The Secret DJ on how Glastonbury changed his life

In the really early days it was a National Express coach then free in. No fences. Nearly every band was an ageing version of prog-rock or metal. Some whizz, tepid lager and maybe a bit of ’shroom action and it was a laugh and a half. Other drugs didn’t exist for us. No phones. No money! No way of getting any. You literally brought everything you’d need with you. We’d look on in envy at people with cars and transit vans, though they were covered in just as much shit as we were. There was one toilet backstage and it was as rough as everywhere else on site. There were no VIPs. Few people bothered to camp. We arrived the Tuesday before the weekend of the festival and we didn’t need ‘glamping’ and indeed you’d be hard-pushed to see a tent at all, because we’d stay awake for more than a week. Sometimes catch a couple of hours under a truck like the world’s worst mechanic. Or in a bass bin. No, really.

Then we started to go as a gang. It was before acid house really took off, and we all played in bands. But it was funk by now, not metal. We were the ones they told off for changing the comfy status quo 30 years ago. We were the proto-hipsters – although no one had beards except one or two of the riggers and a couple of actual wizards. We were ‘ruining it’ for everyone. The hippies loathed us. We brought speakers and electricity to the peripheries where it had never been before. We were mates with Spiral Tribe, DIY and Tonka and were the first people to rave there. We got in trouble for it. Everyone hated us ’cos we were skint, energetic and pretty. We were the millennials of acid house.

We were the first to play house and techno. I was one of the first DJs to play records on the sidelines, and sometimes between the bands on the big stages – or at least to mix them together – and it’s something I’ll always be proud of. The Second Summer of Love didn’t really dent Glastonbury, because we were already knee-deep in what acid house was just starting to do. We had a huge tin bath full of mushroom tea in an army surplus tented bar. We jammed for hours with our bands, and in between we played records. We gave the tea away. Back then you really could go there without a penny. Loads of things were free, including being there. Then one year traders had to pay for the pitch, and things changed…

A naked man with a long stick kept coming in our bar and demanding tea because he was ‘a dragon slayer’. We told him he was a pool player. Then we told him there was dragon needed slaying in the next field. He went off to check. Came back and every naked inch of him was drained of blood. He’d seen the new giant dragon sculpture for the first time while out of his mind. “I’m a pool player”, he told us. Then he fell asleep on one of our benches so me and the world’s strongest transvestite carried it like it was a stretcher from our peaceful periphery to the busiest drag and stood back to watch him wake up, teleported into Dante’s inferno. Next time we saw him he had climbed to the top of one of the scaffolding towers at one of the first car-park raves and was wanking on the crowd. Thankfully, we never saw him again.

We were the first to dress like idiots. One year there were some people from Torture Garden who came as latex wasps… and something started. The next year I put on a pristine referee’s uniform on Day 6 and minced about giving out yellow and red cards. There’s something about a ref that transcends even police as a force to be reckoned with. I had hippies on their knees crying because I wouldn’t tell them why they got a red card.

We were wearing ballgowns and tuxedos dancing to gypsies in Lost Vagueness with gay lads and lesbians to house music 20 years before NYC Downlow. Every generation thinks they are the first.

One year I played on the Radio 1 stage for 52 hours without pause. For two and half days and nights I mixed records together. I arrived in an estate car full of records and CDs, because unlike the newbie DJs I knew how long things could go on for. Sets weren’t two hours but eight, 16, 24.

I have no sense of smell so I once rescued a girl’s wedding ring from the shit pit. I’ve been helicoptered off site after my hernia split, and am proud to have puked in the only clean toilets in the whole place at the medical centre. We never used to check what the weather would be. It was futile. It never stopped us having a good time.

We always met at the Tiny Tea Tent if we were lost. And we always asked for “some tiny tea please” in teeny-tiny voice. We even did the steam lodge properly, as it was the only place you could approach clean. We’d see how many could crush into ‘Minuscule of Sound’ for shits and giggles. The answer is 22 – until one of the wall panels collapses.

“Beak! beak! beak!” – I can still hear a Liverpool voice selling cocaine back when it was strictly for celebrities. An amazing
lift when it was nearly over and we had nothing left in the tank.

And no politicians, no matter how awesome, would ever consider attending to win us over. ‘Cos we were scum, not nice, well-heeled voters. Every year I pray for it to rain, not because I am a bad person, but because I had the most fun there when it did.

Over a 15-year period we helped turn Glastonbury from a crusty mud-fest to what you love now, and the organisers barely acknowledged we existed and were happy to forget about us when suddenly everyone wanted to go. We we were the first to do many of the things you now enjoy, but under threat of violence from both police and security.

Watching it on the telly from your sofa has no more resemblance to what’s happening there than watching a major sporting event compares to being one of the players. And even as I reflect here on the page, I know that when I go there again I will love every minute. And as ever, I’ll find something highly weird on the periphery and never see so much as a falafel, guitar or pop starlet.

And I also know that despite every awful, middle-class ‘pop-up’, for every plastic DJ and badly chosen megastar, there will be kids and workers there for the first time who, like me, will one day look back and say, “those were some of the best days of my life.”

Ultimately, it’s up to us all to make – and live – our own Summer of Love, every single year.

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