0.12.1 - Or just twenty thousand people standing in a field?
She knew of my love of music festivals, and so when it came time for her family to make summer festival plans, she asked if I wanted to come also. In what seems a delightfully antiquated system in these modern times, I went to a music shop, put my name down on a list, paid £87 and around two weeks later, a full festival camping ticket arrived through my letterbox.
For context, the cost of festival tickets for the 2025 festival is £378.50, a mere 335% increase across the 18 festivals which have taken place since. Don't get me wrong, the festival deserves to make its money, musicians need to be paid well for their services, it's just a shame that the fact that wages have stagnated throughout the country as money falls into the orbit of the megarich which means that the people who stood with me in that field in 2000 likely would not have been able to afford to go at today's prices. Don't take my word for it, the economists at the Bank of England have my back here as well.
But I could, and I did, and so I went; me, my friend Alex, the young woman in question, and her housemate, plus all our camping equipment, food for 4 days, and really quite a lot of alcohol packed ourselves into her Fiat Panda and drove 6 hours packed like sardines in a can down to Worthy Farm in Somerset. The thing I love about Glastonbury's lineup is it's always eclectic and surprising. Most of the UK festivals cater for a specific crowd, attracting bands in complementary genres to ensure the maximum chance that if you enjoy something in the lineup, there's likely to other acts there which will take your fancy. The Glastonbury philosophy has always been just to invite all manner of bands, across the entire spectrum of music, and operate on the assumption that attendees have a wide musical taste and an curate their own experience without being forced to sit in a particular musical pigeonhole in case they get scared. It rules, and its years of consistent sell-out popularity reinforces that philosophy.
We arrived at the site relatively intact (just a slight traffic collision in the queue to get onto the festival site which did no significant damage apart from somehow breaking every coffee mug we had collectively packed for the weekend), got our tents up, got a program, and started to plan who we were going to see, and when.
My main reason for going to Glastonbury 2000 was to see Nine Inch Nails, who were on their Fragility tour and had not been to the UK either for some time, or possibly ever before; certainly not in the 4 or so years since The Downward Spiral and I was desperate to see them. They were playing precisely two shows in the UK that year; headline slot at Glastonbury on the Friday Night, and a gig at a weekend festival in London three weeks later. However, because I'm going to see NIN this summer, and I've already done one of their albums already, I chose instead to focus on other bands I memorably saw that year, and listen to the albums of theirs which most fits the time period.
Friday
Is it dirty pool of me to put Methods of Mayhem first here because it allows me to recycle an article I wrote back in 2017 about this album? Not at all. They were absolutely the first band we made a point of watching (yes, at nearly 4pm, we'd had a late night and also the festival site was big and we wandered around the whole thing) and the article has a fun Glastonbury story with it, so just go and read this article from 2017. It's worth it, honest. And for what it's worth, the album is now no longer too esoteric to appear in Spotify; eight years after I wrote that, it's now freely available through our streaming overlords.
Following them were The Bloodhound Gang, so we stayed and watched their show. I own still, somewhere (I think) Hooray for Boobies, a collection of music so embarrassingly juvenile I spent the entire time listening to it getting more and more mad at myself for buying and listening to the album in the first place. As a band, they are like the living incarnation of toxic masculinity, like as a concept it had somehow incarnated itself into a collection of human beings comprised entirely of misogyny and dick and fart jokes, and their album relentlessly reinforces that impression. As a misguided, stupid teen I thought they were funny and edgy, I remember distinctly and with great embarrassment my father coming to my room where I was playing this album, particularly the song 3.14 which involves the lead singer who's name I do not care to look up trying to find rhymes for the word vagina. He told me it was terrible, I told him he just didn't get it. He was probably the same age, or younger, than I am right now. He was right, it was stupid, and I was as well. In case you need any further reinforcement of this point, the live performance at Glastonbury did involve the band enticing several young women onto the stage and bribing them with merch and just straight up cash to take strip naked from the waist up. I don't get to use the word reprehensible very often, so I should thank the Bloodhound Gang for that at least.
When I was working through these albums for this blog this week, I listened to Play in part in the car with Catherine as we were driving around in the evening. I asked her if she owned this album - nearly everyone I knew back in 2000 did. Moby-mania had gripped the Gen X nation, but it seemed to pass Catherine by, and she somehow did not have it in her CD collection back in the day. As we were driving back, towards the end of our journey, she said "it's quite boring, isn't it?" and I wasn't sure how to answer - not because I thought she was wrong, but because songs on this album are so wedded to the experience of my twenties, and it was so ubiquitous, its hard to imagine levelling such a serious criticism at it. But I don't listen to Play, haven't for more than two decades before this week I would guess, and while the familiarity washed over me as I listened to the tracks in sequence, I don't think I was really listening to the music, just using it to think about being in my twenties again. Is Play boring? It's not exciting, it doesn't stir any real emotion in me apart from nostalgia. The jury might have to return no verdict here.
As to the Glastonbury performance, scheduling Moby, playing low energy ambient music, just a man on stage with the keyboard and a sequencer, just ahead of Nine Inch Nails, a band which is pure emotional energy from start to finish, will always puzzle me. Not to recycle more of my old writing, but I said this in my post about the Nine Inch Nails live album And All That Could Have Been back in 2017:-
" I remember that, in a scheduling choice that will continue to baffle me for all my life, Moby was the last act on before Nine Inch Nails headlined. Me and Alex had turned up half way through Moby's set to try and work our way to the front, and had ended up standing next to a pair of nice guys from New Zealand who had brought some booze in plastic bottles with them and shared it with us as we waited. I remember Moby finishing, and looking behind me at the massed crowd of people waiting at the stage. Almost in real time, the field of bright, tie-dye colours slowly bled away until it was awash with nothing but black as far as the eye could see."
I can still recall that moment with perfect clarity.
Saturday
The most middle aged reaction I've had to looking through my old things from that festival is the concept of headline acts not starting until 11pm. I'm ready for my gigs to be over at that point, if I don't get headline acts on stage before 9pm I get nervous. But it was a different time, and instead of being up until 2am because you have work stress and global event anxiety, I was up until 2am because of being 24 and watching bands and other entertaining activities.
This is a bit of a cheat because obviously I did not see The Chemical Brothers during this festival; I was busy in the moshpit for NIN while they were playing, but I did see them very shortly afterwards at the Manchester Apollo, and they fit thematically with the bands I saw that Saturday - specifically, the dance stage. Part of not just saying you like all kinds of music, but actually liking all kinds of music is commitment. I'd been listening to a lot of British dance and electronic music since the mid 90's. I heard Music For The Jilted Generation I think at the home of RPG nerd acquaintance Kingsley; I know for sure that D owned it, and I bought it on CD long before Firestarter unexpectedly send The Prodigy to number one. I'd also bought Dig Your Own Hole, and that album, and Exit Planet Dust and Leftism, along with some trip-hop stuff, DJ Shadow and Tricky, all contributed to a growing interest in Dance music.
When I did my article on songs being used in adverts, I very nearly put BRA in there, but it seemed to hyperspecific to the mid 90's and the UK, but if you don't know, Lynx (aka Axe) Body Spray used it in this commercial and the song made it into the charts off the back of it. I didn't know anything about Bentley Rhythm Ace apart from I liked the song from the advert, but that didn't stop me buying their album. To call back to a previous article, this album has a huge amount of connective tissue with the DJ Format and Jurassic 5 albums I discussed last week; this style of big beat/sample heavy dance, when I listen to it now, feels like it's just missing an MC rapping over it. There are great loops and beats here, but they feel somehow incomplete on their own; maybe I am just well conditioned. Bentley Rhythm Ace are also the reason I stopped wearing glasses and switched to contacts. The Glastonbuty dance tent was incredibly packed, sweaty, and kinetic by 10pm. In a fit of what was intended to be rhythmic movement during their set, I somehow careened into a fellow dancer who backhanded my glasses off my face and onto the floor some distance from me. I don't know if you've ever tried to retrieve a pair of glasses from the floor of an active dancefloor at 10pm when everyone is out of their mind on some kind of substance, but it's a thankless task and no-one comes out a winner, especially not the glasses. The lenses were intact, but the frames required some massaging to even resemble their former shape, and they never sat right on my face after that.
While Bentley Rhythm Ace (I have to stop referencing them, correctly spelling Rhythm every time is killing me) had underground and club success, Norman Cook/Fatboy Slim was a regular fixture at the top spots of the British charts; As was the style at the time, I came across his stuff first on the radio, where I was subjected to regular plays of the variety of hits off You've Come A Long Way, Baby! primarily as the nation and I followed along with the budding romance between him and his future ex-wife, Radio One DJ Zoe Ball. Much like Moby, owning this album seemed almost like a membership card to Gen X in the late 90s; unlike Moby, his music can't be accused of being boring, but if I am honest, I never felt completely at home at live Dance performances, Fatboy Slim included. My interactions with recreational narcotics had almost universally been poor (a story for when I talk about Portishead in the future), so apart from being lightly-to-moderately drunk, I never really experienced what I suspect is the special combination of altered consciousness and pounding dance music to unlock the quasi-religious experience I've had others try to explain to me. I think it's either a very tough gig (you're just a guy with a laptop in a booth, how do you make that into a live performance) or a very simple one (everyone is wasted and predisposed to have a good time, just hit your buttons and look like you are having fun) to be a DJ doing a live performance, but it never quite landed for me.
I've got more time for The Chemical Brothers in that regard; Is it because their shows come with large projection visuals? Is it because there are two of them? Is it the guest vocalists from other big bands at the time? I can't give you a straight answer, but all of those are factors; the other might be that I have in the past and still to this day find The Private Psychadelic Reel to be a transcendental musical experience, to the point where just writing about it has made me put it on in the background to enjoy it once again. I'm questioning my own wisdom in not just listening to Dig Your Own Hole for this, but Surrender was definitely the album at the time; Hey Boy, Hey Girl was not only all over the radio, but was being played in the rock and metal clubs I was going to on a Saturday night. However, I don't think this album holds a candle to its younger sibling. The Surrender tour did afford me the opportunity to hear TPPReel 'live' (are any dance concerts live? It's all just playback really) and that was something I had to experience, but when the best thing about a tour is when they play the song off the previous album you liked better, something has gone wrong somewhere.
Sunday
I've got complicated thoughts about how to be a consumer of live music, but I think British crowds are probably harder work to get out of their reserved posture and into a more engaged and responsive crowd than most. When its Sunday morning, and everyone is hung over, and it's 11.30am, and you are playing in a small tent, and the only reason the tent is full is because its throwing it down with rain, that's a degree of difficulty to win that crowd over which is nigh impossible to quantify. But I saw Asian Dub Foundation, a band I 100% knew nothing about until I ducked into a tent to get out of the rain, turn a crowd of wet and disinterested festival goers into their biggest fans in that moment through sheer enthusiasm and force of personality. It remains one of the great feats of live performance I have witnessed, and its stuck with me for two and a half decades, so the least I could do was listen to their album, Community Music. Obviously, I'm not British Asian, I don't have a colonial background, and even the northern town I grew up in was as white as the snowy mountain, but listening to Community Music tells me that people are still fighting the same battles now that they were then. This album was a kind of closet banger, and you have to wonder whether it was their politics, or the colour of their skin, or both which kept them from achieving more mainstream success.
Embrace exist in my mind in only three aspects; they are a medium difficulty answer to the question "name a Britpop band which isn't Blur/Oasis/Pulp"; All You Good Good People is such a weirdly catchy song that to this day I will just start singing the chorus out of nowhere; and they're one of the very few bands I've seen give an absolutely terrible live performance due to being (to use the technical term) completely wankered before they came on stage. Just an all time stinker, a staggering, slurring performance made worse by how amused by the whole thing they were. The Good Will Out is pretty standard britpop fare, with the standout radio single and several other songs you could mix into a pile with Ocean Colour Scene and The Seahorses and The Charlatans and make a game of trying to distinguish between them (you would fail), but my prevailing memory of Embrace is them giving one of the worst live performances I have ever seen.
But, honestly, if I had to go on before David Bowie, I might start drinking at breakfast and not stop as well.
I'm not going to tell you anything here that you don't know about David Bowie or Heroes; I picked that album just because Heroes was his encore, the final note of music from the Glastonbury 2000 main stage. It still feels surreal to have seen him perform live. I must have been a hundred rows or more back from the stage front when I saw him; just a tiny figure in the distance in a white suit; Like I did with Nine Inch Nails, I turned back to look at the crowd behind me. I can't imagine, or I hope not to, seeing that many people, that kind of mass of humanity gathered together. They went back as far as I could see, back all the way to the line of hedges and trees which marked where the paths back to the camping ground were, held in thrall by the voice of someone whose career had been going longer than most of us had been alive. I've never doubted the power of music to bring people together, but never has it been so starkly outlined in my presence.
We stayed up until 6a.m. that night/morning. We went up to sacred space and watched the sun come up, and then because we were not making wise decisions, decided that we'd try and make a quick get away before the crowds, went back, and struck our tents, packed our stuff and headed back to the Fiat Panda without sleeping. By 8am, with 4+ hours of driving still to go, we were all crashing. Our drivers family lived nearby, we stopped in for breakfast. I remember being sat at their dining table, with a plate of bacon and egg in front of me, and then being woken up ninety minutes later, the food still gently cooling on the plate before me. How we made it home alive that day, I will never know.
I'd love to go back; despite the price tag, the crowds, the noise, the late nights, it's still a place of magic to me; each year I watch the tv coverage and say to Catherine "I wish you could come and experience that like I did". Maybe when we are both retired.
* I'm going to have to start making a note about all the things I say I am going to talk about in the future just to make sure I actually cover them at some point.
**look, there's no January 0000; so 1 Jan 2001 would be exactly 1000 years since 1 Jan 1001 and 2000 years since 1 Jan 0001, everyone celebrated a year early.
