If nothing else, Julien Temple's new film Glastonbury, tracing the long, frequently bizarre history of Britain's Woodstock, lets us know that for three days in a tiny, often very wet corner of Southwest England, hippies are alive, well, and doing what they do best: tweaking the nose of the Establishment, and providing the rest of us with a glimpse at how life might appear if everyone was allowed to do just as they pleased.
Like The Queen, Glastonbury is a vastly entertaining exploration of why we may never fully understand our British cousins, and why we should probably never stop trying.
The whole thing begins, fittingly enough, on September 19, 1970, the day after Jimi Hendrix died. A farmer, Michael Eavis, invited blues fans to spend two days soaking up their favorite bands (Marc Bolan, Stackridge) on a hastily constructed stage near his barn. The one-pound admission included free milk. The word having got around, next year's event got a lot more ambitious, with the help of Britain's most illustrious and wealthy "hippie," Arabella Churchill, granddaughter of the great man, as 12,000 gathered to celebrate the Summer Solstice with a folk/pop aristocracy that included Melanie, David Bowie, Joan Baez and Fairport Convention. The Churchill crowd felt that commercial music festivals like Woodstock ripped off the "people's culture," and proposed an alternative that would include the performing arts, be absolutely free, and filmed for posterity by Nick Roeg and David Puttnam.
The Glastonbury Fayre might have remained a historical curiosity if it hadn't been for Margaret Thatcher and the expulsion of a group of hippie/anarchists called the Travelers, from a festival at nearby Stonehenge. In 1978, this rag-tag group of 500 resulted in Glastonbury becoming a kind of rump social convention, comprising Britons who wanted to ban the bomb, save the environment or just rut around semi-naked in the mud with thousands of pop fans, a boundless supply of drugs, and very few social restraints. The festival also inaugurated the custom of rocking out for left-wing causes, over the years raising huge sums for groups like Greenpeace.
Julien Temple, the filmmaker avatar of the equally messy punk scene in 1979's The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and the 2000 Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury, has now produced a film about Glastonbury. Chock-full of 30 years of music fashion from The Velvet Underground to Radiohead, it's a visually compelling if wildly digressive tour through three decades of a uniquely British brand of social anarchy, druggie excess, full-frontal nudity by all sexes, and a passionate demonstration of a culture that has never stopped viewing rock and roll as a medium of political protest and revolt.
Nick Cave smokes a cigarette onstage while fronting The Bad Seeds; a naked guitarist from The Bravery crashes into his drummer as the climax of "Fearless"; police roust gate-crashers, cut to a performance of "Swastika Eyes" by the legendary Scottish band Primal Scream. Various performers and spectators attack the omnipresent cameras, and the festival's founding guru Michael Eavis delivers a bemused commentary about confiscating drugs and battling local attempts to put him out of business.
While a tad long at 138 minutes, it lacks the sustained performances demanded by concert-film fans. But Temple gives us a wonderful reinvention of the rock film. Some dizzying cuts reveal Glastonbury at one moment as a latter-day Woodstock, then as a Mad Max -like version of Burning Man, with absurdist moments of Monty Python's Flying Circus thrown in. Since the town of Glastonbury has its own share of mock history involving the legend of King Arthur and the possible birthplace of British Christianity, there are older townfolks who are a little grouchy about having to suffer the annual invasion of smelly pagans. One older man mutters about wanting to get out his old Tommy gun, not unlike pious San Franciscans who once decried The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.