TMOLSGPEH

OWOF 95

Downstairs in a little Cheltenham dive bar that had become our britpop clubhouse (see Chelter Skelter by Ricky Spontane for further details), watching the channel 4 coverage of Pulp, headlining the Saturday night, pissed off.

(Can’t work out how to embed this from my phone, but here is Ricky Spontane, 13 years later…)

OWOF 1994

1994 was a weird one, I was completely alone. Given how into it my friends would become over the next two years it seems almost impossible. Bizarrely this doesn’t seem to have stopped me having a brilliant time…

In the box that held most of the other things I’ll be showing you was also my 94 diary (the only real time I’ve kept a proper one), which tells us this:

Thursday 23rd: went to Glasto with a ridiculous smile plastered all over my face. Happy hippy joy joy.
Friday 24th: Manics, Sice’s steaming head. Dancing til 3am at Jo Banana’s with blonde smiling girl.
Saturday 25th: Jah Wobble, sleeping through Trans-global, Senser, Wa-da-da-don-da-da-day [editors note: no, me neither], the failure of M-People + Bjork, Charlie Chuck, live percussion for Orbital, wondering how many people had died [editors note 2: no one, but there was a shooting, by Jo Bananas]
Sunday 26th: meeting Lisa [a college friend], Oasis, Credit, Chumbawamba, PULP, missing penguin caff, radiohead, blur, we are the mods, spiritualised, more dancing.
Monday 27th: boo hiss, going home.

Well done 20 year old me, there.

94 was also the first time I camped by the NME stage and, as we can see, I got as far as the acoustic and cabaret tents.

The site is still relatively tiny at this point. The Park is still a car park and the site is longer than it is wide, unlike the middle age spread its shown over the last couple of years. Also still no proper dance tent, but there was (honestly) a tent at the far edge of the Other stage which played the Young People’s Dance Music, but had no licence. I think this is what my Sunday dancing was. I also think I was on nothing stronger than cartons of ribena…

The Sunday NME line-up has, of course, passed into legend as The Real Actual Start of Britpop, and, honestly, it really did kind of feel like it, even with chumbawamba in the middle of it all!

OWOF 1993 errata

Ha, just thought of another couple of things!

93 was the only year I camped on Big Ground, ridiculously near the outdoor cinema screen, not a great choice.

My tent, a ridiculously heavy brown ridge job, got robbed. They nicked my sunglasses and the paracetamol from the very large first aid kit me mam had sent me, but that was all.

There are a squillion other things too, dancing at Jo Bananas (we had to make our own fun in those days etc), wandering round the theatre fields, being amazed by the food etcetc. Can’t remember if I went up the stone circle though, think I was afeared of the hippies…

OWOF 1993

So in my sixth form common room in the north east I’d read EVERYTHING about Glastonbury 92 and knew I had to go in 93. Moving to Cheltenham for college made this significantly easier. I got my ticket for my birthday in mid-May (imagine!).

It was a beautiful weekend, not a drop of rain. Strangely none of my friends were bothered and it was only by meeting someone I vaguely knew on the bus down that I wasn’t completely alone.

What you can’t really tell from the map in the last post is that the NME stage (call it by its name) was 90 degrees round from what would become its permanent place the next year. I spent pretty much the entire weekend there apart from Rolf Harris, who might have been the first act i saw and Velvet Underground who were absolute bobbins.

Highlights included:

The Lemonheads, just before Evan got on the crack and thus the “come on feel…” tracks were sung beautifully. I suspect the bootleg tape I bought later that evening is now knackered.

Teenage Fanclub, they kicked footballs into the audience!

SUEDE. Oh suede, how I loved you. Still with Bernard and still lovely.

One week, One festival

Next week I will go to my fifteenth Glastonbury Festival, it’s 20 years since I first went and it’s changed (and changed and changed) over the years. Sadly I don’t seem to have many personal photos of my time there (I definitely took some in ‘93, but god only knows where they’ve ended up), but I have got a big pile of paper-based things that I’m going to take pics of, and write a bit about too (hopefully).

My Glastonburys split into four phases, defined, pretty much, by who I went with and where we camped, viz:

93-94 Early Funny Stuff
97-00 Blagging it
02-07 The Freaky Trigger/ILX years
09-11 Strictly for the hardcore

The two festivals I’ve missed since I started going were 95, due to complete skintness (having just finished my degree) and 2008 which I boycotted due to the massive fail that was 2007.

One Week*, One Festival

So I’ve got a BIG pile of Glastonbury ephemera:

a phone with the tumblr app and a camera and nothing to do this evening…

Strangely almost nothing from the last two. I know i accidentally left my programme behind in 2010, but there should be a q review somewhere and both prog and review from 2011…

Join me later as I remind you who was the last band to play the Pyramid stage in the 20th Century, how small the site used to be as recently as 2005 and what 16 year old mud stains look like (on a Select daily, nothing else…)

*possibly “one evening”, bit busy the rest of the week…

Craft Beer Crawl!

So, next Saturday, 29th January we will attempt to visit a lot of london’s finest Craft Beer Establishments in one day.

This is how it goes:

11:30 breakfast of Kernels, Druid Street SE1 (walk to)
12.00 Dean Swift, Lafone St (walk to)
13.00 Draft House, Tower Bridge Road (walk to) Draft House shut ‘til 2 due to waterworks…
13.30 Rake, Borough Market (get THAMES CLIPPER at 1529 (or 1609) to)
16.00 Cask, Charlwood St (get Victoria Line)
18.00 Euston Tap, Euston Station (get Northern Line)
19.30 Southampton Arms, Highgate Road (Overground to Dalston)
21.30 Jolly Butchers, Stoke Newington High Street
21.30 CHANGE OF PLAN Dukeof Wellington, Balls Pond Road is having a beer festival so seems rude not to pop in… Sorry Jolly Bs, we’ll see you soon.

Obviously as the day progresses timings become more [ahem] fluid, particularly once BOATS and TUBES become involved.

we shall be using #craftbeercrawl as our hashtag and having a lovely time, i’m sure.