Jeremy Corbyn appeared at the Glastonbury CND festival, as part of an ongoing comeback more surprising than Dylan’s 1997 Time Out of Mind turnaround. Like Dylan, a contrary Corbyn refused to give his enthusiastic new fans what they wanted. A last-minute set amendment pledging to block Brexit would have displaced even the Wombles from all-time Glastonbury CND festival top fives. But Corbyn didn’t deliver. Once he had mountains in the palm of his hand, and rivers that ran through every day. He must have been mad. He never knew what he had, until he threw it all away.
Nonetheless, Nigel Farage, a stateless Twitter golem, its task complete but still rampaging around the internet with a torn-up Daily Express between its teeth, was instantly furious about the BBC coverage of Corbyn’s set. And rightly so. It is wrong of the BBC to use the licence fee to give airtime to politicians, and Farage has proven this more convincingly than anyone.
Suddenly cross Conservative commentators nationwide all knew what the Glastonbury CND festival was supposed to be, and who should be allowed to be on there, despite never having expressed any interest in attending it ever, because it obviously isn’t for Daily Telegraph readers, bastards, and people who hate humanity.
It would probably have been better, apparently, if the Saturday mid-afternoon slot had seen Dan “Dan” Hannananananan, dressed as a pound note, introducing Mike Read singing a racist calypso in a Jamaican accent over footage of migrants being beaten back into the sea with umbrellas. I am sure the audience reaction would have been memorable.
Personally, I think the Henley Regatta, instead of having loads of boats in it and being by a river, would be better if it featured Napalm Death, Kunt & the Gang, Yoko Ono, and some Grayson Perry plates that mocked sailing, and took place in a landlocked desert full of ferocious wolves. I suppose it’s not aimed at me.
Know this! There is a genuine photo online of Jeremy Clarkson and David Cameron shooting the breeze at the cheese bloke from Blur’s cheese and music festival in Oxfordshire in 2011. This image, more than any other, which should never have happened, told us that the 60s were finally over. Did Free Festival founder Wally Hope die so Jeremy Clarkson could eat a Groucho club cheesemaker’s pop cheese?
Tories like Cameron and Clarkson should not be at rock festivals. If two such turds had turned up at Glastonbury in the 80s they would both have been fatally stuffed face-first into a deep trench latrine by hordes of psilocybe-crazed convoy dwellers, the sound of Black Uhuru’s Youth of Eglington growing ever more faint as their fat pink ears filled with festival-goer faeces.
Ironically, Clarkson would have then escaped the far more ignominious fate of spending his twilight years manufacturing bespoke controversy to an ever-diminishing audience of impotent Level 42 fans who think ice cream is gay, like a failed dictator awaiting arrest, yet still making futile proclamations, in his supermarket denim-lined Amazon firestick bunker.
You! You awful people! You cannot have our festivals! You have taken everything else! Our health service! Our libraries! Our very air! Even our future! Leave us our filthy fields! We will always have Glastonbury! No pop music for you!
But what do I know? I attended the Glastonbury CND festival a dozen times or so, usually as a performer, from the mid-80s to the mid-00s. Every year the late Malcolm Hardee would host the comedy tent and open by observing, “I remember when this was all fields.” It never got old.
In 1992, still awake, I saw the sun rise over a misty morning meadow, profoundly empty, except for Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69, sitting high on an upturned wheelie bin, heroically topless, dragging on a cigarette and staring blurry-eyed into the distance, as if searching for an answer that had always eluded him. Either that or he’d forgotten where his tent was.
But, eventually, rather than being a cut and paste Shangri-La of freak rock and folkies and topless hippy chicks, the Glastonbury CND festival came to feel to me like it was full of music I didn’t like any more, squares taking ironic pictures of themselves in front of Lionel Richie, and privileged young people wandering around eating expensive street food while looking at their phones and saying how funny they thought Hayseed Dixie were.
The crusties were cleared out and the hipsters had moved in to gentrify their abandoned haunts. To be fair to the Glastonbury CND festival, I now feel the same about much of London, which I once loved beyond all reason, the city redeemed in comparison to the festival only by the quality of its toilet facilities.
The Glastonbury CND festival was changing. And I was changing too. At least we parted as friends.
Maybe I’m romanticising things. The festival movement was always, if not middle class, then at least more bohemian than Bolshevik. After my Glastonbury CND festival sets I was paid in food vouchers by the festival’s co-founder, an ex-debutante philanthropist called Arabella Churchill, granddaughter of our national icon, who still oversaw the circus and cabaret tents on what was now the site’s fringes, her death in 2007 severing a seam that ran back to the sensibility that first shaped the event in 1970.
Each year as I signed my chit I amused myself by trying to sneak Churchillian rhetoric into our perfunctory conversation. “How was your show?” “We’ve all been finding it hard, Arabella, with the flooding this year, but you know what it’s like. We will never surrender.”
Arabella Churchill just smiled wryly, stubbing out her massive cigar as she petted her poodle.
In the London Evening Standard, a weak anti-Corbyn humour piece by a man called Nick Curtis mocked the Glastonbury CND festival’s “perfect spread for ordinary, young, working-class music fans who can afford £238 for a ticket plus the cost of transport, organic falafel, and reiki sessions”. In the same awful paper, there are restaurant reviews for dinners for two that cost more than that, and they don’t come with thousands of different acts over hundreds of different stages. They come with some bread. And the tip doesn’t go to Greenpeace.
This year, Jeremy Corbyn’s logical appearance at the Glastonbury CND festival seems to have reminded people that 60s and 70s festivals emerged from an actual un-co-opted counterculture. Maybe they, and their attendees, will now re-embrace the radical spirit that spawned them, alongside the apparently unavoidable 21st-century follies of glamping, Goan seafoods and selfies with Jack Whitehall.
Oh, the times they are a-changing. Jang jangy jangy jang jangy jangy jang jangy jangy jang!
Stewart Lee is touring his new show, Content Provider, throughout 2017; see stewartlee.co.uk for details
