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Do you have a Glastonbury story to tell?

free spirit said:
tbh if she's going to write a story based on glastonbury, and only has post 2005 experiences to base it on herself, then I'd probably prefer it if she did have some proper pre2005 experiences to use, and let's face it we do have a fair few of such experiences between us to provide her with, or not as we choose.
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Thank you. That's exactly why I'm asking for stories in this way. Because I know that my own personal experience of Glastonbury can't possibly do justice to the pre-2000 days of the festival.
 
free spirit said:
from what point of view is ti being written? paying punter, volunteer, performer, staff, or mix?
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I definitely want it to be a mix of perspectives. There will be a lot of different stories that interconnect over the timespan of the novel (50 years), some in random, incidental ways, others in more significant ways, with many characters who return and become part of stories in subsequent years. I actually want to use an experimental plural first-person point-of-view ('we') that then blurs into individual first-person narratives. I know that sounds weird but I think it can work.

I've been working on the project for a few years now but only have only recently started trying to crowdsource the material. Thanks for your interest, Free Spirit.
 
I remember my girlfriend going. I didn't, but then I got together with a girl from college after I stayed at her place to watch the new show Vic reeves big night out. Horrible man. My brother also went an came back very smelly. Lame music and bad smells, I have never wanted to go, and my tellings about how shit it must be just get amplified year on year. Yuck.
 
I think one of my issues is that as soon as stories are written down they are finalised, that version becomes fact (even in fiction).
 
wiskey said:
I think one of my issues is that as soon as stories are written down they are finalised, that version becomes fact (even in fiction).
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I completely agree. One of the things I want to do with the novel is explore the idea of stories being told and re-told, and the way they become distorted in the process. So as well as things actually happening to the characters, some of the material I gather will be shared anecdotally between the characters, and take on a life of its own in the next chapters. So there will be a sense of people mythologising their own and others' experiences, and it will become a theme of the novel that there is no fact - only a loosely-shared fiction.
 
wiskey said:
I think one of my issues is that as soon as stories are written down they are finalised, that version becomes fact (even in fiction).
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and one of the main things with glastonbury was always how fluid it was, folk dealing with situations as they arose, so even amongst working or volunteer crews there would be a massive range of experiences, far more so than most other festivals due to the decentralised way the festival is / was run, with loads of fairly autonomous crews looking after different aspects of the festival.

but i guess that's why anyone wanting to write about it would need to crowd source the research to get as many different experiences as possible. not entirely sure how you could get that all into a book though without falsely mixing up the different experiences into a single character / group.
 
Sounds fascinating. I've never been to Glastonbury festival but I love the idea of your project and look forward to reading your book one day :)
 
I called in sick to work from glasto in 2000 I think it was, my excuse being that I had lockjaw. Made for an interesting phone call. I don't recommend it as an excuse as I had to keep it up for the rest of the week.

That was actually the only decent glasto I've been too, they were all shit after that. I think it was the last year before the fence so we all paid a fiver to use a rope ladder. Pet shop boys and Bowie. Off my tits on some quality pills. Oh to be young again.
 
free spirit said:
and one of the main things with glastonbury was always how fluid it was, folk dealing with situations as they arose, so even amongst working or volunteer crews there would be a massive range of experiences, far more so than most other festivals due to the decentralised way the festival is / was run, with loads of fairly autonomous crews looking after different aspects of the festival.

but i guess that's why anyone wanting to write about it would need to crowd source the research to get as many different experiences as possible. not entirely sure how you could get that all into a book though without falsely mixing up the different experiences into a single character / group.
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Three people watching the same event have 5 different versions of it ;)
 
Ruby 1979 said:
Hmmm, no. This is a YA novel set over one weekend of the festival, with a small group of characters. What I'm aiming for is much more ambitious an experimental than that.
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But the thing about Glastonbury is you can't do it ALL, you can only deal with what's in front of you ... sure, you know the rest is out there but it's too mindblowing to contemplate all at once.

Are you not just massively overcomplicating things?
 
wiskey said:
But the thing about Glastonbury is you can't do it ALL, you can only deal with what's in front of you ... sure, you know the rest is out there but it's too mindblowing to contemplate all at once.

Are you not just massively overcomplicating things?
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You've got a point about the individual experience of Glastonbury. That is exactly what it's like. But then the beauty of the novel as an artform is that it can give us access to a reality that isn't just about what we can see in front of our own eyes - like the inside of other people's heads and hearts, or things that happened in the past that connect in strange and complex ways to what's happening now.

Personally, I like making things complicated ;)
 
Starter for 10...

The year the fence really came down, I drove a van down overnight, stopped at the travellers field to drop a generator off with a friend's rig in the travellers field, left a mate sleeping in the van while me and another mate delivered the generator, saying that if he slept we'd get him to drive us round to the other side of site to the gate we needed to get in at....

got given a tab of acid as a thankyou, sat there for an hour or so then decided we'd best get into the site. Walked out of the marquee to find the van no longer there. Rang mate to find he'd done what he thought we'd asked, woken up and driven the van around to the gate at the other side of site to meet us, but we weren't there so he used my wristband and went in through the gate and started unloading the van to the campsite.

So me and mate were tripping our tits off the wrong side of the site, wrong side of the fence, and I was supposed to be running a stewards team the next morning.

Off we set down towards the site, veer off before the entrance and start walking up the fenceline. A few minutes later we walk into someone offering entry for a tenner each, hand over a tenner, crawl under a hole under the fence and leg it into the festival.

tbc
 
Oh another one, I once held the camera while my music journo flat mate interviewed fatboy slim on top of a winnebago. That was fucking surreal, he was absolutely smashed.

I also found an unlikely liking for Sugababes at that one. their music made perfect sense on a slightly sunny afternoon and again off my tits. There's a theme here I think.
 
one year the closest I got to seeing an actual name band on stage was 20 minutes listening to rolf harris from the backstage portaloo while answering walkie talkie messages.
 
free spirit said:
Starter for 10...

The year the fence really came down, I drove a van down overnight, stopped at the travellers field to drop a generator off with a friend's rig in the travellers field, left a mate sleeping in the van while me and another mate delivered the generator, saying that if he slept we'd get him to drive us round to the other side of site to the gate we needed to get in at....

got given a tab of acid as a thankyou, sat there for an hour or so then decided we'd best get into the site. Walked out of the marquee to find the van no longer there. Rang mate to find he'd done what he thought we'd asked, woken up and driven the van around to the gate at the other side of site to meet us, but we weren't there so he used my wristband and went in through the gate and started unloading the van to the campsite.

So me and mate were tripping our tits off the wrong side of the site, wrong side of the fence, and I was supposed to be running a stewards team the next morning.

Off we set down towards the site, veer off before the entrance and start walking up the fenceline. A few minutes later we walk into someone offering entry for a tenner each, hand over a tenner, crawl under a hole under the fence and leg it into the festival.

tbc
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Thanks for starting this off...look forward to the next installment.

I like "got given a tab of acid as a thankyou" - another theme emerging perhaps, of the Glastonbury barter system? There's another story on my site where someone says they gave a man a Kleenex and he offered a Valium in return. Not a bad swap...
 
Ruby 1979 said:
Thanks for starting this off...look forward to the next installment.

I like "got given a tab of acid as a thankyou" - another theme emerging perhaps, of the Glastonbury barter system? There's another story on my site where someone says they gave a man a Kleenex and he offered a Valium in return. Not a bad swap...
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had some mates the same year who spent a day going round all the dealers they could find on site doing swapsies for their pills attempting to work out which were the best pills on site.

At one point I think they had about 15 different pills, and could pretty much remember where they'd all come from.

I next saw them at the 24 hour dance stage absolutely off their tits and loving it.

They did attempt to explain which were the best of the pills, but gave up and hugged me instead going 'fuck knows they're all fucking mint'.
 
wiskey said:
I love that photo :D it is the definition of 'sauntering'!

And my mad photo skills from the back of a moving landrover :thumbs:
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see I've still got the picture in my head of you on the back of that landrover driving past grinning then raising the camera to your face, then grinning some more.
 
friedaweed said:
I went with my dad one year and he died snorting coke in a portaloo with the Manic Street Preachers but it all got hushed up because they didn't want anyone to know that they'd shared their toilet with him ;)
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I used their loo... There were no dead bodies in it I can assure you
 
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