Kenny and the poo-cano

The first and only time I went to Glastonbury Festival was in 1995, a year when the internet and webmail still wasn’t widely used, when most people still had rotary dial telephones in their homes, except for the handful of executives and drug dealers that carried Mercury m300 mobile handsets on the one2one payment plan that gave them free evening and weekend calls, and when fax machines still printed onto thermal paper which would fade after about two hours, making the text harder to read than the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone.

It was a while ago.

Now if I conjure an image of ‘Glasto’ in my mind’s eye it’s of Jo Wiley sitting on a hay-bale, earnestly watching Ed Sheeran play an intimate acoustic cover of ‘Dirrty‘ by Christina Aguilera as the dying embers of another midsummer sunset in Avalon glint off his Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, while the children of record executives gambol amongst Soho House yurts, foraging for pills on the ground.

Back in 1995 the festival was very different. Britain was struggling. The utopian promise of the second summer of love was fading into a morass of moody drugs, Monday morning come-down acne, punitive legislation in the form of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act designed to curb illegal raves and free parties, and a sleaze ridden Tory government that watched as the pound crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on Black Wednesday, plunging the country into recession. When the Leader of the Opposition John Smith’s heart abruptly gave out the feeling was inescapable: the nation was on the skids.

Glastonbury festival was not immune. Despite a lauded performance by Orbital in 1994 and the introduction of the Dance Tent the following year, tabloid reports coming out of the 1995 edition were of violence, organised drug cartels, theft, burnt tents, caps, box cutters, big jackets, Stone Island, speedy beans, lax security, and a shit fence that got torn down, allowing 80,000 people to break in.

I was one of those 80,000.

Arriving at the site was like walking into the Do Lung Bridge scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’.

“Hey soldier, do you know who’s in command here?”

Festoon lights. Music. Smoke. Flares. Screams. The last acid-soaked outpost of a civilisation teetering on the threshold of lawlessness. An inter-zone where sensory modalities seemed to distort. Out on the wire people danced with ghosts.

I saw a man throw a grappling iron onto the top of the perimeter wall. He started to haul himself up. The grapple lost its mooring, pitching the man to the ground, and then struck him in the head. I saw the white of his skull as thick plasma oozed from the wound.

I moved around the boundary towards Hitchen Hill Ground. A geezer who looked like he was from the Inter City Firm tried to sell me passage through a freshly dug tunnel under the fence. “Twenty quid. It’s a bargain mate. Don’t be a cunt.” Further along I heard a security Landrover patrolling. A searchlight raked the evening sky. Leeward drift. A demobbed juggler offered me a bunk up. I scrambled over the top of the wall and dropped down the other side. There was shouting and the sound of sod pounded by hooves as a guard on horseback galloped out of the gloaming. I ran across the ten metre no man’s land and scaled the second lower fence and kept on running.

My memory of the weekend that followed is hazy, most of it lost to sunburn and excess. I can’t even remember what bands I saw.

But I do remember the Sunday morning of the festival very vividly. As Kris Kristofferson sang on ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’ — “Well, I woke up Sunday morning / With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt / And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad / So I had one more for dessert.”

Nursing a monster hangover I decided to check out the Stone Circle, that famous collection of oolitic limestones designed to represent the stars of the Cygnus constellation. Lore told that the easterly most stone aligned with the solstice sunrise and had the alchemical force to reveal the secrets of the unconscious. I strapped a zoot and made my way to the Green Fields. I was still experiencing some residual wonkiness from the previous night, low level visual and auditory distortions and time dilations that elongated every second of the present. As far as I was aware the fifteen minute walk from my tent had taken ten hours.

The sun was already over the yardarm when I reached the Fields. I saw a naked Vitruvian man sitting in a tree. His body was painted the colour of green algae, and he wore a crown of leaves. He intoned, “Science is the tree of death,” over and over. I continued past a Punch and Judy show just as Judy popped up on the play board and asked, “Where's the baby?” I heard the punchman deftly position the swazzle in his mouth to create Punch’s distinctive, squawked reply, “I have had a misfortune; the child was so terrible cross, I throwed it out of the winder.” The cudgel left faint trails as Judy swung it into Punch’s head something awful. Nearby a woman sat cross-legged in front of a hand-painted tipi, holding an orb and tearfully reciting William Blake:

“Little Lamb who made thee / Dost thou know who made thee.”

It was immeasurably sad.

I made my way up the hill and approached the sacred monument. A few small campfires burned. Revellers lay on the grass, peacefully communing with nature. A group of drummers beat out a shamanic rhythm. Tinny New Age music played on a small sound system. In the middle of this pastoral scene I noticed that a man was raving on his own. He wore stone-washed Best Company jeans and a white Lacoste polo shirt. His friend called over to him.

“KENNY GET TAE FUCK, YA DAFT CUNT. DINNAE GIES THAT SHITE. WHIT’S GOAT INTAE YE? LET’S GO. AH NEED A PISH.”

Kenny had taken all the drugs. Every single one. Like Oblelix from the Asterix comics, he had fallen into a Druid’s cauldron of drugs. His mind had loosened from the moorings of reality, leaving him afloat on an eternal cosmic rave. He danced in rapture and saw a tree full of angels bespangling every bough like stars, before the universe narrowed to a single point of light reflected in the pupil of an elfin mother goddess. Then he stopped, unbuttoned his jeans, pulled them down, and bent forward at the waist. A parabola of liquid shit shot out of his arsehole as he emptied the contents of his bowels. The perfect lateral poo-cano. He pulled his jeans back up and carried on raving.

His friend said, “FUCKS SAKES, THE CUNT’S SHAT EHS FUCKIN’ KEKS AGAIN.”