Sunday’s grey and rainy which doesn’t seem fair. The optimistic predictions of “trainers Sunday for sure, all this will be dust mate” are some way wide of the mark.
It starts late.
But it’s LCD Soundsystem on at the Other Stage that I want to see. The thumping rhythms that make it such strong dance music, but otherwise hard to define in its breadth. James Murphy, half swaggering punk auteur, half preacher at the pulpit, has a confidence with his lyrics – the ambling narrative of ‘Losing My Edge (‘I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band. I told him: “Don’t do it that way. You’ll never make a dime.” I was there. I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids,”) to the sparse repetition of the eponymous lyric of “yeah” – and the spacey basslines rising to a frenzy of tortured synths.
Kate Tempest and friends are playing down at the Wow! stage by the time we’ve made our way back down the hill to Silver Hayes. They play a deliciously varied mix of bass music: throbbing, hypnotic techno, heavy dub rattlers, grime bangers and some thundering jungle. Solo 45 and Preditah’s Feed Them to the Lions gets a particularly big response from the crowd. The joy and exhilaration on the faces of those onstage is infectious, and when Kate takes to the mic at the end of the night to spit out her unique style of heartfelt, powerful lyrics, full of politics and anger but also bursting with humour, love and a sharp expression of the human condition, she has the whole tent with her, screaming their appreciation as she gives a humble smile and a raised hand, and leaves the stage.
For all the great music – despite the somewhat uninspired choice of headliners – Glastonbury is about much more than who you’ve seen. It’s an assault on the senses and the body for four days which brings out the feeling of battle-weary troops pulling together to get through the last hours until finally you have to concede it’s over. Legs that felt they might not go further on Saturday morning are climbing the hill to the Arcadia crew bar again. Everyone stops to help the man (usually the same one) whose welly has been sucked into the ravenous mud or to give what they have left to get everyone through to the end. The friends of friends that help your friends they’ve never met before find the missing crew wristband to get you in.
It’s about meeting Pistol Pete, the stinging nettle eating world champion; the entrepreneurs selling cardboard boxes as seats up at the stone circle; the conversations on the Teleconfusing phones booths with randoms about how all music descends or is influenced by The Lighthouse Family; the anecdotes of Glastonburys past. The naked lady in a bass bin pleasuring herself with a pizza slice gets an airing more than most.
You love your friends a bit more than you did (at least until you want them to leave your house on Tuesday and not see them again for another few weeks).
Above all it’s about togetherness.
In a weekend that would, back at home in the real world, have been defined by selfishness, divisiveness and fear, has for the lucky 200,000 odd people in this Somerset field been defined by generosity, inclusiveness and freedom. Whilst talk of Brexit had long ago been banned, it was hard to imagine anyone we’d met here voting to leave and on this dreary, drizzly Glastonbury morning no-one wanted to leave this place either.
