Golden Oldies
GLASTONBURY FOR BEGINNERS
Like many of you, I have never ‘done’ Glastonbury, beyond catching the TV highlights on enchanted summer evenings, suffused with a cosmic sense of wonder and relief that I am not there ‘in person’.
My approach to ‘Glasto’ has echoed my Somerset neighbour Robin’s attitude to our capital. ‘London, Rachel?’ he replied when I asked him when he was last there, as if he hadn’t heard me right. ‘Never been. Never seen the need.’
Weirdly, this was the one year I might have given it a go, and not just to say I’d done it.
I haven’t done much outside my ‘bubble’ (bleugh), let alone heard live music or gone to social events for 12 months, apart from Donovan in the Cadogan Hall, which I described here as a‘ thé dansant in a care home without the tea or indeed the dancing’.
The Eavis family cancelled Glasto 2021 for the second year running on the grounds that it couldn’t be made 100 per cent safe (don’t get me started).
But then they announced that a bunch of marquee names – including Coldplay and Blur – would be playing for one night only for a ‘ticketed virtual event’, called Live at Worthy Farm. The concert is to be broadcast in full over four time zones. Everyone is invited and it’s only 20 quid to log on, zoom in and rock out.
Performers will play on stages at so-called ‘landmarks’ around the 900-acre site, including the Pyramid Field and the stone circle. ‘It’s going to be like the festival but without the people,’ Emily Eavis told BBC Radio 2.
Yay! Glasto is virtually back on, and the big question is – will you be washing your hair again that night on 22nd May? Well, let’s take a closer look at the line-up.
Apart from the aforementioned stadium-fillers, we have Michael Kiwanuka (best known for the Big Little Lies soundtrack), the duo Wolf Alice, the La-based girl group Haim and plenty more, including spoken-word, which may or may not be a draw.
When I heard the news on a BBC bulletin, the announcer mentioned another act which my brain automatically transposed to ‘Caino’ – after all, stranger things have happened than Lee Cain doing a live set, especially as so many Downing Street ex-staffers have been singing like canaries.
Even though it’s a rapper called Kano, I am ‘going’ and will report back.
Eavis had me at the words ‘like the festival, but without the people’.
Everyone’s invited, tickets are unlimited and, unlike former Glastos, you don’t have to suck up to friends with houses in Somerset nearby to contemplate going if you, like me, can’t bear camping.
See you at the Stone Circle at dawn, groovers!