Festivals
GLASTONBURY AND BURFORD
It’s a funny old world.
One night in high summer heat, Stormzy (25) was rapping to tens of thousands at a West Country festival whose devotees are so oldie-heavy that the organisers had taken the precaution of stocking up on defibrillators and wheelchairs. David Attenborough, 93, also wowed Glasto on the same weekend.
On the very same night that a young black man was headlining Glastonbury for the first time, I was living the dream at stately Burford Priory, Oxfordshire. There Jools Holland, in pin-striped zoot suit, was fronting his big band in front of a young audience (average age under 30) having their boogie-socks blown off by a music legend twice their age.
I think, on the whole, I was better off slumming it at Burford, even if my 50-something peer group were all in Somerset. Even if U2 failed to arrive as rumoured by helicopter, and ‘everyone’ was at Glasto, we had Jools, with his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, on a small sound stage dug into the pink-lit electric woods, on a lilac midsummer night. Guests lazed around hay bales drinking vintage claret out of plastic goblets (I am not making this up – thank you, mine host Matthew Freud!).
David Blaine, the hot illusionist with melting spaniel eyes, performed tricks on fainting women in long, filmy, backless summer dresses. And Jools, as ever, gave it all he had – we had the original line-up from Squeeze, playing the original Squeeze numbers – and then some. Gilson Lavis on drums, as ever. Mark Flanagan on blues guitar.
Jools – the diamond geezer from Deptford loved by old and young, chav and toff alike – took the mic.
‘We were famous once,’ he squeaked, before launching into a throbbing piano riff that had everyone jumping to their feet.
Then we had Cool for Cats, and another dig at the comparative youth of the audience compared with the 20 or so performers on stage. ‘We used to be on Top of the Pops. Have you ever heard of Top of the Pops?’
The audience 100 miles to the west of us certainly had.
Then, as if we weren’t already spoiled enough, Ruby Turner did a song, and Marc Almond OBE did a Tainted Love duet with Jools.
You know you’re old when formerly transgressive gay pop stars become national treasures.
You also know you’re old when Lady Dunstone (of Carphone Warehouse) drops her Soho House-provided pizza on your white dress and then your host throws a glass of 2003 Pauillac over it and, instead of tearing it off and running around naked (as my forebears would have done at Woodstock and Glasto in the Seventies), you leave the gig and trudge up to the house to wash it in the sink.