I played banjo with Billy Bragg at Glastonbury festival

Forget the mud, the toilets and the crowds. Glastonbury first-timer Tim Dowling’s biggest challenge was to get a gig. But who would invite him on stage? Step forward Billy Bragg . . . On the train I tell myself I won’t write about the mud. There’s always mud, I think, and everyone always writes about it. Let’s just say the going is extremely soft, even liquid. The ground sucks at your boots when you walk and, once you’ve crossed a few hundred metres of it, it sucks at your soul a little, too. When people talk about Glastonbury in terms of numbers, the scale of it can be hard to fathom. I can’t really picture 137,000 people, or imagine the throughput of the 3,200 toilets laid on to accommodate them. But there is one statistic that struck me with a certain force: over the three days no fewer than 2,200 acts were scheduled to perform. Whether anyone watched them or not, several thousand people will be able to say they played Glastonbury 2011. And when I turn up early on Saturday morning, I mean to be one of them. I am going to play the banjo at Glastonbury. Finding someone to play with proves more challenging. Despite some cajoling from the Guardian music desk, Noah and the Whale do not wish to be associated with, or photographed anywhere near, a banjo. Instead I manage to book a brief jam session with Fisherman’s Friends , a sea-shanty group from Cornwall, under a giant giraffe. I can’t see why an a cappella group would need banjo accompaniment, but I am not in a position to be choosy. Unfortunately they are, and I’m left standing under the giraffe by myself. Later they reschedule for 6pm. I am obliged to strike out on my own. Although I would like to claim toting a banjo around a huge muddy festival as an additional hardship, I can’t. Everybody’s carrying stuff. Parents are happily hauling pushchairs through the mire. People are walking around the site in wedding dresses. I pass a man wearing butterfly wings, Spock ears, a purple feather fascinator and a high-visibility vest. I decide the Stone Circle – a sort of catch-all spiritual focal point on a rise at the southern edge of the site – might be a good place to kick off my Glastonbury career, but it soon becomes clear that anyone seeking to draw attention to themselves in the circle faces impressive competition. I climb up on one of the stones and play for a bit, but no one comes near. Some festival-goers appear to be attempting to commune with the other stones, either by leaning against them or laying on hands. On the stone directly opposite four people dressed as Teletubbies are having their picture taken. Around the campfire at the centre of the circle all one hears is a series of sharp staccato gusts, as balloons are filled with nitrous oxide and sold to punters by enterprising, red-faced men. It’s sort of peaceful. After about 20 minutes a small child with a painted face clambers up on the stone beside me and listens while I play. “How many Glastonburys have you been to?” I say, trying to make small talk. “Six,” he says. I notice he has something written on his forearm. “It’s my first one,” I say. “What’s that written on your arm?” He grabs hold of his wrist and reads it out carefully. “Please. Return. This. Child. To . . .” I have to go, because I’m appearing with Billy Bragg , who has graciously consented to let me play a song with him in his regular 3pm slot, Bill’s Big Roundup, on the Left Field stage. “The song is called Way Down Yonder in the Minor Key,” he told me when I spoke to him on the phone the previous Thursday. “But don’t listen to the recording, because I don’t play it that way any more. You need to find the version I play live. Your best bet is a YouTube clip from a Canadian children’s programme called Peggy’s Cove , where I’m singing it to a puppet lobster.” “OK,” I said. “It might have been a crab, I don’t know,” he added. It was a lobster. After watching the clip several dozen times, I think I’ve memorised the chords, as well as all the lobster’s lines, but as I approach the backstage area behind the Left Field tent, my hands are shaking. I once drove hours hours through a blizzard to see Billy Bragg play, and the prospect of meeting him would be very exciting were it not alloyed with a sense of impending doom. He pulls his guitar out of his case and talks me through the song’s basic structure. It’s simple enough, but I get a bit lost in the run-through. “The thing is, Tim, I’m a bit like you,” he says. “Not much of a musician.” I pause to admire the way he has welded a charming bit of self-deprecation to an insult so neatly that at first I mistake the whole thing for a compliment. During our brief rehearsal I never once play the song right. I wait backstage while Bragg begins his show, which immediately follows a debate on the future of green employment. Onstage with him are Emmy the Great and singer-songwriter Leon Walker, late of Dartmoor prison, who Billy met though his campaign to provide musical instruments to offenders, Jail Guitar Doors. I am, in every possible sense, out of my depth. After their third song I get introduced, I walk out, I sit down and, well, I’m afraid I don’t remember too much after that. I’m pretty certain I missed the passing A chord in the first chorus (I’ve always assumed that “passing” is in its musical sense more or less synonymous with “optional”) because every time it came around again Bragg turned and gave me a quick, hard stare to make sure I didn’t forget again. Later I also recall something Bragg said to Leon about me just before we went on. “We’re treating him as a musician today, not a journalist,” he said, sounding as if he’d only just decided it. “Bring him in gently, he’s one of us.” I’ll take that – if I never play Glastonbury again, I can be content with the memory of Billy Bragg’s extreme generosity. Which is just as well, because the Fisherman’s Friends cancel our six o’clock. I am left to wander the site. In the Craft Field I see a stall where people are taught how to build ovens out of cob, an ancient, handmade clay-and-straw building material. This strikes me as odd, since the whole festival already seems like a giant machine for churning straw into wet clay with the feet. We’re all making cob, hundreds of acres of it, smooth and oven-ready. In a dystopian urban mockup called Shangri-La, I am suddenly surrounded by nurses in platinum blond wigs, who prod me and look into my eyes. They tell me I have a virus. They recommend tequila. I realise I haven’t seen much music. I slog over to see Pulp at the Park stage, where the mud is so sticky that to stand still is to risk permanent cementation. As the sun sets the woman next to me offers me something brown and homemade from a lemonade bottle. “What is it?” I say. “After Eight vodka,” she says. “Oh, no thank you,” I say. There is a long pause while we listen to Pulp. “So what do you do?” I say. “Just crush up After Eight mints with vodka?” “No, I melt them,” she says. “Actually, I think I’d better have some of that.” This begins a chain of events that I could probably summarise as more drinks. My legs turn to lead. I watch Coldplay’s set on a hospitality bar telly. Glastonbury runs on a 24-hour clock, but I do not. I find myself listening to people who are drinking whisky at 2.30am complain of being defeated by tiredness. I decide it’s time to find my tent while I still can. It sits directly under a guard tower – tower R2 – where a watchman’s walkie talkie brings news from around the festival all night. “We have a very distressed individual wishing to leave the site,” it chirps at 4am. This makes it hard to sleep, but I find it reassuring to know that if I become distressed in the night – a distinct possibility – I need only shout up to him. The next morning the sun has dried the mud into leathery lumps and rolls. At midday I wander off to the Pyramid stage – my first visit – to see the Low Anthem . At this hour it’s easy to get to the front of the stage, where security guards are handing out cups of water. I notice the Low Anthem has a banjo onstage. That’s at least two banjos, out of just 2,200 performers. I think I smell a trend. Glastonbury 2011 Billy Bragg Festivals Tim Dowling guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 26, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.