Sunday was busy, I mean really busy.
It started with an alarm which is some thing we’re just not used to. We tend to get up when we wake up and some times we get up when we wake up, have a Pee think its still too early and go back to bed again.
But this Sunday was different.
This Sunday was Glastonbury Festival Ticket Sale day.
That means getting every laptop and phone you’ve got available ready for 0900 (UK time) and spending the next 37 minutes trying to log on to Seetickets.com to try and bag tickets for the biggest and best Music Festival in the world.
This means wasting 37 minutes of your life being frustrated and teased by a system that is rigged to cause maximum stress and anxiety.
Anyone who has ever gone through this process will know just how utterly miserable that 37 minutes is. This year 1.4 Million people were all trying to do the same thing, at the same time, with the same objective and its a bun fight.
In theory, you log onto the site and a little screen tells you you are in the queue (like when you phone your GP only this time you are position number 870,001).
Then that screen should hold and attempt to get in every 20 seconds.
What happens in reality is that you can’t get on to that page in the first place and if you eventually do (we got on 11 times) it boot’s you back out again before the page can refresh.
At the end of the 37 minutes when all 170,000 tickets had been sold, we never got a sniff.
My daughter was only slightly luckier, or perhaps not.
She got onto the site, managed to enter all the details, name, registration number (this isn’t the first stage in the process, you have to register your details well in advance and send a passport style photo) and post code for her group of six, went to pay and was told they were SOLD OUT!
That is the worst of all. So close you almost have the tickets in your hand, then they are snatched away.
This year we decided we weren’t going to bother getting tickets but we ended up still trying for family and friends.
We don’t have a camper any more and there’s no way I’m sleeping in a tent down on the site in amongst the masses, plus its very expensive. For us two, including tickets, camping fee’s, food and drinks its biggest part of £1000.
There is an awful lot of walking involved and often it’s through mud that would make a WW1 soldier feel at home and with a dodgy knee?
No, I think our Glastonbury will be spent at home on the settee with a large screen TV and the remote so I can swap from one stage to another and watch which ever band I choose without having to fight my way across the Pyramid stage to get to the loo.
Its not like we haven’t been before.
Jaki and I started going years ago when Billy Bragg worked with the trades Unions and the Co-operative society to set up the LEFT FIELD Tent where they mixed music with left wing politics.
The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) was asked to provide 20-30 fire stewards to ensure the site was evacuated safely in the event of an emergency. A few days before the start they were short two people and as they couldn’t get anyone else, Jaki and I were roped in.
We slept in a tent in the workers beer festival compound where there were hot shower, clean toilets and a subsidised food and drinks marquee, which made it almost bearable given it was one of the wettest and as a result, muddiest festivals on record.
We had a very young daughter at that time so we introduced Georgia to the mayhem that is Glastonbury when she was only about 10 years old.
I remember having her on my shoulders at the New Bands tent (now the John Peel stage) and she said in a very loud voice.
“Oh Daddy whats that horrible smell”?
When I looked there was a guy with an enormous ‘Spliff’ stood next to us and Georgia was introduced to her first Wacky Backy.
We continued working on the left Field for about 6-7 years, it was in the main great fun.
In the beginning we were jacks of all trades, not just fire stewards.
When the vehicles got stuck we hopped in and drove them, when security for Babyshambles didn’t turn up and we had a 7000 crowd we became security guards. Jaki on stage as personal protection for Pete Doherty (who was a very sweet and polite guy) and me and the boys in front of the stage keeping the mosh pit at bay.
We met a load of famous people, some we knew others we didn’t.
There’s a famous story where I said hello to a lady as she came off stage and kissed her, asking how she was.
She kissed me back, said she was fine and went off.
Jaki said, “You don’t know who that was do you”?
Which I didn’t.
Apparently it was Bianca Jagger.
I thought she was another Trades Union Official who I’d met some where before!
I sat on the steps up to the stage chatting to Sea Sick Steve not having a clue who he was.
We have pictures of Georgia with Joss Stone, Hard Fi, Kate Moss, Bill Bragg (who Georgia introduced to her friend some years later when she was about 14, dressed in matching Hot Pants and Wellington Boots, as one of Dad’s mates) and a host of other band who went on to become famous.
We took it all in our stride, it didn’t seem at the time like it was important.
I didn’t realise it would come to an end, we seemed invincible then. We were so blasé about it we never even had pictures taken, even when I presented an FBU memorial paper weight to Glen Tilbrook (from Squeeze) I didn’t think to have a photo taken and he is one of my all time favourite performers.
I met Steve Earl the legendary Country singer who is a God in the Hendy household (The Revolution starts now and Copper head road being my favourites) and I did have the sense to get him to sign his book “To my best mate Bill.”
Though I seem to have mislaid the book some where since .
However, as the Left Field got bigger its became more of a business and the amateur organisers from the trades unions who did it voluntarily were replaced by professionals who charge enormous fees and treated us like some form of skivvies.
I remember a guy telling me to go and get him a pack of beers and I told him to “Ferk Off.”
He said. “You don’t know who I am do you”.
I told him I did, but I still wasn’t going to get him a beer.
It was at that point that The Left Field and the Hendy family parted company.
One of the last things I did was to meet Bill Bragg at Shepton Mallet Prison where we delivered a range of musical instruments (as part of ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ ) a project Bill Bragg ran to get prisoners into music.
After that we decided to go to Glastonbury as punters rather than workers.
Over the years we’ve worked for OXFAM as stewards at ‘Bestival’ on the Isle of Wight where we ran the Stewards tent providing food and drink to the hundreds of young Kids who thought being a steward would be a cheap and easy way to see the festival and at WOMAD where I drove a Buggy for 4 days and got to know the site inside out.
Driving a round in the dark taking tea and sandwiches to stewards in the most far flung reaches of the festival ground’s was a memory I will never forget.
It was a sunny festival (Congo Natty) and the nights were warm. I remember watching the sun come up over the site and it was so quiet and still.
Jaki wasn’t so lucky, she was a Supervisor in charge of about 8 stewards patrolling the staff camp ground and she walked about 30 miles a night.
So you can see, our engagement with Glastonbury goes way beyond getting tickets, its in our DNA and when we didn’t even get a sniff, I felt hurt.
Does Emily know? Does Michael realise one of his stalwarts has been rejected.
Do they even care?
And that my friends only took us up to 0937 on Sunday morning, there’s lots more of that still to come.
Bill and Jaki go Travelling 