Sarah Vine, poor Michael Gove’s ex, loves what Glastonbury used to be and hates what it has become: “It’s not really a music festival at all, despite the line-up. It’s just a sprawling outdoor echo chamber for a self-selecting group of champagne socialists.”
True. And Miss Vine ought to be commended for the expert flogging she administers to that loathsome, hypocritical group, especially the celebs within it.
For all their bleating about the environment, they turn Glastonbury into a helipad housing fleets of choppers. Those ecowarriors don’t mind paying £13,950 for a return ticket to fly to the festival from London in one of those carbon-spewing monsters.
Nor are they really music lovers: “Hardly anyone’s there for the music any more, sometimes not even the musicians,” writes Miss Vine. “Everyone has an agenda. And it’s always tediously Left-wing.”
The article is well-written and makes good, poignantly phrased points. However, as I reach up to doff my non-existent hat, my hand stops in mid-air. You see, I have a need to ask not only ‘What?’ but also ‘Why?’.
‘Why’ questions tend to uncover causality links: events setting other events in train, ideas causing a chain reaction, social and cultural trends developing to their natural conclusion. A lifelong exercise of such inquisitiveness has led me to believe that, if something ends up unspeakably rotten, some rot had to be there from the beginning.
Miss Vine clearly doesn’t think along such lines, which is why she waxes nostalgic for the wonderful early days of Glastonbury:
“Remember when festivals were just about having fun and listening to some great music? When the acts went on stage and did their thing, for better or worse, and then just headed back to the trailer to pass out with a couple of accommodating groupies and a bottle or two of Jack Daniel’s?”
Listening? Great? Music? Oh, come off it. If we refer to pop excretions as great music, then what terms do we reserve for Mozart and Beethoven?
Performers at Glastonbury and other such gangbangs have never played any music. They’ve merely screamed the shamanistic chants of an anomic cult, satisfying not an aesthetic need but a thirst for a quasi-religious experience expressed in orgiastic terms.
If you don’t believe me, just gauge the audience’s response to that pop din. When real music is played, people listen in silence. Sometimes, when it’s played exceptionally well, the listeners have tears in their eyes. When the music stops, they applaud.
I’ve been to concerts of some of the best musicians in history, yet never once did I see the audience at places like Carnegie Hall or Salle Pleyel jump up and down, screaming hysterically while the music was played, with the women throwing their knickers and/or bras at the performers. Yet this sort of behaviour is expected and encouraged at pagan orgies like Glastonbury.
That’s not how you listen to music, chaps. That’s how you dance around a totem pole, whipping yourself to orgasmic frenzy. And if music elicits this sort of response, it isn’t music. It’s something entirely different.
Miss Vine’s tender recollections of Glastonbury as it was in her youth bring to mind the French playwright Emile Augier, who in 1855 coined the phrase nostalgie de la boue, which can be loosely translated as my title above.
That sort of ‘music’ was exactly the same in 1970 as it is in 2025. Perhaps back then there was a smidgen more musical content in those pagan rites, something missing altogether these days.
In fact, traces of swing or rhythm and blues, primitive music but music still, are prominent in the output of the early pop stars, such as Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry. But even in those salad days of rock ‘n roll, music played second fiddle to the cult. Presley in particular became a Christ-like figure, even acquiring aspects of resurrection after his death.
This religious-surrogate aspect of pop became particularly prominent with the Beatles who started out as singers of cute little songs and ended up as false prophets, cult leaders of a civilisation gone to pot, in more ways than one.
Somewhere along the way they acquired the help of musically trained assistants, so their later records display competent harmonies and even direct quotes from real composers, including Bach and Beethoven. Paradoxically, it is precisely in their late albums that music, even at its most primitive, no longer mattered.
No one listened to it any longer anyway. Instead, hysterical audiences of youngsters were hanging on to every garbled word of the semiotic message they discerned behind the expertly harmonised pulse. Unlike real music, the Beatles had no spiritual content as such.
Theirs was a glossocratic appeal, the marching orders screamed by a victorious modernity. In some extreme cases, the orders were literally understood and faithfully followed.
Charlie Manson and his ‘family’ went on a rampage of horrific murders partly as a result of the message they had perceived in the songs of The White Album. Charlie, aka ‘Jesus Christ’, claimed he was in extrasensory communication with his gods, John and Paul. Perhaps he was at that, for he heard nothing in the music of the Beatles that wasn’t there.
While the Beatles still tried to preserve a semblance of musicality, their followers have abandoned any such attempts. More and more, pop began to acquire overtly satanist characteristics. More and more, it began to appeal not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp splashing underneath it.
The appeal continued to be quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus redeemed his followers by dying on the cross, the messengers of the new god would commit suicide or else die of alcoholism, drug overdose or in due course AIDS. Improbably, they were all portrayed as innocent victims of some unidentified enemy who, contextually, could only be ‘the establishment’.
In the process, pop has become a big business, perhaps the biggest of all. Illiterate, tone-deaf adolescents can become billionaires overnight, provided they can tickle the naughty bits of their mass audiences in a particularly effective way.
They belch their anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank, and many critics sneer at the alleged paradox. Yet none exists. The drug-crazed pop stars simply demonstrate the nature of modern business activity.
Businessmen no longer sell products. They create markets and sell brands. They slap together sub-cultures. They fuse the markets and the sub-cultures into a uniform whole. In this case, pop music is only a part, although the most important one, of what passes for the modern ethos.
It is the heart of the new glossocratic Leviathan whose tentacles are numerous and ever-reaching. Pornography, fashion, show business, a great part of the publishing and record industries, electronic media including the Internet, drugs – all reach for the immature hearts and minds of the modern young.
It was Prof. Allan Bloom who in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind commented on the unprecedented importance music had assumed in modern times. All his students seemed to define their personalities in terms of pop music. Music was ever present in the background of people’s lives; it was their philosophy, their love, their secret, their true essence.
Above all, ‘music’ provided food for the ogre of modernity: anomie, an aggressive attack on social, moral, cultural and political norms. This is the essence of the dominant sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll culture of modernity.
The central element of that triad is ubiquitous. That deafening, incoherent, electronically enhanced noise can be neither produced nor listened to without one’s mind being addled by narcotics.
“A bottle or two of Jack Daniel’s”? Seriously, Miss Vine? What about mainlining heroin, popping Ecstasy, freebasing cocaine, smoking meth? Or, in your day, puffing on weed and snorting the odd line of coke?
Memory does play tricks on people no longer in the first flush of youth. Yet the kind of ‘music’ played at Glastonbury is and always has been an extension of the pharmaceutical industry more than anything else.
The drugs go in and out of fashion, the chants change words. But the inspiring animus never changes: hatred of the West as it now is and especially of the Christendom that it used to be.
Muck is always muck, and Glastonbury has always been “tediously Left-wing”. It’s nothing to feel nostalgic about.