Bubblehammerblog

I was at the first Glastonbury Festival, 40 years ago. And alas, there's truth in the cliché about not being able to recall such things. Went with Phil Roddis and Dave Lee I seem to think. I was about 20. Dave was with a plump chick who wore glasses, and they spent much of the time groping, as it was called in those pre-correct days, in his tent. The little tent had Sheffield Cats Shelter printed on the sides, because that was where he'd nicked it from.

Phil had lurched off somewhere on acid. I was tripping on mescaline when I fell in the shit ditch, a 5 foot deep trench with a foot of turds floating in piss at the bottom.

I had to take all my vile smelling clothes off and bury them, everything. I washed as best I could in a trickle of water from a sewage pipe. Someone gave me an old blanket, and I cut a hole in the middle and put it over my head. Safety pins appeared from somewhere.

I took up with a Frenchman who carried an impressively large North Vietnamese flag. We shared a gallon of scrumpy, some joints and more acid, then set off, in the middle of the night, for Glastonbury Tor, a few miles away. It was raining and windy. Beneath the tower on top of the Tor was the entrance to Annwn, the Celtic dreamtime. Sometime King Arthur would re-emerge from it. Just before dawn I stood shivering in the dark, listening to the wind batter the glistening black tower. Horses galloping. Drums.

Such mystical notions about Glastonbury and the Isle of Avalon were commonplace at the time, but have barely survived. There was a belief that Christ had visited and built a church. Joseph of Arimathea brought the whitethorn from Jerusalem. Most people at the festival would have read John Mitchell's The View Over Atlantis. I'd recently been passing round a copy of Lewis Spence's Mysteries of Britain.

I recall talking to a group of Anglican monks who had suddlenly turned up at the site one morning. They said they were concerned that the paganism they were witnessing could have dire consequences at such a sacred site. They'd come to warn us. They all had pale translucent skin, and as they moved the scent of frankinsense wafted from their white cassocks.

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