Glastonbury 1993: where you there?!

[kenny g]

1999 was the worst year for me. I had grown a beard and had a shaved head and looked like some bizarre Manson/taliban figure-- why I had done this i do not know, and was carrying a big block of hash which i stopped making into spliffs but started eating in a desperate attempt to come down from the massive charley lines I seemed to be doing every 20 minutes or so. Needless to say it all rapidly descended into some kind of autistic breakdown with me being convinced i was being tracked by the helicopters and various police agents. I can remember flushing a few grams of powder into one of the bogs and being convinced that at that very moment the SWAT teams would descend and i would have the last laugh. Needless to say nothing of the sort happened.
Another experience from that year, i seemed to be hearing voices full on..or maybe it was true, but i was sure that I heard a voice from a tent say that they would bet 25pence that I would not leave Glastonbury fields alive. I convinced myself that i would be stabbed to death that day. Saw some kids passing chewing gum but assumed they were sharing razor blades to slice me up . Got out from the very center of the rap tent convinced that I had had a lucky escape.
I was about to go into a welfare tent in the green fields and turn myself in a s someone who had completely lost the plot but either someone said, or I hallucinated someone saying , that if I went in there i would never come out again. Fortunately i followed their/my advice and got myself to some kind of tent/ cafe where i sat down for a long time and someone gave me a ball that I could throw to a dog which it brought back to me and slowly, slowly I returned from the deep paronoid hole into which i had decended and shared a couple of words with some guy about how I had been too terrified to communicate for many hours and he said he could see that I had been in a pretty bad place. Anyways, I had wandered all over the site, lost my mates and my mind but finally found some good vibes which I will never forget my thanks for.

 

[WasGeri]

I remember seeing the Velvet Underground and thinking "Oh my God...this is the Velvet Underground...this is amazing!"

Then about five minutes later I started thinking "Hang on a minute...this is shit!" and wandered off.

 

[Blue Bauble]

After my 'getting the wrong year' cock up for the archive Glastonbury feature, I could use some 1993 anecdotes to add to the feature.

So where you there in 1993?
What's your story?!

I was at Glastonbury in 1993. These are the first five things I remember:

Some boys shouting "alkaline" every time they heard a dealer shout "acid".

Standing outside my friend's cafe thing, listening to the Velvet Underground start 'All Tomorrow's Parties', and feeling very sad about Nico.

Rosie the Magician.

Offering to take my friend's three children, and then being volunteered by same friend to take next door's three children, to the Children's Field (one in backpack,two on each arm, one guided by remote control in front), and people shouting out, "buy a packet of condoms!"

Best of all: There was a little show across from the Theatre Tent. Some people had rigged up the facade of a house on some scaffolding. There were four floors (I think). As some scratchy music recorded from a badly tuned radio began, a window would open on each floor in turn: there was someone waking up in the top one, someone having a bath in the next one, and so on.
After all the windows were open on each floor, the radio suddenly tuned itself into a station playing 'Let's Get It On' and the man in the kitchen put something in the oven which, after a minute or so, turned into a man, who unfolded himself from the oven and began to dance. I'm not sure that I've described it very well, but it was the most entertaining thing to watch. I went back for each subsequent performance. On the down side, one of the younger children became convinced that people 'came from' being baked.

The Orb playing on the NME stage at night, not far from my tent. Warm and spooky at the same time. I horrified the young person across the way when I had to ask him who they were.

Sorry, that was six.

 

[corporate whore]

I applaud the fact you remember so much...

 

[Blue Bauble]

I applaud the fact you remember so much...

Thanks. I love applause... Yes, I've already got that kind of 'remember things that happened ninety years ago, but can't remember what happened this morning' sort of memory. I think the reason why Glastonbury '93 left such an impression on me was that I was living in an isolated village in Somerset, not really going anywhere or seeing anyone, and then suddenly found myself being taken to this mad city for the weekend. Real culture shock - like going to a foreign country - and it was only a thirty minute drive from where I lived!

 

[academia]

Er, yes I was there.

I think I remember someone firing a flare when the Orb were on and we thought it was a UFO landing.

And we surrounded our bonfire with rocks, which split open with the heat to reveal they were made of concrete, so we thought the whole festival site was prefabricated, trees, grass etc. for about 8 hours.

 

[mirageman]

'93 was my 1st and only Glasto. At 9.30 on the Friday morning I was up in Edinburgh having my final degree exam in molecular biology. As soon as it finished I dashed back home, grabbed my bag and hit the motorway slipway with my thumb out. Several hitches later I was picked up by some geeza in a Beamer with a cellphone. He let me use it to make a call to the Uni to find out my degree result, and yeaha, a 2.1, I was pleased as punch. Several more hitches and no sleep later I was at Glasto, looking for the freebee route in. And low and behold a nice ditch dug beneath the chainlink and I was thru. Met up with my mates and had a great time.

How things have changed hey? Mainstaging it back then on the Saturday were the Orb, Ozrics and the Stereo MCs. And these days it's the English National Opera and Paul fucking McCartney.

Never been back since '93, don't think I'll ever go again given the sellout it's become.

Now the Glade festival the other week, that was very nice....

 

[Andy the Don]

If 1993 was the year The Velvet Underground played, yes I was there. Unlike some (well actually most) others I thaight they were fantastic. Was also great weather or maybe it rained..

 

[Pie 1]

I was there.
Did Primal scream play before the Orb? or am I merging my years
We had backstage passes that year for some reason that escapes me now, and after discovering how boring it was, kept using it as a sort cut though, until Van Morrison & Peter Gabrial barrelled up to us in a Range Rover and asked us, Morrison leaning out the passnger window, 'where the fuck the car park was' .Unfortuanalty due to the large amount of mushies we'd recently ingested, our answer was to simply fall about helplessly on the floor in hysterics.