Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin | Music | Arts | Telegraph

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin


Tom Horan is washed away by the music
Video: Fun in the mud at Glastonbury
Audio: Christopher Howse on the magic of Glastonbury
In pictures: Glastonbury 2007
Glastonbury videos, reports, reviews and blogs

Christopher Howse reports from the Glastonbury Festival

Christopher Howse: The only man in a tie among 144,000 revellers

Zac, 11, was pulling Josh, nine, in a sledge, with sloppy Glastonbury mud in place of snow. "Again! Again!" Josh shouted. Then the thunderstorm started.

Away from the mud, with teepees at £1,600 and ridiculously bulky, shiny white camper vans filling the fields, the three-day festival has never been so comfort-seeking.

"In the past eight years I've been here," said the gate steward to the family camping field, "there's more money, less drugs, less crime and no fear of it."

In the first 24 hours, among 144,000 visitors there were only 33 arrests, mostly for drugs.

"And there's less of the hippy thing. Not so much naturism," says a woman volunteer, delicately. "It's the wall that's made the difference," says the steward. The wall is prefabricated, solid and high, disturbingly like Israel's wall.

Michael Eavis, the founder of the festival, is proud of it. "Apparently you can see it from the Moon," he says.

The festival is not at Glastonbury at all, though the cone of the tor breaks the horizon. It is held at Pilton. Perhaps the mystical number of 144,000 here make up a new breed, Pilton Man, which never grows out of a youthful urge to unite ritually each year.

But Clare and David from York, who have "just got our bus passes", are not veterans from the first festival 36 years ago. "We got interested after our children left home," she says. "Dave likes world music, but it's more than that. I like the performance art. It's amazing."


Among the 30,000 cars in the car parks, there are plenty of Audis, Volvos and BMWs. Ten thousand, almost all young, came greenly by train and then chugged the last miles on dirty old buses.

"We're doing a dance degree at Greenwich," says my 20-year-old neighbour, pointing to her fair-haired friend. But now they're spending the weekend working in a vegan cafe, hoping to slip out to see Bjork. Bjork has been here before, she just can't remember.

If for some Glastonbury is joining the social season with Ascot and Henley, its style is still young and grungy. At Henley gentlemen must still wear ties. Here I spent 24 hours without seeing anyone else with one on. Ascot cocktail dresses and feather hats can look vulgar. Here the middle class come in muddy disguise.

The mud was shaping up nicely yesterday - slopping under reckless reinforcements of rain. Nearly 2,000 years ago, an Iron Age tribe built a lake-village near here with huts raised on a solid pile of brushwood clay. This skill has been lost.

Tents in the rain cover the slopes like a swarm of crabs in a nature documentary - their carapaces jostling. The maddest camp next to the giant speakers. Hayley Evans, with her 20-month-old boy, found a quieter family field, behind the open-air cinema. "My baby slept through. But they had Ghostbusters on, and every time there was a scream, I woke up with a jump."

By night the noise and stalls turn the site into an endless funfair. A neon red dragon spews real fire. Chewing on burgers or Mexican veggie wraps, "newgers" or neo-punks mill past Blendavenda (juices and smoothies), Magic Shoes (For Happy Feet), Fairylove (The Place Where the Fairies Get Their Wings). A child cries for a fake tattoo - three scorpions for a pound. "The kids love it," says Miriam Kandis, of north London, as her six-year-old daughter, Bea, grizzles against her sleeve. Well, it was 10.45pm.

The site is so big and the crowds so sluggish that it seems many arrive at the Jazz World stage just in time to miss Toumani Diabate and then slug back to the Dance stage in time to miss Courtney Orange.

The place has its own smell - firelighter smoke, fat from burgers, bacon, Thai food, beer-tent swill, rubbish bins, rubber boots, chemical lavatories. It is not true that Glastonbury is unfashionable dress-wise. Everyone is dressed in a way that would turn heads in the street. Leopardskin wellingtons, a leather kilt and tattoos make a man stand out at home. Not here. Some of the G8 protest tendency can even look frightening in a pixie hat.

A festival-goer dives into the ubiquitous Glastonbury mud, encouraged by a crowd of revellers
A field is given over to disabled camping. A woman in a tricycle wheelchair whizzes downhill towards the Pyramid stage, where Kasabian were to play last night. As a first-timer to Glastonbury, I found it more friendly and more disorientating than I expected. In a way it is an immense babysitting venture. The 144,000 are fed and kept safe. Security men swap radio messages through the night.

Just after dawn at 4am the music abates and a thrush sings. Otherwise nature does not get much of a look-in. Outside the site, honeysuckle smothers a hawthorn, and bramble blossom chokes the ditches. Inside, the grass is trodden into mud. For the locals with houses in the lanes around, this weekend is like August bank holiday for Notting Hillers - noisy and crowded. But at Glastonbury only 13 thefts from tents were reported in the first full day.

"Come back when Mr Eavis's cows are in sole occupancy," says an earnest young man with an interest in the National Youth Orchestra, who perform tomorrow. "You'll be able to see the Four Evangelists carved on the old tithe barn."

Thanks, George, I might just.

Confessions of a Glastonbury virgin Music Arts Telegraph

Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker

Went to the Hopper retrospective at Tate Modern, London, a couple of years ago. Stunning.

Go see ...

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Why buck crowds to attend the big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston? Don’t we know this artist well enough by now? When I want to commune with “Nighthawks” (1942) again, I can do so quite satisfactorily at my dentist’s office, where, from a framed poster, the beaky dude and the bony dame at the wee-hours diner convey that root-canal surgery may not rate all that high on the scale of human tribulations. In fact, Hoppers in the flesh add remarkably small increments of pleasure and meaning to Hoppers in reproduction. The scale of the paintings is indifferent, in the way of graphic art. Their drawing is graceless, their colors acrid, and their brushstrokes numb. Anti-Baroque, they are the same thing when looked at up close and when seen from afar. I believe that Hopper painted with reproducibility on his mind, as a new function and fate of images in his time. This is part of what makes him modern—and persistently misunderstood, by detractors, as merely an illustrator. If “Nighthawks” is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby.

A visual bard of ordinary life, Hopper imposed a thudding ordinariness on painting. The strangeness of this quality must be contemplated directly, and in quantity, for its radical character to register at full force. It is the basis of his universal accessibility. Laying the cards of his intention face up, it inspires rare trust, which steadies our minds to receive the living truths that the pictures tell. Hopper stands with two other American artists, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, whose likewise monumental styles also trashed prevailing conventions of good painting and have proved to be deathless.

The Boston show is so comprehensive a gathering of Hopper’s greatest hits—each a world, created ex nihilo—that it may best be described by what little it lacks, in that regard. I miss about a half-dozen favorites, including “Pennsylvania Coal Town” (1947)—a geeky-looking guy with a rake in late-afternoon sunlight between two old town houses, seemingly glimpsed from a passing car—and “Office in a Small City” (1953): a young man at a desk in a large-windowed corner office like an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside. Both characters appear to daydream, absenting themselves from themselves, as people by Hopper do. Those are relatively late works, from the twenty-some ever less prolific and consistent (but underrated) years before the artist’s death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1967. One of the show’s curators, Carol Troyen, has deëmphasized that period as well as the busy phases, before the early nineteen-twenties, of Hopper’s long maturation, during which he practiced variants of Impressionism and, to support himself, worked unhappily as an illustrator.

While including a great many of the watercolors, of New England places, at which he excelled—with light-struck, massy, hardly watery effects, even when they depict water—Troyen scants the revealing drawings with which he painstakingly evolved his painted compositions. This is an occasion for exploring not what Hopper was for himself but what he is for us.

There isn’t a lot to know about him, anyhow. Born in Nyack, New York, the son of a drygoods merchant, Hopper studied with Robert Henri and made three sojourns to Europe. He was almost six feet five, and taciturn. In 1924, when a show of watercolors brought him his first success, he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a disappointed painter and his lively, obstreperous partner for life. She both resented and defended him. She insisted on being the model for nearly all his paintings of women. Childless, they lived on the top floor of a town house on Washington Square and, starting in 1934, spent nearly half their time in a starkly isolated house on Cape Cod. (Hopper seems to have liked places possessed of what might be termed negative feng-shui.) The couple read voraciously, often in French, and were compulsive moviegoers. Hopper portrayed himself and Jo in “Two Comedians” (1965-66), a late painting which is not in the show, as commedia-dell’arte clowns taking a farewell bow.

A good way to grasp Hopper paintings is to sketch them—never mind if, like me, you can’t draw. Just get the main shapes, including those of empty space, and how they nest together in the pictorial rectangle. Hopper bets everything on composition, which, in his work, is almost as tautly considered as in a Mondrian. (He didn’t so much hold back from modernism, from which he took what he needed, as see beyond it. He objected to abstraction only as Picasso did, for its limits on emotional engagement.) Hopper’s means are light and shadow, which establish the masses and the relative locations of forms. Raking light is the active element in static situations, as a stand-in for the artist, who inhabits his works everywhere and nowhere, like God. The light’s authority overrules worries about clotted textures and gawky contours. A wall or an arm is exactly as it is because the light, hitting it, says so.

Hopper’s is an art of illuminated outsides that bespeak important insides. He vivifies impenetrable privacies. Notice how seldom he gives houses visible or, if visible, usable-looking doors; but the windows are alive. His preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture. Imputations, to them, of “loneliness” are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder. They may not have lives you envy, but they live them without complaint. Another mistake that some observers make is to quibble with Hopper’s crudeness, notably in his renderings of flesh and foliage. His insults to taste are even instrumental to his art, focussing attention on what matters, which is drama. Clement Greenberg got it right when he remarked that if Hopper “were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.”

Art: COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

“Ordinary People” continues


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Ordinary People: The Art World: The New Yorker

Detroit spinners | Saturday Magazine | Arts | Telegraph

An electrifying stage act coupled with a teasing behind-the-scenes relationship has made the White Stripes the most thrilling and intriguing rock band of the past 10 years - Ben Thompson separates the art from the artifice

Son House was one of the greatest of all blues singers. Born on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1902, he died 86 years later - a long way north of his birthplace, amid the urban decay of Detroit, Michigan. The White Stripes: 'We know that making the kind of music we make is inherently ridiculous because we were born in the 1970s, we’re white and we’re from Detroit'

Just across that blighted city, in the predominantly Hispanic district of Mexicantown, a 13-year-old high school student called John Gillis (later to be known as Jack White) was wholly unaware of the old man's passing. Yet White's subsequent attempts to cross the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the ancient black blues singer and the young white rock fan (he once stated his artistic goal as being 'to trick 15-year-old girls into singing Son House's lyrics') would prove astoundingly successful.

The White Stripes, the band he formed to spread the electric pulse of excitement he felt on first hearing House's song Grinning In Your Face in his late teens, would introduce a whole new generation to the dusty delights of the blues, and establish them as the most consistently thrilling rock group of the 21st century. How these things came to pass is a story with as many twists and turns as a grizzled bluesman's biography.

But the central thread of the narrative is the relationship between Jack and his hard-drumming namesake - and lone bandmate - Meg White. Although she is invariably referred to within the clearly defined borders of the White Stripes' world as his 'little sister', Meg is actually Jack's ex-wife. And while this fact is now firmly in the public domain, it is very much off limits in on-the-record situations.

Absurd as the White Stripes' ritualised avowal of a demonstrable non-fact might appear in an era of remorseless accessibility, there is something intensely refreshing about Jack and Meg White's conviction that there are some questions that should not (or at least will not) be answered. And their unfashionable commitment to the preservation of their own mystery has certainly paid dividends.

As the White Stripes pull up beside Nashville's Blackbird recording studios (in which they recently completed work on their new album) it is hard to think of any pairing in pop who could make a more instantaneous and dramatic visual impact.

As brightly coloured songbirds flit and swivel in the magnolia-scented southern spring air, Jack, 31, is at the wheel of his immaculate cream 1960 Ford Thunderbird, with Meg, 32, seated demurely by his side.

Both are dressed in their habitual black and red - a routinised garb which the latter sees as being 'like a school uniform: it means you can just focus on what you're doing, because everyone's always wearing the same thing'. Yet this improbably glamorous duo could not be more fastidiously styled if they were Johnny Depp and Parker Posey starring in a Tim Burton remake of American Graffiti.

The marked contrast between the White Stripes' aura of old-school Hollywood glamour and the earthy spontaneity of their music is in no way accidental. 'Probably my favourite thing that's ever been written about us,' Jack White avers genially, having sat down in a sumptuous cerise-flock-wallpapered reception room, 'was that the White Stripes are "simultaneously the most real and the most fake band in the world".' He breaks into a Woody Woodpecker cackle. 'That's a high compliment - to be top of both those charts...'

Continued

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Detroit spinners Saturday Magazine Arts Telegraph

Sheffield Theatres - Dylan Thomas: Return Journey

Dylan Thomas: Return Journey has enjoyed international success and worldwide acclaim and played both London and New York seasons. Blending beauty, humour and passion, Dylan Thomas' electrifying presence is brought to life by award-winning Welsh actor Bob Kingdom.

This is an incredible tour-de-force performance for the 21st anniversary farewell UK tour of this revisited legendary production that has been internationally acclaimed around the world. ‘I could have listened to his spell-binding, word wizardry for hours’ The Times ‘Thomas' intense love affair with language transmitted with hypnotic-beauty’ New York Times ‘He creates an actor/author partnership to match the very greatest’ - London Evening Standard

Presented by Richard Jordan Original Direction by Anthony Hopkins with Bob Kingdom as Dylan Thomas.

Sheffield Theatres - Dylan Thomas: Return Journey

To die for | Saturday Magazine | Arts | Telegraph

Damien Hirst may have mellowed since his hellraising days, but his capacity for the sensational has not waned. As the artist unleashes a new exhibition, crowned by a diamond-encrusted skull worth £50 million, Will Self is granted a very high-security preview ...



In pictures: For the Love of God



In pictures: Selected works



Richard Dorment's review



Thursday, May 10, 2007. We are in Newport Street, London SE11. To one side is a non-descript row of light-industrial units, to the other the railway viaduct along which the Eurostar trains slow-sway their way through the somnolent southern suburbs bound for Paris. This bit of Lambeth seems like a scrag-end of the metropolis: implausibly close to the Neo-Gothic power station of Westminster and the Brutalist cultural blockhouses of the South Bank, yet a world apart.

Damien Hirst: 'We can't be humping about steel and glass when we're old; we'll have to make little wooden things'



Still, cities have long memories, bred in the brick. Within yards of here the Lambeth Pleasure Gardens once spread, with their contrived grottoes and pseudo-sylvan groves, their lightshows, water features and hidden string ensembles - a 17thcentury exercise in special effects. Near here, too, was Tradescant's Ark, London's first museum, where the eponymous antiquarian amassed a great wealth of animal bones, stuffed birds and exotica from far-flung cultures.





We are also in purlieus of Elias Ashmole, the alchemist - and collector - who's buried under a black slab in South Lambeth Church that proclaims his name will endure as long as his Oxford museum. And, of course, Lambeth is William Blake's London: the garden nudist, the visionary who drew the angels he saw doing synchronised swimming in time-goo. Blake, of whom it was once said, 'His work shows what a bad artist would be like, if he happened to be a genius.'



There, walking beside the railway arches in a knitted helmet - complete with earflaps - wearing a leather jacket with an iridescent skull across its shoulders, an off-white T-shirt with a dove motif on its breast, and half-arsed black bondage trousers (they look capable of confining only the seriously febrile), is the lineal descendant of Ashmole, Blake and Tradescant: Damien Hirst, the curator of his own museum, the artificer of pleasurable torture gardens, whose self-professed alchemical aim is to cheat death through the sheer chutzpah of his creations and his collecting. He's on the phone.



And stays on and off it for the remainder of the six hours we spend together. Interviewers remark on Hirst's phenomenal energy: his gourmand's attempt to ingest the world, quite as much as he vomits his art into it. Others who've met him have been bamboozled by his bewildering shifts of persona: from mechant Machiavellian, to ingenue, to idiot savant, to - in their purview - surprisingly well-educated discourser on the history of art and his place within it.



But I greet none of these, only Damien, whom I first met in 1994, then knocked about with a bit during what his friend - and art dealer - Jay Jopling describes, not a little ironically, as 'the glory years'; that heady period in the mid to late 1990s when, so far as Hirst and his peers were concerned, the kaleidoscope had been shaken and the pieces were in flux. Before they settled, Hirst et al made to re-order the London art world. And they succeeded.



If I'm paraphrasing Tony Blair's notorious sound-burp, eructated after 9/11, it's for a reason. Blair and Hirst were the polarities of this era: nodal points around which the energies of our very metropolitan society have flowed for a decade. If Blair had the hubris to seize upon the destruction of the World Trade Centre as an opportunity for a Nietzschean re-evaluation of all values, then Hirst had already got there, with his call for the perpetrators of the atrocity to be viewed as artists. This statement he later apologised for - although never retracted.



Now, May 10, 2007, Blair is on his way out. As Hirst and I sit drinking tea made by the artist himself in the studenty kitchenette of his London atelier, his nemesis is fighting back the tears in front of his constituency party in County Durham: 'Sometimes expectations were too high,' Blair moans, 'but at least I had a go.' It's a mea culpa we can never conceive of Hirst making; nor can we imagine him committing the moral solecism of describing the bloody flux of Iraq as 'blowback'.



No. Blair is on his way out, off to the US lecture circuit to pay his mortgage, taking his religious belief with him. Meanwhile, Hirst is on his way up, with his first show at Jopling's White Cube since 2003's Romance in the Age of Uncertainty; a show that may have received a critical excoriation but garnered prices that made him the highest-paid living artist in the world.
Blair and his apparatchiks may have come to power in 1997 saying that they were seriously comfortable with the seriously rich - but they were never comfortable with Hirst; and the very cynosure of the Great Wheel of Spin they tried to rev up around 'Cool Britannia' was a dark and numinous hole, for the artist's work exposes that which underpins all capitalism, including Blairism, namely - to quote the anthropologist Mary Douglas - that 'Money is only an extreme and specialised form of ritual.' Or, as Hirst himself sums up the Antihirst's premiership: 'The lying c***. I hated all that spin. I just looked at him and thought, you're a fraud.'

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