Glasto: Mud, Blur and bags of attitude

Cathy Reay and Paul Carter high-fived when they heard their next assignment involved hangin’ at Glastonbury 09. Then they heard that there would be a stage of disabled bands on one of the festival days, and hearts sank. Was this going to be some pitying “look at us – we’re special” show, or would people actually realise the musicians’ talent and forget that they might look a little different

Glastonbury is renowned for being the biggest contemporary arts and music festival in Europe. With over 200,000 attendees at Worthy Farm, just outside the small village of Pilton in Somerset, its huge sprawling mass is daunting to anyone, particularly people with mobility difficulties, like myself and my colleague Paul Carter.

To begin with we were naively optimistic about the amount of expected mud. The opening night saw huge showers and thunderstorms directly over the site, ensuring that by midday Friday, swamps had formed trailing the length of every necessary route to and from each stage.

For someone as uncoordinated as me, this was very bad news, particularly because I find it difficult to balance on level ground let alone in gloopy, slippery sticky, uneven mud. Unsurprisingly, I fell over twice and missed several bands because I simply couldn’t access the stages they were playing. Neil Young more than made up for it though with his incredible, atmospheric headline set on the Pyramid stage. Playing old and newer tracks both acoustically and with his full band, Young’s exhaustive two-hour set proved, in case anyone needed reminding, that he still has it.

Although Friday was wet and miserable, Saturday was one of the hottest days of the year so far and as a consequence the ground quickly dried out. It enabled us to head down to the Shangri La fields, at the opposite end of the site, to see the disabled bands on the Club Dada stage, run by Attitude Is Everything.

After consulting our poorly-scaled map, we estimated that it would take us over an hour to walk to the fields. Given that we were exhausted from the previous day, we decided to enquire about alternative forms of transport. Waiting over 40 minutes, we were then told that buses were available from the disabled camping area to three of the stages, not including Club Dada. We took one bus, which got us a little closer, but still had to walk quite far at the other end on incredibly uneven ground. When we wanted to leave we had to wait a staggering two hours for a bus back to the main site.

The Shangri La field turned out to be the hippiest and most happening place to be. Families seemed to have decamped here to escape the mainstream masses and chill out with circus, jazz and cabaret acts. It’s such a shame it’s very hidden away from everything else, but perhaps if it wasn’t it would be just as congested as the main area.

Club Dada got off to a slow start with electro-rock outfit Spaceships Are Cool. Fronted by Rob Madisson, who is in a wheelchair, when describing their sound he said that they “try to incorporate sci-fi sounds of the 60s and 70s into modern music”. One of the instruments they use isn’t even tangible; it’s a magnetic field which sound is generated from when you move your hand within it. The crowd got bigger and better through the set as strays wandered in from outside.

Speaking to us afterwards, Rob said that, because he was nervous about playing again as a recently disabled person, coming to Glastonbury with Club Attitude created a very “safe environment” for his band. “I think this is a great way to promote the issue Club Attitude are raising [of accessibility at festivals and venues], and a chance for us to say thank you to them for helping us.”

He agreed that he’d like to see disabled musicians playing on the larger stages too, but said that he didn’t think they would purposely turn disabled musicians down; just there was no opportunity for it this year.

While there we also spoke to Grae Wall, Attitude is Everything/Club Attitude’s promoter. “The long-term aim is that we work towards a world where venues and festivals automatically think about being accessible from day one. The short-term aim is that the bands we put on today have been given an opportunity to perform at this huge festival,” he told us.

“We don’t want these musicians to be noticed for the fact that they’ve got a disability but for the fact that they’re just really good musicians.”

Surely putting them on a bill of disabled musicians and promoting it as such is invoking an unnecessary separation between the two, though?

“We do tend to try and mix it up, no-one in the final band playing in our line-up has a disability. We had this limited window of opportunity so I had to ask myself whether to offer it to bands we regularly try to support and might not get the chance to perform here if it wasn’t for us, or to utilise it to be more of a mixed forum. The last thing we want to do is create another ghetto,” he said.

Next up on the Club Dada stage was Al Cool and the Stranger Wines, who sound very much like Manu Chao. Cool hippie beats with an indie twang, we liked them a lot, and the tent was packed for their set.

After our two hour wait for a bus, we returned to the main site to watch Crosby Stills and Nash (who sounded a little wrong without Neil Young), indie darling Florence and the Machine (who has a very cool look and style, but rather unoriginally composed songs) and the evening’s headliner, Bruce Springsteen. We’d been looking forward to Springsteen for a while but sadly his two and a half hour slot didn’t match expectations, largely because he didn’t play a song anyone recognised for the first half of it.

The good weather held up on Sunday, with just a light spot of rain and cloud bothering the sun. The performances during the day were rather eclipsed by the impending reunion headline slot by Blur. They definitely didn’t disappoint; bounding through a two hour set jam-packed with hits (even we, as hardcore fans, didn’t realise they had so many), they moved through their own music in a timeless and classic way, in a way only the members of Blur know how to do. And the 150,000 strong crowd really loved it.

We trundled off to bed, knackered but happy. Though my colleague stayed in a tent on site (which he had to do on his own as our friends were camping too far away for him to join them), I had booked a lovely B&B for the weekend. The only trouble was, it was a huge pain to get to, and involved several expensive taxis in the middle of the night. On that almost fateful Sunday evening I was told to get on a bus, which would apparently take me back to my accommodation, but I ended up in Cheddar.

Fortunately for me, a fellow festival goer was prepared to drive me the hour and a half back. Let that be a lesson learned: if and when getting accommodation, make sure it’s very near to the festival site or that transport links are easy. There is nothing much worse than standing alone in the middle of a deserted village at 3am.

Overall, Glastonbury presented both expected and unexpected revelations, in terms of accessibility, attitude towards disabled people and music talent on show. No-one can prepare for how massive the site is, or really avoid it, but it would have been a lot easier if we had been given easy access to transport links around the areas we wanted to go. It also would have been a lot easier on the muddy Friday if I had remembered to bring wellies.

The work that Club Attitude and Attitude Is Everything are doing is fantastic; accessibility should be a given priority at venues and festivals, there’s no reason why someone shouldn’t be able to access music because of their disability and it definitely needs that recognition and hard work the organisation are putting in. However, for me personally I really don’t like being segregated or made to feel “special” and, whether intentionally or not, I did feel that their Glastonbury event did this.

As one of the members of Al Cool and the Stranger Wines was telling me after their set, people shouldn’t look at a band and consider a member’s disability a negative thing when it comes to their success, otherwise it will be. These bands, who are just as talented if not more so than lots of the other acts playing Glastonbury, should be playing slots on larger stages between bands that have no disabled members. People shouldn’t be made to feel like they should see them because they are “disadvantaged”, they should be made to feel like they should see them because they are very good musicians.