Alison Goldfrapp was going through a gentle, folky, acoustic period when she was invited to play a festival in the outer reaches of Norway. The journey was wonderful, she says. She and her band travelled by boat across beautiful fjords until finally they reached their destination. It turned out it was a metal festival. “We went on stage and there was one long-haired bloke in the middle of this dusty forest.”
Did he enjoy the gig? She doesn’t bother answering. “Slowly people started turning up. Mostly men with beards in black T-shirts.” So things improved? She laughs. Her keyboard player, Angie, had a fight with one of the heavy metal musicians because he kept throwing things into their dressing room and trying to get a look at her changing. “He was covered in tats and had a neck about this wide,” says Goldfrapp, making a circle with her arms big enough to hug a sequoia.
Music festivals are strange beasts. For civilians, the memorable ones are often half-forgotten, exaggerated tales of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Not for the musicians. Drugs are an everyday experience for many who have experienced addiction, so not memorable. As for the sex, they are stars – it’s easy to come by. And the rock’n’roll? That’s their day job.
But Goldfrapp, who played Glastonbury again this year, has done her best to add to festival mythology. I remind her of the time she said she wanted three buses for the next time she played Britain’s biggest music festival – one for the outfits, one for the boudoir and one for her lovers. “I don’t recognise that quote,” she says. “But it sounds good to me.” And she once said she had a “terrible urge to take off all her clothes” on stage. She looks appalled. “Who said that?” You! “When?” Nineteen years ago, when I interviewed you. “Never! That’s the last fucking thing I want to do! Jesus Christ! I mean, apart from terrifying myself, everyone would run away in horror. That’s the kind of thing you have nightmares about – that you’ve gone on stage without your knickers on.” Maybe you’ve changed over the years, or I brutally misquoted you. “I think you brutally misquoted me! Ha ha ha!”
Debbie Harry is Zooming from the US in the buildup to her appearance on the Pyramid stage. She sounds a little breathless. “I’ve just been chasing the dogs,” she says. Harry had five, but she is down to two. “I just had to give the little guy away because he was pissing on everything.”
Harry looks fabulous – huge glasses, a punky T-shirt and that signature blond bob. Did she go to festivals when she was younger? “Well, you know, I’m quite an old lady now. There weren’t really any festivals to speak of.” Then one comes to mind. Woodstock. “That was the first festival I went to. Woodstock was the birth of festivals in the US. I rolled about in the muck and had a great time.” How old was she? “Oh, I was old. In my early 20s. I just went there with my friends who happened to have a big tent. We thought we’d found a great place to pitch the tent, and it was kinda rainy and messy, and in the middle of the night people came along and said: ‘Oh, you’ve got to move the tent – a helicopter’s coming in with Janis Joplin.’”
At a festival in Barcelona in the 1970s, she walked into her dressing room to find Nico, whom she had long admired. “The caravans were tiny and cute, shaped like ovals ... I went barging in and there she was with her harmonium.” Is it right that she was shooting up when Harry walked in? “I don’t know for sure, but I think she was. It would have been very rock’n’roll of her to be doing that. In retrospect, I wish she hadn’t been.”
The singer-songwriter Steve Earle, who played the Acoustic stage on Friday, says he has grown to like festivals more as he has got older. At first, he was anxious and peeved that he didn’t get to soundcheck before playing. “Self-importance used to make me nervous about the fact I didn’t get a sound check and I didn’t get this and that. The huge headliners own the stage where they’re playing for that day and go by their rules, but I’m not one of them.” Why does he enjoy festivals more nowadays? “The money’s usually good, but it’s really the people I get to see.”
Earle is touring in Antwerp when we speak a couple of weeks before Glastonbury. He tells me of the time he played the Byron Bay festival in Australia and the harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite complimented him. “He’s the best blues harp player in the world. I finally made a blues record and played the music at the festival, and Charlie came all the way across the staging area and said: ‘You play great harp on this record.’ I went out with my chest puffed out for about three days.” As he tells the story, his chest puffs out again.
Then there was the festival at which Earle got to share a ride with the singer-songwriter Donovan and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. Earle sounds like a kid in a candy shop. “I had both of them in the same van. I interrogated them all the way back and they were happy to tell me everything they could. That’s the stuff I remember about festivals.”
Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds also says meeting musicians has made for his most memorable festival experiences. Chatting to Jackson Browne was a highlight because, well, he is Jackson Browne. But the musician who made an impact the first time he played Glastonbury hadn’t even begun his career at the time. “Two guys were in a bit of a state and I was like: ‘Are you all right, fellas?’ and they were like: ‘We’ve had our tent robbed and we’ve lost all our money.’ They were all upset and I was like: ‘Bloody hell, here’s 40 quid, try to enjoy the rest, hopefully that’ll get you through.’” That was kind of you, I say. “Yeah.” He smiles. “It’s not like me to have done that! Years later, I discovered one of them was Simon Fowler, the singer of Ocean Colour Scene. He was a kid at the time.”
Laura Mvula is driving down to Glastonbury when we speak. She was shocked the first time she played, in 2013. “I was on the main stage, the Pyramid. And it was pretty overwhelming. I’d never seen so many people in the flesh before.” Her weirdest experience at the festival was in 2016. “Meeting the Stones backstage was really wild – and I figured out Ronnie Wood is married to the daughter of my junior school teacher!”
The soul and disco legend Candi Staton has just arrived in the UK for Glastonbury. Like Mvula, she didn’t know what to expect of the festival when she made her debut years ago. “I’d never heard of it. I’m from Atlanta and it wasn’t talked about there. When I got to Glastonbury, I’d been doing a few shows and I was a little hoarse and tired, and I wasn’t dressed the way I normally am. I just threw something on and walked out there and I was shocked – 60,000 people, and they were wild. I was like: ‘Oh my God, if I’d known there were going to be 60,000 people, I’d have at least put a bit of the shiny stuff on.’”
Staton, 83, is full of life and love. But when I ask about her most memorable festival, she goes quiet. “It was in Atlanta at the time of their Olympics in 1996. I was there the night they had the bombing. We were all there that night – me and my kids and my grandkids were at that particular stage where the bomb went off. I had to perform somewhere else the following night, so we decided to leave and check it out. And that’s when the bomb went off. I felt so sorry for the people who died and were injured, but so blessed that we decided to move. People at home were calling us, saying: ‘Get off the grounds, they’re bombing that place.’ It was bad. Really bad.”
Neville Staple’s most memorable festival is also rooted in tragedy. Staple, formerly of the Specials and performing at Glastonbury this year with his own band, played at the Godiva festival in Coventry a day after his 21-year-old grandson was fatally stabbed. “He was killed on the Friday night and the festival was on the Saturday. My daughter said I should do it. When I was on stage, I could see people crying, and I was supposed to talk about what had happened – a ‘watch what you’re going to do with your kids’ talk. I was singing A Message to You and I couldn’t sing. I kept on crying. My wife, Sugary, had to take over halfway through. That was the worst time at a festival and the most moving one I’ve ever done.”
As for the weirdest – well, that was Glastonbury. Staple says he was used to the pampered backstage life when he decided to take a walk across a field. It was one of the wetter festivals. A fan spotted him and asked for an autograph. Staple walked over to meet him and found himself sinking into the mud. “It was raining like hell. I got stuck nearly bloody knee-high. I couldn’t move. ‘Sugary, Sugary!’ I was shouting.” She came over to help. And she got stuck as well. “Our roadie had to come and get us out. In the end, it took the two of them to get me out.”
He asks if he is allowed one more memory: the time Amy Winehouse asked the Specials to play with her at V festival. They were made for each other, he says. “She was so brilliant – and the way she danced. When she was on stage with us, it made me wish she’d been in the Specials. It would have been great to have done a tour with her.”
Billy Bragg can’t remember how many Glastonburys he has done. All he knows is that he made his first appearance in 1984 and that he and his wife, Juliet, have been in charge of the Left Field since 2010. Yes, he says, the festival is bigger, more corporate and certainly far more expensive than it was (Staple shows me a 1983 poster when a ticket cost £12 – about £65 today – for the weekend; this year, it was £340). But there is still something special about it. “Every year, you discover something new. In that sense, I think it does retain its original spirit. I often feel this is where I’m meant to be; this is what I’m meant to be doing. I’m never more Braggy than when I’m at Left Field.” For Bragg, no single Glastonbury stands out. “They all have little moments of connection and ecstasy.”
He tells me a story about his brother that sums it up. David, a bricklayer, had never shown the slightest interest in festivals. When David told him he fancied going to Glastonbury, Bragg was concerned. “Not everybody is built for it. Some people just don’t want to go somewhere so muddy and I assumed my brother would be like that. Then he disappeared for the weekend and spent the entire time in the Healing Field getting hot stones put on his back and meditating. Ah, mate, it was so revelatory to see that side of him.”
Ron Mael, one half of the sibling duo that comprise Sparks, is sitting in his tour bus at Glastonbury when we meet. His brother, Russell, is resting his voice. Ron is dressed in a black suit with white cotton stitching – the elegant eccentricity we have come to expect of the unsmiling keyboardist with the pencil moustache who never knowingly looks his audience in the face. Were it not for festivals, he says, Sparks may well never have existed. One of the Mael brothers’ defining experiences was attending the National Jazz and Blues festival – which wasn’t anything of the sort. “The earliest music festival experience Russell and I had was when we were starting university and came to the UK as backpackers in 1967, and we went to the jazz and blues festival. There were bands that meant so much to us, like Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett, the Move and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. I’ve become soft since then.”
What did the hardness involve back then? “Well, it didn’t matter if I was lying in the mud because the music and feeling were so incredible. We grew up idolising British bands and it meant a tremendous amount to us.” Did they have a band then? “No, but we were soon to have one.” Did that experience make them want to form one? “Yes, it had a big effect on us wanting to be like those guys.”
As for his worst experience, that was supporting Blur at a festival about 25 years ago. No reflection on Blur, it was just that Sparks, the 51-year-old band that is enjoying a surge of popularity, had fallen out of fashion. “The audience didn’t want to know anything about us. We were in this mid-period where people didn’t connect with us. It was demoralising.”
I bet you get a fair few Ron impersonators in the crowd when you play at festivals, I say. He nods. “Yes, we do. It usually tends to be girls dressed like me. I like that kind of cosplay.” Do they get more Rons or Russells? “Well, I’m easier to caricature – you put on a white shirt and a tie and slick your hair back and you’re made.” Does he like seeing clones? “Absolutely!”
Meanwhile, Goldfrapp is still mulling over the truth or otherwise of her festival fantasies. “I have a vague memory I did say that about the clothes,” she concedes. “But I don’t get that desire any more.”
