in a trad jazz outfit were doing Staying Alive. There is a candle chandelier and bootleg liquor for sale. As Pete The Temp said, it is a carnival of abandoned logic.

It's off the side of the Stone Circle field, at the furthest reaches of the site, and there must be many a pharmacologically altered munter-punter who wakes the next morning with no idea where they found it and starts to wonder if they imagined the whole thing.

I'd planned to see Jimmy Cliff on Friday. Saw him at Glastonbury a few years back and he was superb, piling through his immense repertoire - Many Rivers To Cross, Wonderful World Beautiful People, You Can Get It If You Really Want, The Harder They Come - with all the gravitas of an original reggae pioneer but also the luminous exuberant delivery of a soul singer. However there was a rumour - I always believe the rumours, they've led me to secret sets from Madness and Thom Yorke, and never been wrong - that the special guests on The Park were

RADIOHEAD

The Park is a poorly laid out site. The stage faces a slope side on, so if you come in the bottom of the field you just can't see. We went round the top for Radiohead, mingled well down but still, it was too small a soundsystem for so large a crowd.

When you're listening to music in a fairly noisy car, you need to play things you know well so that your brain can fill in the gaps made by the engine noise. By the same token, Radiohead doing mostly very new stuff with a few In Rainbows tracks to a crowd who mostly couldn't hear it was a bit meh. Given how utterly transcendent they can be, how they make music into something others can't even allude to, it was odd to walk away none the richer.

Jimmy Cliff, meanwhile, had played a blinder including updating Vietnam to be Afghanistan over at West Holts. Incidentally, honourable mention should be made of

BROTHERS CIDER

It's a more or less tasteless pear cider base into which they mix flavoured syrups. It tastes about as sickly and artificial as it sounds when drunk in an urban environment. But out there in the spliffing fields it is the best drink imaginable. Silly, fizzy pop that is somehow stronger than beer. Perfect for keeping you on an uneven keel, and in its way it contributes as much to the weekend as any Arcadia pyrotechnics, bump into a dear old mate, K-hole psychonautry, or blinding set from a band.

Nicely positioned at the side of West Holts field it's easy to get to the Brothers bar no matter who's on stage. West Holts, come to think of it, is sort of an anti-Park. The sound is loud and full no matter where you are, clear view of the stage for far more people than want it.

Anyway, from Radioheady underwhelm down to

PRIMAL SCREAM

They've headlined the Other Stage a couple of times and mates have always come back saying they were mindblowing. Unexpectedly, properly mindblowing.

They are not my favourite band by a long, long way. I respect their excellent taste but find them really derivative. You can so tell what records they're thinking of when you hear them. Not that that's so terrible. As Julian Cope said, rock n roll is a strange artform in that a facsimile is the real thing. Oasis are obvious, unoriginal and meaningless, but nobody can deny that they're a real rock n roll band. So, you know, total originality isn't a prerequisite for being great, but nonetheless it does separate the great from the godlike.

Primal Scream have been doing one of those classic album tours, playing the entirety of Screamadelica. And they came out and did it. And truly, minds were blown. It scooped everyone up and swirled them into the music. It opens with the pop euphoria of Movin On Up and is by turns trippy, euphoric, edgy, sweeping, and has such deep groove running through it, touching on everything I need from music, melded into one huge rich symphony.

They've never split up so, like the Rolling Stones, they've stayed committed to their band and got to a stage where they deliver everything with such push, such penetrating confident swagger. Every moment, individually, was utterly perfect. I'd forgotten gigs could do that. Total strangers were arms round each other, bouncing and singing to the sky. It was quite simply the best gig I've ever seen.

I remember after Bowie at Glastonbury in 2000 - also a glorious and perfect gig that frankly I thought I'd never see the likes of again - I was one of many people checking with strangers at the end that it was indeed the best thing anyone had ever seen. With Primal Scream it happened again.

At the end of Primal Scream someone came up and said they'd lost their mates and come on their own 'and it was the best decision of my life'. I was there with Joe, the random stranger I'd been gurgling and singing and swooning with, and said, 'and your mates won't believe you cos it's only Primal Scream. But you, me and Joe here, we *know*', and we left the field feeling like we were walking on acres of fluffy pillow about two feet above the ground, like an invisible bouncy castle.

I was, it barely needs saying, ripped to the tits for the whole thing.

After I ran out of friends and strangers at the festival to gush at I had to spend the rest of the evening calling and texting everyone to enthuse. I knew that in the cold light of day I'd try to revise it cos, you know, what are Primal Scream next to Bowie or REM or whoever? But really, it was the best gig I've ever seen, anyone, anywhere, ever.

U2

Meanwhile, over at the Pyramid Stage, the U2 protest went off pretty well. U2 complain about low levels of poverty relief from Western governments yet they are registered in the Netherlands to avoid the taxes they would pay if they were an Irish company, rather like the way Boots is run from their vast estates that take up half of Nottingham but are technically based in a PO Box in Switzerland. So Art Uncut inflated a 20 foot high balloon saying 'U PAY TAX 2?', and got their fingers broken by security for doing so.

Holding up banners at stadium rock bands on the Pyramid Stage? Did a bit of that myself back in the day, but that's another story.

U2's set included a mere four songs from the latter two-thirds of their career, a ton of Achtung Baby stuff, and no pontificating from Bono, which is as good as I would've dare hope for if I were there. Wouldn't have swapped that, nor most things I can think of, for being down the front at Primal Scream though. And I still feel weird about saying that.

On Saturday down at the Cabaret marquee

MARK THOMAS

did an epic set, well over an hour long, talking about his recent walk along the length of the Israeli apartheid wall. The energetic passionate delivery is infectious, the way he can find comedy in anything holds you there, yet he can talk of the most harrowing experiences in unflinching detail and it doesn't lose you but pulls you in further. It's a hell of a talent, and what you get for only working on things you really deeply care about.

In some excellent billing he was followed by

JEREMY HARDY

who also does something peculiar with comedy. Like Bill Hicks, he says funny stuff but then wanders off into just saying what he thinks politically and philosophically. The openness he's created with the humour is used to make us amenable to his perspective.

More than that, he's optimistic. It is far easier to write slagging things off than being positive (as a visit to the Comments sections that form the bottom half of the internet can attest). Comedy tends to generalise and ridicule, and whilst Hardy's stuff certainly does this, his underlying position is one of hope, his hatred (where it exists) is for the way we've been made to feel dull and powerless.

He knows he's largely talking to older folks ('good to see so many people here; I have a Radio 4 demographic and it was a harsh winter'), and he uses that to stir people to break through their crust of jadedness. 'Young people aren't being daft when they protest, they just haven't thrown in the towel. They're thinking about globalisation instead of what's on offer at Topps Tiles'

The rumour - yet again, true - was that Saturday's special guests at the Park would be

PULP

I know that they really mean a lot to people who were 14-24 in 1995. And I like the big choruses, the knowingness. Jarvis' subsequent solo stuff is intelligent and continues the same line, bold and inventive and catchy and with a real edge. Cunts are Still Running The World is just marvellous.

But still, I never got on with Pulp. There's a sneeringness in the lyrics, something arrogant and somehow hollow. The heavy irony is laid on so thick that you can't tell what point is actually being made, and I suspect Jarvis himself can't tell either.

When he sings 'is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or just 20,000 people standing in a field?', what does he mean? Blatantly he's having a great time and genuinely loving it, as are the 20,000 people singing along. Yet the line is clearly there to say that they don't like it, that it is rubbish. It's the kind of relentlessly dismissive smug aloofness common to people who want to dress up their fear of intimacy and enthusiasm as some form of cool superiority.

Of course, now the whole thing is nostalgia and so it doesn't matter. We can sing along all manner of songs of heartbreak or gibberish and they really mean something to us if we've cherished them in our bones for years and years.

CHEMICAL BROTHERS

Headlining the Saturday night on the Other Stage, Chemical Brothers were massive. With them, as with folks like Orbital and Fourtet, seeing them live is kind of like watching someone check their email whilst listening to Chemical Brothers CD. But at full-on festival volume the dark nebulous elements come out in full, the depth and complexity of the music splatters you in a way that no headphones or home speakers can ever allow.

TONY BENN'S BACKING SINGERS

The Speakers Forum where we Rabble Rousers do our thing was its usual great self all weekend. Climate politics analysis from the person who conceived Contraction and Convergence, Aubrey Mayer who - hell, you're on stage at Glastonbury so milk it - ended with a viola piece.

Sunday brought a truly weird moment for me though.

In Bob Geldof's autobiography there's a picture of him on stage at the end of the Live Aid concert. He is being carried on the shoulders of Paul McCartney and Pete Townshend while David Bowie looks on, applauding. Geldof captioned it 'spot the non rock god'.

Two years ago we were on before Nick fucking Clegg (and I did a seven minute poem about what duplicitious freemarket fundamentalists the LibDems are). But this year the bill on Sunday ran; Mark Thomas, Michael Eavis, Rabble Rousers, Tony Benn. Kinnell. Spot the non folk heroes.

PAUL SIMON

We had to leg it down to my only visit to the Pyramid Stage this year. It's that Sunday late afternoon slot, everyone's a bit minging and a bit musiced-out. You need a legend who touches your soul. In previous years I've seen Al Green, Brian Wilson and Van Morrison in this slot. Paul Simon is a total box ticker for it. It amazes me he wasn't higher up the bill. With such a phenomenal back catalogue and songs that absolutely everyone adores, he'd close the festival so well. What sort of event has given Roger sodding Waters the headline slot yet relegates Paul Simon to 4th?

You've gotta feel for any drummer Paul Simon hires. You're going to dread him saying he wants you to play 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, a song with a drum pattern so languidly loose and grooving that the original drummer, Steve Gadd, gets a royalty from the track.

As is often the case with going in with high hopes, Paul Simon was disappointing. What was good was wonderful - four or five from Graceland, an album that half the world seems to regard as a dear friend - and some gorgeous sunshine stuff like Slip Sliding Away and (the one time that I cried this year) Hearts and Bones. But there were four from the new album, and no Simon and Garfunkel tunes whatsoever. I know he must be sick of Bridge Over Troubled Water, but how about America, Hazy Shade of Winter? As opposed to coming to Glastonbury and encoring with Kodachrome? Erk?

From there to the BBC Introducing stage, oddly situated in the Dance Village, to see a well deserved headline slot from the mighty

VESSELS

BBC Introducing have put video of pretty much their whole weekend online. You can watch the whole Vessels set here and you'll be a smaller sadder creature if you don't. Try it at the loudest that you dare.

Vessels were magnificent, but then again they always are. Like Radiohead they can take the peculiar time signatures, grandeur and segmentation normally associated with wanky prog and make something epic and rocking that makes you think that the band are telepathic and all other pop music, even the stuff you love, is essentially nursery rhymes.

From there a shlurp back through the mud for the closer on West Holts,

KOOL AND THE GANG

Not many places'll give you Kool and the Gang supported by Vessels and Paul Simon.

Coming from the American soul revue tradition with its roots in playing for dancing before the advent of DJs, the music never stopped, it was one long bouncing party.

Tight as a gnat's chuff and yet all ten of them on stage arsing around and having a hell of a time, they bundled through all the hits - unfortunately that included two I Just Called To Say I Love Youalikes, Cherish and Joanna - they hit with with more funk than I'd dared to hope for. In my mind's ear stuff like Get Down On It is a bit slick and shiny, but that night the sheen became sparkle and there was a real proper dirty funk chassis that it rode upon.

And as I'm obeying the instructions to get down get down, as if the gods of festivalaciousness wanted to make sure everything felt unified and joyous, bouncing in by my side is Joe from down the front at Primal Scream. And, as anticipated, when they closed the set with Celebration, being in the field at the end of the boistrous festival with ten thousand people singing that first 'wahoo' was a real Moment.

As ever, people who don't go to festivals always ask about the bands, and as always it's easiest to cite the bands rather than the thousand little interactions, joys, positive exchanges with strangers and weirdnesses that make the real vibe. Glastonbury would be worth it without any of the bands listed above.

like a war zone without the dead people

I went to Reading Festival once, nearly 20 years ago. It has none of the character of Glastonbury, none of the quirks and charm of smaller festivals. What it does have is a vast range of top rock bands playing blisteringly loud to massive beery audiences. For some people that's not enough to entice them but for others, like me in 1991, it's a definition of heaven.

It was overwhelmingly populated by teenagers wearing band T-shirts who enjoyed making campfires out of plastic. As I understand it, that is still the case, and their techniques and targets have evolved and expanded. Stories from a few years ago about lines of burning portaloos are truly the stuff of nightmares.

The festival is now so popular that it's held at two sites, Leeds and Reading, with the same acts on alternating nights. This year I helped with the salvage; teams of volunteers get a couple of days after the festival to pick up any decent tat left by punters.

There were people gathering camping tat like SolAIDarity collecting for the camps of migrants at Calais, others for displaced victims of the Pakistani floods, and scouting groups. Other charity collectors like Everything's Possible were looking for stuff to clean and sell as fundraisers.

The waste seems largely to be a product of the mindset of the punters rather than the infrastructure. During the festival, if you bring in a sack of empty cans and/or plastic bottles for recycling, you get a token for a beer. Yet I saw hundreds of full cans of beer lying around, let alone the uncountable thousands of empties.

There are camping gear drop-off points for people who don't want to take stuff home. Yet I would estimate that at least one tent in four was left behind where it was pitched.

This is a spliced together panorama. Bear in mind this is one corner of one empty field, everyone's gone home. There were acres of this.



Almost all the abandoned tents had stuff inside them. Many had just been walked out of, leaving sleeping bags, rollmats, clothes, cosmetics and food. Possessions were seen as disposable, not just by a few who were irredeemably irresponsible or acutely hungover, but as a culture among festival-goers.

Many of the tents and camping gear were clearly new, bought for the weekend, regarded as being as ephemeral as the beer. That was the good bit.  Finding otherwise decent tents slashed, or burned out, or shat in was much worse.

GREEN TENTS

One thing that caught my eye was the vast number of 'Green Tents'.



The words 'green' and 'eco' are, as we well know, meaningless. Vauxhall's new Ecoflex range of cars are eco, even though they emit over 130g of CO2 per kilometre, more than a third as much again as some normal cars already on the road. 'Recyclable' is used as if this means the virgin materials have less impact, and as if the recycling process has no impact at all.

Leeds Festival big up their partnership with Green Tent Company, telling us that buying their gear will

help us to reduce our carbon footprint, thus SAVING THE PLANET

They really do use capitals.

So go on then, what's green about a plastic tent? The makers explain

Traditionally a tent is made up of many different components such as fibreglass poles, metal eyelets and pegs, polyester material and nylon zips etc… which make them uneconomical to separate for recycling. This results in the vast majority of the tents being sent directly to landfill... until now !

The Green Tent Company are the first company in the world to design and manufacture a stylish competitively priced range of tents that are made solely of one product. That product is... polyester.

As if to equal Leeds Festival's jarring emphasis of nonsense, they really do put a three dotted drumroll before telling us their green material is the same non-degradable oil product all the other tents are made of.

Should any of our tents, camping mats or sleeping bags be left behind after a festival ends they do not have to be sent to landfill, instead they can be sent for recycling

They can be sent for recycling. They do not have to be sent to landfill. But, in the main, they are.

A two person Green Tent is £12.99. A full kit of tent, two rollmats and two sleeping bags is £30. You can order online and pick up at the festival, encouraging the throwaway attitude. Why waste precious beer space with camping gear when for £15 each you can get it disposably at the festival, and do the same next year?

The wastefulness is seriously exacerbated - and any potential generosity one may feel toward the company dissolved - by the manufacturer's shoddy quality of work. Some of the material is not fit for repeated use (there's a reason other tents don't use polyester pegs), the rest of it is scrappy single-skin stuff that is barely showerproof. The makers acknowledge this when they boast

If our tents have been well looked after AND fully dried out before being packed away, they could be used SEVERAL times

My tent - reasonable quality, still going strong, and I assure you really not that well looked after - has been to at least 80 festivals.

Put another way, had I bought Green Tent Company tents instead, I would have sent fifty or so to landfill already, or to recycling if I could find where to do it.

How would the eventual landfilling of my solitary tent compare to the energy use and waste of making and recycling a hundred Green Tents? Let alone, as would be more likely, to landfilling a hundred of them?

glastonbury 2010

Glastonbury was fabulously hot all week, which was regarded as unusual by those who've only been to recent ones, but for us old timers felt like a return to form. Feeling your brain melt like margarine and your consciousness ooze and slow to the languid pace and level that the elements demand, it was beautiful.

The heat lends itself well to that finest of Glastonbury activities, aimless bimbling. It's in the hours of wandering that you soak up the vibe of the crowd and see the bits of random incidental stuff that makes it so wonderful. The person playing a piano bike. A piano but with pedals underneath to propel the wheels, steered by turning in the seat. Why was it built? Where else could it possibly be utilised? Brilliantly baffling. It's that stuff that really makes the festival.

Because Glastonbury is done on such a colossal scale, they can really afford to fill it with a squillion little bits of fascinating stuff. This means that, more than any other festival, you could go and not see any of the acts whose names are listed in the poster and programme yet still have an amazing time.

That stuff is difficult to pin down in words, whereas describing the stuff you see on stages is a lot easier, so here we go.

Rolf Harris

When I was in a band back in neolithic times, we eschewed the idea of saving our best songs till last. Always open with a big crowd pleaser, it gets the audience right up straight away, and the vibe can readily be made to stay there. Last year's billing for Bjorn Again - and indeed 1993's for Rolf himself - is the same principle. It's a masterstroke to put a popular and silly act on to open the Pyramid stage on Friday morning.

Tens of thousands of people singing Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport to the tune of Land of Hope And Glory. Perfect.

Let's just ignore the, ahem, mounting evidence that Harris is somewhat fixated with autoerotic behaviour.

Femi Kuti

Not many people watched Rolf followed by Kuti, which isn't surprising. Can't really see them touring together or anything. The field pretty much emptied, and we were left with sunshine, space to dance and bright, hard, contagious, funky, bouncy afrobeat belting out. I genuinely thought I'd not see anything better all weekend.

Nouvelle Vague

And yet this airy, soft jazzy approach to new wave classics also sounded like it was made for this weather. The silliness of the covers fit so well into the festival mindset, but the music was genuinely sweet and balmy. And there was a funny frisson in thinking that I'd seen The Specials do Friday Night Saturday Morning at Glastonbury last year and then Nouvelle Vague do it this year.

Some of my team left as there was a rumour that the special guest on at The Park was

Thom Yorke

Imagine if Thom Yorke was playing in a field five minutes walk from where you're sat now, and that you could just nip over and catch it. What would you do? Yet it's a measure of the festival mindset that we stopped for food on the way.

The topography of the Park field meant you could only see if you were on shoulders, but that didn't really detract from the sense of A Special Moment when he played Karma Police and Fade Out.

The aching majestic sweep of the songs is now augmented by the fact that they've been in our bloodstreams for so very long. Truly special guests, Radiohead's music makes the vast majority of other music, even the good stuff, seem trite and stupid.

Broken Bells

These folks were on after Thom Yorke and I'd not even heard of them before but some of the gang said they'd be good, and indeed they were great, sort of like Air but with a strong sense of melody, rich and varied yet catchy and unpretentious. And, continuing the theme established by Nouvelle Vague and The Specials, Broken Bells did a cover of You Really Got A Hold On Me, which I saw Elvis Costello do at Glastonbury five years ago.

Devendra Banhart

Vivacious eccentric lifting pop, with a hilarious distressingly authentic cover of Tell It To My Heart inexplicably dropped into the set like an anvil on your head. That was mopped up by following it with Lover, one of my favourite songs of recent years, so cheeky and sexy, so effervescent and catchy.

But then it was time to miss the end and gallop if we were gonna be over at the Other Stage to see

The National

Introduced to this band by the impeccable taste of Zoe Goldfish, we followed their 2005 tour when the magnificent Alligator came out.

At Glastonbury it was mostly stuff from the last two albums that I'm much less familiar with, but that didn't matter. On record they have such a brooding, hunched over, mysterious quality, but live it's the power that comes forth. It's astonishing how a band can be so intelligent and literary feeling and yet rock so fucking hard, how they can swap brands of intensity so well.

Jerry Dammers' Spatial AKA Orchestra

Now this was something truly remarkable from the mastermind behind the Specials and 2 Tone. I'd heard good things about his recent stuff, and found it interesting that he refused to join the Specials reunion as he wanted to do something that moved music forwards.

An 18 piece orchestra, half of them brass section, the other half having upright bass, tympani, guitars and of course Jerry amidst an encircling tower of old school keyboards.

There is a very potent influence from Sun Ra here, as they came on in ancient Egyptian garb and a sizeable chunk of the set was Sun Ra covers. However, it didn't have the sprawl of much of Sun Ra's work, there was a tight, sharp reggae basis to it, fused with a snaring funky jazz edge.

There was a fabulous mash up of Sun Ra's Nuclear War and The Specials' Man At C&A, and a sweeping rework of Ghost Town (which, continuing the 'heard this here before' theme, I saw The Specials do last year). On came legendary Jamaican trombone player Rico, whose career has straddled the gap with him playing on the earliest reggae records as well as on 2 Tone classics (he even played on both versions of A Message To You Rudy).

A fabulous reggae reworking of Arthur Brown's Fire followed, with Brown himself coming on to sing the breakdown.

They closed with Sun Ra's Space Is The Place, leaving the stage one at a time, some bringing drums, then out into the audience leading a snaking column around the field all chanting 'space is the place, space is the place, space is the place'. An extraordinarily exhilarating visionary performance.

Quick nip over to Chapati Man for refuelling, which was opposite the Leftfield tent, popped in to catch the last four songs from

Billy Bragg

I Keep Faith is a song close to my heart, a tender affirming song of consolation.

As always, his between song talks were almost as good as the music. He talked of how faith is a loaded word with the heightened religious presence in society, but it's not that kind of faith he's talking about in I Keep Faith. It's the kind of faith you have in the people around you, the faith that makes you believe in their ability and resilience even when they doubt themselves, the kind of faith that lets you know that, if it came to it, the people behind you here in the dark who you've never met would be on your side.

He'd been curating the whole Leftfield thing, and talks about it and its place in Glastonbury here. His prime point has been that the word socialism may be being treated as anachronistic but when he says it he means a socialism that's just organised compassion. We need a compassionate society, that means free health care, free education, decent pensions, affordable housing. Call it socialism, call it what you like, it's the compassionate society as opposed to the exploitative rule of the rich.

Then in an abrupt headstate change it was time to zoom out of that and back to West Holts for

George Clinton

Clinton once said 'a good show starts in the dressing room and work its way to the stage', and it's easy to believe he still works that way. A rolling, rollicking deeply funky party flooded the stage and the field, tunes morphing and seguing into one another. Shit! Goddamn! Get off your ass and jam!

They ran right up to curfew, then after a couple of minutes came back out and played more even though the sound system wasn't on for them and after ten minutes the plugs were pulled on stage. It wouldn't surprise me if they were still funking in the dressing room to this day.

Climate Camp's Tripod Stage

The Tripod Stage field is tucked away near the edge of the site, and that was all to its benefit I think. It meant that Climate Campers could take the time to talk to people who came in, and several times I saw people who've only been media spectators of climate activism make the change and decide to get involved.

They were dishing out copies of the sharp, smart Never Mind The Bankers freesheet that I had a small hand in writing, and also putting on some fine performances from musicians and ranters including Robin Ince, Attila The Stockbroker and Get Cape Wear Cape Fly.

On Sunday afternoon I did another set there with a poetry team including Claire Fauset and Danny Chivers, so missed out on seeing the glorious Staff Benda Bilili whose music was just made for hot happy afternoons like that.

Still, did get to see

Tunng

Pretty, quirky, like a wheel of intelligent folk with a flat tyre so just as you get the feel of where it's going it goes ker-chunk and bumps you somewhere totally different. Challenging, absorbing, incredibly internal music, dreams made into sound. Which makes them unlikely candidates for joyous singalongs in the sunshine, but it was beautiful and it worked. I clapped so hard I spilt my toffee-apple flavour cider.

Stevie Wonder

The reviews of the recent tour said he kept getting distracted into noodly instrumentals that burst any bubble that the cool stuff developed. So I went along thinking, well, we'll see. It might still be good. And it was off the top end of the scale.

A tight funkily soulful band, plenty of groove and a hefty punch, Stevie being really funny and warm but with a strong righteous political edge, and all the hits I could have hoped for and beyond.

We were bound to get Superstition, Living For The City, Master Blaster, For Once In My Life, Sir Duke and Signed Sealed Delivered, but I hadn't really expected some personal favourites like We Can Work It Out, If You Really Loved Me or Fingertips. He was buoyant on the music, vibrant and witty and it just lifted the whole field high.

(Incidentally, heard McCartney do We Can Work It Out on the same stage in 2004, that's one more for the repeated songs list, sheesh.)

We'll rapidly gloss over the fact that he did I Just Call To Say I Love You and focus on the set closer, Happy Birthday reworked to reference Glastonbury's 40th year, sung arm in arm with Michael Eavis, Stevie delivering like one of the great soul singers of all time and Eavis singing like a septuagenarian dairy farmer.

Sunday is always great at Glastonbury, the outside world has stopped seeming real. You can remember life outside the way you can remember childhood holidays, yes it was your life but it's a very different world now and that old stuff's not really real any more.

Away from the bands, Arcadia was a bit nuts to get into with the post-big stages crush, but the grand mechanical spooky spider thing with a massive sound system would be graced every night by a full-on fireshow in addition to a huge load of sensory candy for the folks that want it banging out.

Shangri-La is, as I said last year, as baffling, uneasy, and tip-your-scales as you could wish for (or wish not for, depending on your pharmacological intake).

And, as ever, few things in life can beat sitting up till dawn in the stone circle, the joyous swirl of this epic expanse of revelry all around you. Glastonbury is pretty much my idea of utopia.

elementary canals

I recently spent time on a narrowboat and, as a relative newcomer, was captivated by every aspect of the experience.

THE HISTORY

Although artificial waterways have been with us for millennia - there's still a navigable part of the English canal system that was dug by the Romans - it was the industrial revolution that saw the great boom in their construction.

Actually, it was more of a symbiosis. Canals came early in the revolution, mostly in the century starting in 1750, and the ability to move huge amounts of goods reliably allowed many industries to take off. A horse pulling a narrowboat can pull up to fifty times as much as a horse pulling a cart.

Additionally, it allowed stability. How could Staffordshire potteries ship their goods by bumpy cart on rocky roads? They were, unsurprisingly, among the first to invest in the new waterways.

One of the first big canals, the Bridgewater, connected coalfields with a town of 25,000 called Manchester. It halved the price of coal there at a stroke. Where would you have chosen to build your new mill then? Imagine if, say, Southport suddenly had half price gas and electricity today. It is no coincidence that Manchester became the world's first industrial city.

Incidentally, the standard size of today's narrowboats is due to a system built for the Duke of Bridgewater, 70 feet by 6 feet 10 inches, designed for the system in his mines three hundred years ago.

The railways knocked canals out of favour being markedly faster (the five hours it took me to go on the canal from Sowerby Bridge to Brighouse is covered by a train in less than ten minutes). The railways not only work at speed, they don't freeze over either.

The last major stretch of canal was built in the early 1900s, and within a couple of decades numerous canals were falling into disrepair.

In the mid-20th century the end of commercial boats (some, even that late, still drawn by horses after 150 years) overlapped with the abandoning of many stretches, but also the fledgling pleasure boaters as documented in LTC Rolt's 1944 book Narrow Boat. He was a founder of the Inland Waterways Association who, to this day, do an energetic job of preserving and restoring canals.

The network was nationalised by the great socialist postwar government, which made non-commercial concerns get a look-in, but also allowed sweeping detrimental policy to be applied. Today, there's over 2,000 miles of navigable waterways in the UK and more boats using them than at the height of their industrial past.

That's all well and good, but why would you do that? What's the attraction?

THE EXPERIENCE

From a purely practical perspective, I'm sure the freedom in simplicity and safety are some small part of the allure. The buoyancy of the water that made it so easy for horses also means that minor prangs aren't a big deal as you bounce off. Additionally, that slow speed means it's hard to do any real damage. This adds up to a mode of transport so easy and safe that complete novices are allowed to hire and drive one away.

But the real appeal is in what's outside the boat and what's inside you.

The canal and navigable waterways network doesn't show you a manicured version of the land, but instead shows you what's really there. You get to see all that makes up England as it really is. The towns, cities, farms, hills, suburbs, visible to you up close from an angle that isn't trying to show off.

It's something that LTC Rolt noted in his somewhat harsh depiction of Leicester.

The River Soar is Leicester's back door and, as back doors are apt to do, it reveals 'domestic offices' which usually remain discreetly hidden from the eyes of visitors.

Broad squares and pretentious public buildings proclaim the city's prosperity to the traveller by road, but the water-borne traveller sees a very different picture. This is no less than the ugliness and squalor which underlie the superficial pomp and circumstance of all great cities.

We saw the reeking gas works, mountainous refuse dumps, the power-station with its gigantic steam-capped cooling towers, great mills pulsating with machinery rising sheer from the water's edge and, above all, the countless mean streets where dwelt the servants of these monsters.

Whilst the system certainly does wriggle peculiar routes through some of the mingiest parts of the country - I'm looking at you, Stoke on Trent - it mostly moves through glorious rural places. The Macclesfield canal's soft fecund contours, the epic expanse around the navigable Trent, the imposing Pennine grandeur of great stretches of the Rochdale canal.

Nearer than the surrounding landscape, the constant close proximity to wildlife places you amidst the outside world instead of looking at it from a removed position as one does in other modes of transport or places to stay.

You can go for weeks at a time away from much that blights modern life. I don't just mean the obvious assault of billboards, sirens and smoothflow beers. There's something subtler. There are only two types of people you see. Firstly, there are the other boaters, with whom - as with hillwalkers seeing each other upon the fells - there's considerable cameraderie.

The second group are on land, using the towpath as a linear park. These are all dog-walkers, runners and cyclists, meaning it's quite possible for weeks to go by and you forget obesity exists. The towpath folks greet you as readily as any fellow boater.

You are actively acknowledged by the vast majority of people you see, breaking down the armoured alienation that mass society imposes.

Being acknowledged by your fellow humans isn't the only return to a life that your primal self recognises. Pootling at 4mph under stone arch bridges dappled with water reflection like the video for True, you realise that it's not just what you see, it's the way that you see it.

You develop a sense of wonder at the detail of life. You begin to realise just how important detail is... 4mph is walking pace, and that walking pace is the speed at which the human brain can absorb and analyse the myriad of minute details around it. On a canal boat, wandering somewhat aimlessly around the countryside, you soon begin to realise that it's the sum of these details that compose the nature of the place you are in.

- Steve Haywood, Narrowboat Dreams

LTC Rolt notes this element connecting with a place so deep that his description reads in a romantic swoon.

No-one who has not experienced it can fully appreciate the unfading fascination of this tranquil voyaging. The movement of the narrow-boat is like nothing else in the world; as Temple Thurston wrote, 'it is no motion, or it is motion asleep'.

Small wonder that everyone who spends even half a day aboard a narrowboat feels, as I've become, eternally smitten.

climate camp vs newbury

I'm sat here on Blackheath, site of Wat Tyler's rabble-rousing for the Peasants Revolt, among the roused rabble of the Camp For Climate Action, ready for the pedants revolt.

This afternoon I bumped into an old comrade from the Newbury Bypass and we inevitably compared the two events.

The Climate Camp, like Newbury, is composed of a disproportionate number of young adults, especially students. Indeed, yesterday I had a journalist trying to get the old gimmers like me to grumble about it.

Personally, I've no prejudice against being educated, and given the fact that students are the most likely to have the summer free and least likely to be shackled by mortgage and family commitments, it's not surprising they are here in force. The protests against the Vietnam War and in Tianenmen Square were led by students. I don't think that invalidated them in the least.

But anyway, this young demographic have no memory of the older struggles, and many talk of Newbury in the way we old 'uns speak of Paris 68. It's easy to get all rose tinted along with them, but me and Tot Hill veteran Martin just thought about it properly. There is nothing we can remember about Newbury that Climate Camp doesn't blow out of the frigging water.

There are complaints that Climate Camp's politics are diluted, that it's become a liberal lobbying group awash in NGOs and reformist ideas. Yet Newbury was actively supplied by Greenpeace, supported by many Friends of The Earth groups, and both NGOs often felt like they were entitled to speak on behalf of the campaign. There were nimbyists, conservative conservationists, those who just talked of other ways to move the absurd quantity of traffic instead of having any thought-through systemic critique. Climate Camp draws the demarcation much more clearly and speaks for itself a lot louder.

All radical movements we venerate had their woolly end. This doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it does mean that their presence isn't indicative of an all-encompassing woolliness. Check your suffragette, civil rights or anti-nuclear history, they all had it. The Climate Camp remains overtly radical. The first thing you see coming up the hill or going past on the 380 bus is the entrance banner saying Capitalism IS Crisis.



The programme of workshops and discussions shows the position as against the growth economy. The influx of newbies - half the people at the opening plenary hadn't been to a previous Climate Camp - means many have to be walked through the ideas to join it up, but the enthusiasm for that perspective is startling.

Last night I was in a mass meeting of over 500 people talking about economics beyond capitalism, who understand that not only is there no way the climate crisis can be tackled while capitalism is intact but that as well as immediate action we need to be thinking about the broader abstract cultural issues. And not in a stuffy drywank way that thinks economics is something for economists any more than we believe politics is just for politicians.

The Camp has involved itself with those irritant backbench Labour rebel MPs and the LibDems keen on civil rights, but that hasn't necessitated any move to their parliamentary freemarket politics. At Newbury we fought alongside titled tories, fox hunters, all manner of fuckheads who we'd give stick to on any other day of the week.

At Newbury the police totally decided their own agenda. Here, we have them on the back foot, kept off site despite their threats and desires. Newbury had a huge contingent of those who felt that if we only talked to the police as human beings they'd somehow not defend the forces of destruction. Those at Climate Camp who haven't had experience of the police often feel that way too, but it's easy to disabuse them of the notion and, as a site and group, there is no way the Climate Camp would behave like that.

Climate Camp out-media the police, indeed they are as savvy as people can be with the mainstream media, way more sussed and successful than Newbury, normalising radical perspectives in a far more effective way.

There is a total absence of the dippy new-age bullshit that saturated Newbury. People chanting at trees to ensure they couldn't be cut down and that sort of gubbins. Climate Camp may be idealists, but they're realistic and practical ones. My favourite kind.

And they're not just practical in the application of ideology but in the most obvious sense. The ability to equip everyone with the kit needed to allow the real work of talking, thinking, networking and planning to happen is amazing. They tipped a fully working eco-village illegally and secretly into a field in a few hours.

At Newbury we tolerated all manner of brew-crew lairy fuckers. We had no idea how to include them and get them to be a co-operative element of the campaign, nor any idea how to exclude the tiny number of irredeemably disruptive people. Climate Camp stops most of that bother before it even starts, and the Tranquility team sort out much of what does happen, and even then the process is so collectively and democratically understood that often people don't call in the experts but sort it out themselves.

And part of the reason we put up with those munters was the fact that they would dependably be there, and we needed the numbers. The idea of thousands of people coming together, of a movement pulling in hundreds of new people every time a big event happens, was simply unthinkable.

To put them in the middle of the Met's home turf, retain control and get on with the real business of educating, agitating and motivating one another for action - not as a single focus but an ongoing culture of action - would have been an insane joke. The sheer weight of numbers is gobsmacking.

It's never in the bag, all movements make mistakes and all movements need continual vigilance and tweaking if they're not to be co-opted or diluted or burned out. But on those fronts and all the others listed above, Climate Camp is the real deal.

It's not that they're some sort of great guru overachievers pulling it out of a hat. It's the culmination of a lot of lessons learned from sites and campaigns over the last 20 years, and indeed Newbury was part of that experimentation and refinement process. It is clearly on the current front end of all that and its awareness and creativity are immense. It has, as Newbury did, that feeling that this isn't something these people are doing but something they are, that this is a rolling network rather than an event.

Newbury was an amazing campaign, an inspiration to others around the world and a radicalising force for a huge number of people. At the time it felt fractious but righteous, chaotic and dicey but cool as fuck to be in the middle of. Climate Camp is all that and more.

glastonbury 2009

Sorry it's a bit late. It's turned into that summer hecticness of trying to have a normal amount of life crammed into the time between going to festivals and gatherings, and keeping up with the allotment.

But yes, Glastonbury. It kicked major ass. As always. If you don't have a good time at Glastonbury then it's your own fault and I've no sympathy with you.

The thing people ask when you get back, and indeed the stuff you usually offer in your account to others, is about what bands you saw. At Glastonbury, the bands are great and all but they're not the point.

GUNS N ROSES GUYS

One of the highlights was getting caught in the rain and ducking into a clothes stall. Looking out, one of the stalls opposite had Sweet Child of Mine come on to its impressively loud system. Three blokes in straw hats and ponchos stopped and rocked - air guitar, devil horns, the works - as raindrops the size of tennis balls pounded them.

Behind them, the stall holders were also belting it out and grooving. This is the sort of weather that people complain about and rush in from, but not here. People didn't give a fuck and revelled in their unfuckgivenness.

Then it struck me that the guys didn't know they had this line of stallholder backing singer/dancers, and indeed the backers couldn't see the other stalls and had no idea that they were part of a chorus line. Basically, this was a random, spontaneous, joyous, hilarious show that my crew were loving but the performers didn't even realise they were putting on.

Then it struck me further that there was no way I could describe this to people unfamiliar with festival magic without it sounding fucking awful.

'You watched muddy munters air guitar to dinosaur metal? Yeah, wish I'd spent 175 quid on that'.

WHITE JUMPER GUY

Then one night in the small hours we ended up in one of the tents in the Green Fields and some band were on that I can barely remember. About five of them, a bit folky, female singer. I think. Certainly, it was sit down music.

But then this guy gets up on the dance floor and starts galloping round it, flailing and running and twirling and stooping, like the way a five year old responds to music at a wedding. I literally laughed until my ribs hurt. It concluded with a pile-on of him and his mates.

He goes to sit down but a chorus of us onlookers cheered him until, bemused but unbowed, he got back up and carried on.

White jumper guy was one of the most brilliant performers I saw and, again, it was spontaneous, silly, but with this underlying bursting joy of life element that made it really captivating.

THE POLICE

The cops were running their usual protection racket. 'Nice festival you've got here. Seems peaceful now but, well, it'd be a shame if someone told the licensing authorities it wasn't. Of course, for a consideration, we could make sure that doesn't happen'.

Then, having secured their money, they have to show they're spending it. Cops on horses cost a lot more than those on foot, even though they're completely unwieldy where I saw them in the crowded central area between the Pyramid and Acoustic stages.

Then you can do some random searches for drugs. Last year two people were busted selling magic mushrooms in the stone circle field. As with the M5 arrestees, they got what seem to me to be unusually heavy sentences. Mushroom stash holder (twelve wraps on him) got nine months, and his mushroom tout partner got six months, even after explaining that by the time it came to sentencing she was pregnant and would have to give birth in a young offenders institution.

This year they excelled themselves by arresting someone in the stone circle field for public nudity. As the Glastonbury daily paper said, it's rather like arresting someone for urinating in a public toilet.

Aren't you glad you live in a country so free of domestic violence, tax evasion and racially motivated attacks that the police have nothing to do so they squander their resources on beating up peaceful protesters and busting people having a good time who do no harm to anyone?

I'm reminded of that thing the Levellers said in the 90s, that Glastonbury is more of a benefit for Avon and Somerset Constabulary than it is for Greenpeace.

MICHAEL JACKSON

The news of Michael Jackson's death filtered through. At first we thought it was a rumour. At the Earth First! Summer Gathering - especially in the years before people all had mobiles - there'd be an annual rumour of a celebrity death. Several times it was the Queen Mother, and there was to a be a national day of mourning on Monday so we can all stay a day longer.

When my brother texted me unbidden about Jackson I confirmed it to my compadres, but they didn't believe me. I should've taken bets. My tent was next to a path and all night there were people walking past discussing it. There was a levity to their conversations that really dislocated me.

The next day more than one friend made reference to child abuse, and one of them insisted that Jackson had been convicted. As opposed to having a prosecution say he'd touched up Macaulay Culkin without asking Culkin. Who then turned up for the defence and said nothing like that had ever happened, but as two people who'd had their development arrested at an early age by massive stardom, there was a bond they shared that was difficult for outsiders to understand.

It was quite some time before I spoke to anyone who felt as I did. I'm not grieving in any way, but where was everyone else's respect for the talent and work of the man? Everybody loves - like really loves - some Jackson songs.

I've always adored the Jackson 5 stuff - DJing I Want You Back guarantees a cheer from the floor at the first slammed note - and the disco stuff was just magnificent, but it took me a long time to get my head round Thriller. I was basically wanting it to have the sort of deep groove of Don't Stop Till You Get Enough or Can You Feel It.

The breakthrough was realising that Jackson was becoming more and more alienated and on Thriller the music, the lyrics, the whole vibe has this uneasy, awkward darkness set amidst a contrasting polished soul sheen. Look at it with the eyes that see the great alienation in Bowie's early work and it makes sense.

Anyway, where were we?

BJORN AGAIN

Many years ago they opened the Pyramid Stage on Friday morning with Bjorn Again, and it was great that they repeated the masterstroke this year. Genius scheduling.

Normally the Pyramid starts with someone not many people are really into. Anyone really popular would have better billing. But open with Bjorn Again and you get everyone rocketed up, massive crowd, hands in the air belting out every song, defiant in the rain, determined to have a big daft time.

Although I do have to say that they're starting to look a bit haggard as they're older than Abba ever were. In fact, they've been going for longer than Abba too. Time for a Bjorn Again tribute band. Rebjorn Again?

SPINAL TAP

One weirder than Bjorn Again (up to 11?). Spinal Tap have been going longer since the movie than they supposedly had been in the movie. And the new album has songs on it they've just finished that appeared in the movie as snippets. So we were treated to the full Gimme Some Money and (not on the album but available as a free download) Saucy Jack, as peculiar and wrong and hilarious as the idea suggests, with some killer unexpected comedy rhymes that would shame Danny Chivers.

Sadly there was no Listen To The Flower People but we did get Stonehenge, complete with dwarves dancing around a small triathlon, this time an inflatable (a nod to Jagger's infamous inflatable phallus?). They finished with a mighty Big Bottom, with Jarvis Cocker on second bass getting the theatrical spanking from Derek Smalls.

And - perhaps weirdest thing of all - in some strange smothered but discernible way, at times they did genuinely rock.

THE SPECIALS

I saw the Specials twice on the recent reunion tour. Blisteringly energetic, focussed, with a body of songs that still prickle and bite and are more relevant now than any time since they were written, they were not only on fire but really necessary. Stupendous.

NEIL YOUNG

I knew this would be my one chance to ever see this angry guitar buzzard, so I had to take it. Right down the front from before the Specials, up close enough to see everything properly. The first hour was varied, swinging wildly from his abrasive grungescapes to the elegant organic acoustic pastoralism.

But the second hour sagged a bit. I realise this is probably more me than him. Festival memories have a much greater subjectivity level than normal life. I remember seeing Spiritualized at Glastonbury in 93 and thinking it was like one long gorgeous unfolding drone chord that enveloped us for an hour. I heard a recording of that gig and the dynamics are phenomenally varied, nothing like what we experienced out in the spliffing fields.

Having been stood up for over four hours, an hour of that involving a lot of volcanic skanking to the Specials, I was aching and had a bladder like the Millennium Dome. I was seriously thinking of getting bunked over the front barrier, but with a performer as bloody-minded and unpredictable as Neil Young, I had tremendous FOMS so I stayed. Good call. The last fifteen minutes are as good as anything I've ever seen.

He closed the set with an utterly scorching Rockin In the Free World, a song I've not heard for years and every bit as barbed and driven as I remember but with that extra grind of his current sound, and a squillion false endings that made it push harder each time.

Then the encore. The simple chords and rhythm so out of context that you don't quite believe you're hearing it. A Day In The Life, coming from a deep black cloud of guitars.

And it's a song from 1967, when Neil Young was first making records. It captures all that idealism of the hippie generation he was spearheading, with the mean souring of heavy rock that followed and somehow has all the rock n roll since affirmed in it, a sort of sacramental distillation of the last 40 years of guitar rock, in a song that wasn't even originally rock n roll.

It dissolved into a glorious cacophony with Young wrenching the strings from his guitar, leaving minds blown.

Incidentally, the next day in London Young had McCartney come out and do the song with him. While that makes for a really special occasion - and McCartney's 2004 Glastonbury set is one of the best gigs I've ever seen - it dimmed something that Young's Glastonbury performance shone with. McCartney's cheery mugging for the audience and stage-mateyness with Young detracts from that snarly electric fire that is the core of Neil Young's energy, that serrated grit that makes his work cut straight through from his heart to yours.

SPRINGSTEEN

This is probably my biggest subjectivity spinout. I'm pretty sure it was one of the great Glastonbury gigs, and if I'd had the energy and been really there it would surely have blown my head off. As it was, I was really tired and watching it sat on bins halfway up the hill.

Even from there, the energy was contagious and absorbing. He is, as the bard Danny Chivers said, one of those artists you feel you totally see through their work.

The honesty, the integrity, the faith, the optimism and the melancholy, they all combine in a coating of muscular rock. Beyond his relentlessness there was something captivating, that sense that he is unable to waste a second on stage, that total world classness that, when you see it live, makes you realise why people like him, Bowie and Prince are given that level of acclaim.

ROLF HARRIS

The JazzWorld stage is on a massive field. I have never seen that field full before this year. I could barely get on it and, not long after I tried, they stopped people coming in because it was so full. For Rolf Harris. Teedle-eedle-eedle-um.

MADNESS

Sunday afternoon, everyone's a bit musiced out, it's always a good time for something warm and bright. Van Morrison's pulled that off more than once.

Wherever you go, whoever you meet, everyone loves Bob Marley. Not just likes, tolerates, but really loves his stuff. It's the most universal music yet conceived. In Britain, Madness have something of a similar position.

They come from 2 Tone ska, the first multicultural music invented on these shores, but they have that music hall element that makes people loved here too. Even something like Sergeant Peppers, bold and experimental as it was, is chock full of music hall sensibility. The Kinks. Lily Allen. Blur. We love it.

They delivered as dependably as ever, but picking a set with a lot of those second division songs - The Sun and The Rain, Shut Up, Wings of A Dove - that, when you do dig them out, add depth and texture to them and musically stand alongside the belters.

Normally with an old band there's no way the new stuff can match up, you haven't carried it in your heart most of your life, and often it's a bit lacklustre and half-arsed. But the new ones they played really bounced, clever, lyrically strong and fresh. I've never got on with Madness albums after the first one, the singles stood out and the rest felt a bit fillery, but the new one will definitely be getting eartime from me soonly.

NICK CAVE

Oh man he rocked. I was expecting his presence, but somehow thought it'd be more stately. Instead it was hard, distorted, potent snarly fucking rock. Staggeringly good, all the more so viewed through the zing of MDMA and port. Beyond anything even still-relevant old guys like Young do, Nick Cave keeps pushing forward, never reaching the bottom of the well.

In the week when I saw Cave, and footage of The Church doing new songs on their current American tour 30 years on (oh my fuck please let them come to Europe next), it shows that some artists really can just keep evolving without compromising their vision, their integrity or their high standard of work. Suck on that, Spandau fucking Ballet.

NICK CLEGG

The Nick Clegg. Leader of the Liberal Democrats, speaking in the Green Fields. It was a fair bet that he'd be telling everyone how lovely and green his party is and other complete fucking lies.

I knew that there wouldn't be time in his Q&A to list the vast catalogue of anti-environmental, pro-war, pro-freemarket capitalism things the LibDems have done. However, if I made it rhyme and did it in the poetry slot just before he came on, well....

I thought I'd reflect my level of ambiguity and allusion in the title of the piece. So it's called Fuck You Liberal Democrats and I got to do it with Clegg stood behind me. Got cheered and booed in equal measure, which seems fair enough. I'll type it up and post it here soon.

SHANGRI LA

The successor to Lost Vagueness is far greater. The weirdness, the baffling twisted eye and brain candy is inspired, warped, brilliant.

My favourite part was the alleyway of shops, a covered Blade Runneresque market, corners all over so you're utterly disorientated and feel that it goes on forever, grimy, bare piping all around, then inexplicable stalls. A room of blue lights and mirrors with a mermaid - a live one - grooving in the corner.

A shop with babies in jars behind the counter that straps you into a dentists chair, puts an outsize helmet on your head full of speakers that block your vision while playing distressing sounds - animals, alarms, children screaming - as people flick, tweak, nudge, dry hump and prod you. And rifle your pockets for your phone and ring your mates in an east European accent to tell them they're operating on you.

Like Guns n Roses Guys, it's another one I knew describing it would divide people into those that get festivals and those who don't.

And the weather? Didn't matter.