GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL
26-28TH JUNE

FRIDAY

Right, let’s just get one thing clear at the top of this, shall we? This year was nowhere near as muddy as last year. It rained more, and was a bit wetter, but last year I counted about 15 different kinds of mud, and this year we only have the one- the wet kind. This is also the year where Mr Eavis has surpassed himself. A noticeable lack of embarrassingly old and past-it main stage headliners combined with a new stage, the originally christened New Stage, means that this year’s festival has the best line-up in years, in fact, probably the best line-up since I started coming five festivals ago.

After waking up to find that last night’s torrential rain apparently all went into my boots, eating an horrendously overpriced sausage sandwich from the horrendously overpriced breakfast tent and ensuring from a safe distance that MY LIFE STORY have finished, I head down to the Main Stage to start as I mean to go on, with the Beatlesy Beckness of GOMEZ. They’re very, very impressive, despite the fact that the stage is too big, the crowd is too small, the weather is too shitty and the sound mix too rough. I resolve to catch them later in the weekend in a venue that should suit them better. Next up is TAJ MAHAL, who plays the kind of R ‘n’ B that people at festivals always seem to have to dance to because of something to do with the ‘vibe’. He may very well be authentically old and grizzly, but he’s a bit embarrassing and provides the first truly comic moment of the festival when he attempts a bit of British slang and exhorts us all to "shake our bumholes".

Unfortunately, before the glorious BEN HARPER & THE INNOCENT CRIMINALS, we have to endure some wonderfully naïve bollocks from some CND-type group who seem to be under the impression that if enough people sign their bit of paper, the Government will just shrug and destroy all its Trident submarines. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they then go on to make it piss it down with rain by singing an appalling folk song they wrote about arms sales to Indonesia. Cheers guys.

The rain persists until some pissed bloke falls over and passes out face-down in some mud, much to our amusement, so we can watch Ben Harper in the dry. Harper is always nervous, but today he seems even more so- hardly surprising considering that this has to be one of the biggest crowds he’s ever played to. They kick off with ‘Ground On Down’, but seem to have a momentum problem. Nothing really clicks, and the ever-present bass solo section appears to be getting longer every time I see him. However, a sensational ‘Roses From My Friends’ sees them kick up a gear, and the remainder of the set is vintage Harper. The closing ‘Voodoo Chile’ threatens to tear the roof off the sucker, except we’re outside, and there is no roof to be torn off.

So it’s then over to the New Stage, spiritual home to the Baggage this year partly due to the amazing bands and partly due to the fact it’s in a tent and so you don’t get wet. SCOTT 4 start shakily thanks to the idiot on the sound desk who neglects to fade out the PA until halfway through the first song, recent single ‘East Winter’, but recover to deliver a cracking set. They seem to be the result of a horribly mangled tourbus collision involving Girls Against Boys, Sixteen Horsepower and Penthouse, and their final song is a twenty minute long, single-chord Bluegrass Krautrock workout. Certainly a band to watch out for if you like your music dirty and your frontmen Stetson-clad.

The first words of Ben’s first ever review for the Baggage were "the first thing you notice about KRISTIN HERSH is her eyes", and I now see what he meant. An intense, piercing blue, they never blink, but rather stare directly ahead whilst Hersh sways like a cobra, completely absorbed in her music until the last note of the song has died away and then she steps out, smiles and thanks the crowd. The set is mainly made up of tracks from ‘Strange Angels’, with a smattering of tracks from ‘Hips & Makers’ and ‘Limbo’. The only time her focus is broken during a song is at the beginning of ‘Your Ghost’, when she lets out a half-smile of appreciation at our shouts of recognition, but then she’s back inside herself whilst the crowd sing the Michael Stipe part.

Following a performance like this would leave most bands floundering, but not when the band in question have released one of the best debut albums of the year. SIX BY SEVEN have everything; a very hard-looking lead singer with a girly voice, a pretty-boy lead guitarist with an impressive range of squealy noises, a balding Hammond organ-playing saxophonist and a brilliant set of songs that leave most of their competition standing. They also have an impressive lack of pretension or ego, only getting stroppy when the amazingly incompetent sound man fucks up their monitors on ‘Brilliantly Cute’, and even then it’s only because they want to do the best show possible. I’d like to think they have a bright future, but knowing the way music works in this country they seem destined to a life of making great music without receiving the recognition they deserve.

After this, pretty much anything is going to seem fairly insignificant, and the mediocre joke-rock of DAWN OF THE REPLICANTS is especially so. The lead singer claims to have woken up in a bin bag in a lay-by somewhere in Wales, and this seems entirely plausible when you consider his complete inability to string together a coherent sentence between songs, his non-existent timing and the fact he couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow. If the songs were better, they might have lifted the set above their frontman’s appallingly unprofessional performance, but as it is, they are a massive disappointment.

You can’t help feeling sorry for Andy Yorke, for as THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH take the stage, the annoying Sloane bitch behind me pipes up "Oh My God...HOW much does he want to be his brother?" and the first chord of the set has hardly died away before she wails "They ARE Radiohead". It’s because of people like this that Andy will always live in Big Brother’s shadow, even though he is a more than competent songwriter himself. Unfortunately, their performance is somewhat lacklustre tonight, at least until ‘Higher Than Reason’ inspires them, and their last three songs begin to convince me that they may have something that can lift them out of their current comparison-dogged existence.

The only band on this stage who was ever going to be able to follow Six By Seven with any degree of success was the band without whom they would not have existed, THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN themselves, and they are spectacular. Jim Reid is still one of the most charismatic frontmen in the business, and there can be few bands around who can boast a sound this loud, guitars this distorted and dissonant, and yet have tunes this good. It is something of an indictment of the British music scene when some of the best guitar music of the late Nineties is being produced by bands who have been around since the mid-Eighties, but as long as The Mary Chain and The Bunnymen continue to write songs this good (the whole footy d@eacute;bacle notwithstanding), there is at least some hope for what William sneeringy refers to as our "nice generation".

And so, pausing only to laugh at the bloke who enquires to me whether that was the ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION (the first of many casualties of the misprinted programme) and to swear at the news that my tent has flooded, off I go to the Jazz World Stage to see tonight’s headliners, PORTISHEAD. And fuck, there’s a lot of people here. I’m a fair way back, and we’re waiting for a very long time before it is announced that the band are stuck in two cars at the back of the field , and would we all be kind enough to move out of the way so that they can get to the stage. I’m assuming that the relevant people obliged, because all of a sudden, Andy Smith is at the decks treating us to a mini-version of his ‘Document’ album, backspinning, scratching and cutting whilst taking his coat off, and Geoff Barrow is setting up for the set proper, which, when it finally comes, is amazing. Beth Gibbons is another performer like Kristin Hersh, totally absorbed in a persona as she sings each song and then stepping out of it as the song ends. Barrow is working his arse off, frantically re-cuing records, his whole evening being one long struggle to get the record onto the turntables fast enough. Unfortunately, they’ve only been on for about two songs before it starts caning it down with rain again, and the umbrellas go up, somewhat obscuring my view. I figure they can’t have much longer to go, seeing as how they’ve done ‘Only You’, ‘Over’, ‘Glory Box’, ‘Roads’, and all the other classics apart from ‘Sour Times’, and I remember that my boots are full of mud and my tent is apparently floating in three inches of water. I head back to my uncomfortable abode with the sounds of Portishead ringing in my ears and deciding that if it’s still raining when I wake up, I’m off home.

SATURDAY

Glorious sunshine. Thank Christ for that. Whilst sorting myself out with breakfast I manage to dry out all my stuff by cheekily hanging it off the top of other people’s tents and decide upon my day’s entertainment, which starts, of course, in the New Tent with the spritely Scouse pop of OOBERMAN. they’ve only released one seven-inch, but this brilliant chaos-theory performance (and it is a performance) shows that they’ve got a little bit more to them than that. Hopefully they won’t suffer the Symposium syndrome of ‘fantastic live, bollocks on record’, but then with a song about getting drunk and talking to cows you can’t go far wrong.

Local lads and recent London records signing COUNTERMINE are at the other end of the spectrum. Their take on the indie/dance soundclash is tight, highly polished and note-perfect, with none of Ooberman’s deceptively shambolic shenanigans, belying the fact that the drummer still isn’t old enough to get served. They have shades of Faith No More, Garbage and Primal Scream, with more than a smattering of Mansun in the vocals department, and are potentially massive, although I can’t help thinking that despite the fact they’re very good at what they do, so are a lot of other people.

The sun has held up admirably, so I make my first venture over to the Other Stage, soon to be rechristened the Safe Mainstream Indie Stage, for the sunshine punk of KENICKIE. As usual, the bits between the songs are better than the songs themselves, and the two minute downpour during their new disco number, complete with Spice Girls dance routine, is a bit annoying but you have to let off any band made up of a bunch of Geordie schoolgirls who can fool a record label long enough to get them to let them film a video on a yacht in Majorca. As the sun comes out to the strains of ‘In Your Car’, I begin the long and treacherous trek to the Main Stage for the Queen of Kook, TORI AMOS herself.

Due to the way she sits sideways onstage, my only view is of her back, and attractive though Ms Amos’ back undoubtedly is, it is a little too inexpressive for my liking. Due to my not-very-knowledgeable status in these matters, I can’t tell you too much about the set apart from it contained ‘Cornflake Girl’ and ‘Professional Widow’, and that Tori did all the usual touching herself and moaning and whimpering during quiet bits of songs. Thoroughly entertaining, she IS the Madonna for the wannabe disaffected generation.

The weather is now playing silly buggers, being nice and sunny for long enough to fool you into taking your coat off, then kegging it down just long enough and hard enough to soak you through, then stopping and kindly drying you off before it starts all over again. The mud has been causing problems in the Dance tent, my next port of call, but someone has had the bright idea of using one of the tractor-towed vacuum cleaners that they use to empty the toilets to suck up all the offending mud and allow people to dance away happily. Nice idea in theory, but perhaps setting the device to ‘suck’ instead of ‘blow’ would have had closer to the desired effect. As a result, I completely miss DEEJAY PUNK-ROC and decide to return to my beloved New Stage, where the mud is mud, there won’t be any Ed up hippies trying to get me to dance in ways that my mud-filled boots and complete lack of enthusiasm prevent me from doing, and THEAUDIENCE are playing. This is my first massive disappointment of the festival, for theaudience are so dull that I am reminded that I am very hungry indeed and have to go out into the rain in search of sustenance. It seems typical of this country that in the Alternative Eurovision Song Contest, when our European competitors were entering truly interesting bands like Sofa Surfers, Evil Superstars or Spring, we entered a fourth-rate jangly guitar pop act with a grinny frontwoman.

Not that grinny frontwomen are an altogether bad thing, especially not when they’re as cutely mischievous as Isabel Monteiro. DRUGSTORE are resplendent in skinny-fit Brazil shirts, complete with Drugstore logo and band members’ names across the back. However, they do appear to be turning into the Isabel Roadshow, apparently a little to the annoyance of what she refers to more than once as ‘her band’. She messes up the beginning of ‘Sober’, the end of ‘El President’ and then hands her bass over to a roadie so she can manically play a shaker thingy and flirt with the security men. Drugstore are a highly individual band (name me one other band who could seriously say "this is a new song- it’s a tango"), so it fits that their focal point should be someone as impetuous as Isabel is, regardless of the tensions this could cause onstage. Finally, she announces the imminent arrival of some ‘friends from Mexico’, who have apparently never played a festival before and are quite nervous, before tearing into ‘Say Hello’. Halfway through, they walk on, two fat blokes in full Three Amigos get-up, who play the most amazing trumpet interlude, several times longer than the one on the album, and it’s one of those Glastonbury moments where the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Isabel is on the verge of tears, and takes the band off after only five songs , realising there’s no way they can top this. They return for an encore of ‘Fader’, which Isabel reprises on her own after the rest of the band have left the stage, but in that five-song set, Drugstore showed they could still live up to the expectations we had of them all those years ago.

So we’re in a good-time South American vibe now, and who better to follow it up than cheeky Northern whippersnappers GOMEZ in their second appearance of the festival. It’s basically the same set as yesterday, but the songs go on a little longer, and there are a couple of additions, but the main difference is that they seem far more comfortable playing in a full venue this size than an empty venue the size of the Main Stage. Gomez make the kind of Beatles-influenced music that follows in the spirit of the Fab Four, as opposed to following every chord change and vocal harmony that Lennon and McCartney pulled out of Chuck Berry’s hat. They have no one frontman, but three, with different but complimentary voices, talents and presence. There’s chirpy multi-instrumentalist bloke on the far left, with his überRingo intonation; noisy guitarist shy bloke in the middle with his Eddie Vedderesque sandpaper drawl, and floppy haired guitarist and harmonica playing bloke over there on the right with the smooth and sometimes quite high voice. ‘Tijuana Lady’ is one of the silliest songs ever to be written by somebody from Southport, and I swear one of the lyrics to ‘Get Myself Arrested’ mentions something about pants, but no matter. Catch them before they start believing what everybody says about them.

I leave the New Stage to discover that the weather has finally broken, and there is not a cloud in the sky, which is lucky because my last two bands are outside on the Jazz World Stage. THE ROOTS are my annual fix of Illadephian laid-back vibes, replacing the mysteriously absent G-Love & Special Sauce. They’re a legendary outfit- a live band, a rapper and a human beatbox turntablist who turn out a set of groove-laden, old-skool hip-hop without ever having to resort to sampling or DATs. Despite recurrent monitoring problems and the soundman’s neglect to put any bass in the mix for the first three songs, the first half of the set is hands-in-the-air, call-and-response party music and the crowd love it. Unfortunately, they fall into the trap that all too many bands with fantastic rhythm sections fall into- the drum solo, then the bass solo... some of these players could do with reminding that they’re there to lay a groove, not to wank over their instruments for twenty minutes at a time. Just as it looks as if the atmosphere has been totally destroyed, up steps DJ Scratch to the microphone and proceeds to dumbfound us all with the most imaginative performance I have ever seen from an MC. Scratch’s forte is the vocal imitation of turntables, scratching, cutting, transforming and building beats, all the time going through the motions with his hands. Close your eyes and it could BE a DJ dropping the break from ‘King Of The Beats’ and scratching in ‘Paul Revere’ or ‘Welcome To The Terrordome’ over the top. A great show, almost ruined, but saved in the nintieth minute.

There is an interminable wait as The Roots’ bare-essentials stage setup is cleared off in favour of REPRAZENT’S huge banks of gadgetry. The longer it takes, the more the field fills up with a decidedly non-Glastonbury vibe. Dodgy diamond geezers in wax jackets with their mobile phones hanging around their necks next to their whistles start to jostle in front of me, and the small party going on around a wax flare in front of me is shoved and trampled out of existence. The good-time tunes being pumped out by the DJ are starting to feel lost under the vaguely threatening atmosphere more akin to South London than the West Country.

However, down the front for the headliners at Glastonbury is no place for a bunch of style blaggers, regardless of how hard they look or how credible their credentials, because once Roni Size lets rip with the beat from ‘Newforms’ and MC Dynamite takes to the stage, there is no room for those who only want to stand about stroking their chins and waving their phones in the air. You dance, or you get left behind.

The set is pretty much as you would expect, but a year of honing their act has meant that Reprazent are far slicker than their mid-afternoon Dance Tent slot last year. Highlight of the set has to be the ‘History Lesson’, during which Size, Krust, Die and SUV reconstruct all their classic tunes from the last three or four years, break by break, into one massive rollercoaster that takes in ‘It’s A Jazz Thing’, ‘Jazzy’ and all the other tunes they’ve made between them containing the word Jazz.

Unfortunately, the day of being on my feet again takes its toll, and the point at which my legs give way underneath me during ‘Hi-Potent’ (what a bummer- my favourite track) seems like a good point to retire to my tent before I end up on my arse being trampled into the mud by several thousand D&B heads.

SUNDAY

I wake up with a hangover, which I consider highly unfair considering I didn’t have anything to drink yesterday, but a couple of cups of coffee later and I’m back in the New Stage tent watching Magoo, who appear to have blossomed into a five-piece. The newly added keyboard player is a bit of a nob, to be honest, but does an admirable job of fleshing out Magoo’s sound. They’re still purveyors of incredible short bursts of noise-pop, but the new songs in today’s set suggest they may be (ulp) maturing into a serious force to be reckoned with, rather than simply playing second fiddle to their more famous Chemikal Underground labelmates.

Food, and a much belated trip around the markets fills in my time until the first of today’s main highlights, TORTOISE on the Jazz World Stage, but the mud appears to have got the better of them, and the waiting masses are (eventually) informed that they will not be playing. Bollocks. It was bound to happen sooner or later, particularly with a line-up like today’s where I’m cutting it very fine trying to see all the bands I want to, but why did it have to be Tortoise, and why did it have to mean I missed KRASH SLAUGHTA? Oh well, at least I can get myself back over to the New Stage for the BOOM BOOM SATELLITES.

Except it’s SUPERSTAR, who apparently had Tortoisesque problems with the mud earlier on this afternoon and are about to play their set now, which bollockses up my entire plan for the afternoon- it’s too late to trek over to the Other Stage for the ALABAMA 3, and if I hang around for the Satellites, I’ll mess up everything else, so I decide to stick around for Superstar after all, and I’m really glad I do. Although their first couple of songs are disturbingly Stereophonicsalike and I avoid them by studiously cleaning the mud off my boots, the slower, quieter songs are surprisingly affecting, and I eventually leave the New Stage with that warmish, uplifted melancholy feeling carrying me through the increasingly sticky mud.

And so we arrive at the Main Stage for the beginning of the end, and that beginning is supplied by the band who introduce themselves thus; "Hi, we are the SONIC YOUTH, from... erm... I forgot where we’re from". The misprinted programme means that there are an awful lot of old people in denim jackets standing in this field saying "This isn’t BOB DYLAN!", whilst Sonic Youth drag ever-nastier noises out of their guitars. For most of the songs from ‘A Thousand Leaves’ Kim Gordon (the sexiest welly-wearer in the world) plays guitar, meaning that the onslaught is disconcertingly bassless in places, and the mid-afternoon, outdoor setting is nowhere near loud enough, but it’s a fantastic performance that converts at least one Sonic sceptic, but probably no Dylan fans. As they end with the traditional guitar mutilation and Kim gives her bass some welly (quite literally), I look around and see a roughly equal amount of delight, disorientation and disgust on people’s faces, probably the most truly punk rock moment this Main Stage has seen in years, especially on a Sunday afternoon.

After an interesting conversation about Eighties West Midlands fragglepop inspired by the Mega City 4 badge on my hat, a smug American voice announces "Ladies and gentlemen, Columbia recording artist, Mr Bob Dylan" and several thousand plaid-clad teenagers say "This isn’t Sonic Youth!". Someone once said that watching Dylan today is like visiting a ruined castle- you have to look at it and imagine what it would have been like all those years ago. To be honest, Bob’s voice sounds better than most people would have you believe nowadays, but the set is really little more than enjoyable and competently carried off R ‘n’ B. After a while, I realise that the only reason I’m standing in a big puddle of mud getting cold is because Bob Dylan is onstage, and then I realise I’ve never given a stuff about Bob Dylan before, so why should I now? For a moment I consider trying to catch the 21st Century blues of RED SNAPPER at Jazz World, or going all jump-up to DJ RAP and the FREESTYLERS in the Dance Tent, but the way things are going today I realise that I’ll probably end up missing all of them, so I find myself a nice spot of early evening sun and have a ‘moment’, which involves some soggy chips and a tripping crusty in a Noddy hat.

Although NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS by twilight is a tempting proposition, it clashes horribly with my personal festival highlight, what the whole weekend has been building up to- SPIRITUALIZED on the Other Stage. As darkness descends and Jason Pierce and co. take the stage, it becomes apparent that something very special is about to happen, and this is confirmed as track after track from ‘Ladies And Gentlemen...’ is unfolded. This is the third time I’ve seen Spiritualized at Glastonbury, and the third time that they’ve headlined this stage on the Sunday night, but the first time that they’ve come close to proving Pierce’s claim that Spiritualized’s music is "soul music, just not using Otis Redding’s dictionary of soul". The noise is huge, for once the volume of this stage doing a band justice, but the crowning moment is when the London Community Gospel Choir take the stage, complete with four-piece brass section. This is the ultimate performance, an album made flesh onstage, and for an hour I forget the mud, the rain, my cold feet and the impending train trek home. When it finishes, I don’t want any more. It’s the perfect end to a bloody good weekend. See you next year.

Tim.