Mark Johnson

I went to Glastonbury this year for the first time in a long time. It’s hard to admit that I sloped off early, particularly because everyone else was having fun. Maybe that’s one reason I felt so isolated. Everyone seemed to be making the experience more intense by looking at each other and identifying with the good time they were having. I couldn’t seem to do that and so I got more and more detached.

I was sixteen in 1987 when I first went to Glastonbury in a battered old Mini with my girlfriend and a bloke who was a titch and was therefore called Titch. We didn’t have a driving licence between us and the Mini overheated all the way down the motorway. We kept pulling into service stations to refill the radiator. When we arrived, with £30 worth of cannabis hidden in the back, it was time to bring out the cannabis and hide the car instead. So we drove it into a field, pushed it up to a hedge and covered it with branches.

We got into the festival by crossing a ditch on a scaffolding pole and squeezing under the corrugated iron fence. The hardest thing was getting the dog in. Did I mention the dog? I had to stand in the ditch with my Chinese Fighting Dog on my shoulders and hoist it up and under the fence to Titch. He had his own troubles getting in because of the ghetto blaster. Did I mention the ghetto blaster? Well Titch had brought one so enormous that it was almost bigger than he was, and there was no way he was leaving it for someone to nick from a Mini in a hedge. So he had to carry it around with him and it was about as useful as a hump back.

Getting inside the fence was like landing in another world. I came from Planet Concrete. My atmosphere was oxygen-starved. I had been brought up on grey, sprawling housing estates. I had finished school after an undistinguished and mostly absent career and I had left my family to escape the abuse. For years I had been trapped in concrete by anger, bad temper and violence – others’ and my own.

And now I had wriggled under a fence and found beauty. I breathed in the oxygen. Music throbbed. Faces smiled. There were colourful signs, clothes, people, ideas. Everyone here was different. Their values were different. Their appreciation of beauty was different. Their music was different. There was something innately creative about them. And from the hippies to the big rastas, to the CND activists to the people who wore no clothes at all, they were individuals every one of them. There was no featureless sprawl here. For the first time in my life, I felt I belonged. Because I was here with a bunch other people who didn’t belong anywhere else either.

We were three kids with a dog on a rope and a ludicrous outsize ghetto blaster and we walked around in total innocence. We were amazed by the people and the beauty and the colours and shapes: it was a creative world here, full of possibilities. We were probably wandering about with our mouths open. We had a tenner and our cannabis. Titch wouldn’t sell the ghetto blaster so that we could buy some food but we didn’t really care. The Red Cross gave us a pink blanket. We bought some skunk instead of food.

My girlfriend and I walked up a hill with a big spliff and Titch, staggering behind us under his ghetto blaster, kept calling: “Give me some, go on, give me some.”Below us the festival looked like a medieval village. Torches and fires and smoke lit up the night. We paused to let Titch come puffing up under the ghetto blaster, and to take in the beauty. And then it was shattered.

A Land Rover, full to bursting with massive uniformed policemen, appeared from nowhere and pulled up right by us. So here it was then. That other world, the one I usually lived in, had just arrived here at Glastonbury. The coppers pressed their big round faces up against the windows and at the front one of them put his head out and stared at us and at the spliff. We stared back. We knew they had us. The dog didn’t even bark.

But this was Glastonbury where all the rules were different. A huge bloke in ragged jeans, dreadlocks and no shoes suddenly leapt out of a shabby caravan, star-shaped like a football hooligan, his fingers almost touching the Land Rover.

“Fuuuuuuuck oooooooof!” he roared.

And they did.

So then I understood the usual laws didn’t apply here but another form of protection and, unlike the kind of law the police enforced, these laws were looking after me. We ate some sloppy lentil food from a caravan and stayed up the hill and snuggled down under the blanket with a spliff and some Special Brew and listened to the music. Not the kind of stuff people at home listened to. Naked people wandered past. Some of them were old. Some were laughing and bright red because they’d taken acid. A few stopped to talk about their lives, which were hedonistic, devoted to drugs and music. Most were travellers who had rejected society’s conventions and values and were ploughing their own furrow. Titch was suspicious of them all and held on hard to the ghetto blaster, convinced one of them would nick it. As for me, I loved them. I wanted to be one of them. By the following year, I was. I’d gone to art college and met a bunch of arty travellers. We took a lot of drugs and I used a bit of heroin. The women breastfed their babies in public. There was sloppy lentil food. Even though Glastonbury was cancelled, we still travelled around that summer in old buses.

However, although I was stretching a hand out to art and my new arty friends, I was still stuck fast in my concrete background. I had been arrested for violent, drug-related offences and at the end of the summer I would be sentenced and sent to jail.

In 1990 I was out again, and in love with raves, ecstasy and the four/four beat which dominated the new music. I found a musical home in deep house. This brought an enrichment to the musical experience, a new purity which was deepened by drugs and buttressed by free parties. Dealing was one way of participating. I went to Glastonbury that year with the guys I bought my drugs from. It was a darker place but it still had the exciting smokiness of a mass gathering and the exuberance of the free parties. And the music was good.

I didn’t get back there again until 1995. Too much music, too many drugs, and by now the dark side was beginning to take over my life. I was addicted to heroin but I was just about managing my addiction. I’d been accepted at a respectable university to study on a renowned photography course and I was living with my girlfriend in a camper van which was stashed to the gunnels with drugs.

We travelled all over the country selling and Glastonbury was a retail opportunity. I didn’t listen to much of the music. I tried not to think about the wide-eyed kid who had been dazzled by the place just eight years earlier. My eyes were slits, I was so paranoid I locked my girlfriend in the van, and I sold 10 Es for £8 to dealers who walked in a line through the tents shouting: Pills, Es, Speed, Weed.

By that time you could almost get cannabis resin for free and I didn’t even bother to sell it. But I had a stack of pills I knew were bad and I sold them anyway. My hands shook as people handed over the money. I mixed paracetemol with nitrazepam and packed it all into clear, orange dog worming capsules. I didn’t care. I didn’t care where I took my drugs, whether in a grey concrete estate or at a festival: it was all about the insular feeling of getting high. Gradually, my only truth was becoming heroin. It wasn’t long before my addiction soon got bigger than a university course, bigger than my relationship with my girlfriend, bigger than everything else.

So this year was the first time I’ve been back. It’s been 14 years. I’m 38 years old. I’ve been clean since 2000 but I had to get to rock bottom before I could start to change. Rock bottom for me was street homeless with a £400 a day crack and smack habit. But I did change and I continue to change and over the years I’ve found my focus. Now I work, both in a campaigning and practical role, for ex-offenders and addicts who are behind me in their journey. I wrote a best selling book, Wasted, about my own journey and when I got to Glastonbury this year, I wasn’t behind the wheel of a Mini.

I couldn’t find my way around the site because I didn’t recognise it. I looked for the hill where, as a kid, I’d sat stoned under my blanket feeling that this was the dawning of a new world. I couldn’t identify the spot because now it’s part of the crowd control system. There was no patch of ground left to pitch my tent so I slept in the car. Roads, drainage, concrete: it’s a hard, ordered, fixed site now. And it’s easy to imagine the risk assessments and health and safety reports which have gone into managing the Glastonbury experience. I listened to some good but heavily processed pop music with more people than I could have imagined possible.

The festival is a big success. It’s a music festival now, no more and no less, the biggest on a well-trodden festival circuit. I don’t want to knock it. In our world it is a fact that anything new and pure eventually becomes a commercial caricature of itself. Experiences which might once have been spontaneous are no longer created but reproduced, branded and spoon-fed. This is inevitable. So is aging. I’ve aged and so has Glastonbury. I wandered around in my wristband trying to hook up with old mates. It seemed the hippy traveller types from my first Glastonbury were extinct now, until I joyfully discovered a few huddled in one corner like an endangered species. But I knew the deep house crowd were around and that a free party, just like the old days, was scheduled for about three in the morning.

Crowd control was peaked at that time. It was any grey, sprawling provincial town centre on a Saturday night, with gangs of rowdy drunks threatening violence and groups of women dressed identically and walking in lines. I found the right tent. The same djs were playing the music which has electrified me over the years, although they were playing it at a low volume. The tent was packed, too packed for dancing. A lot of the people were the same age I was when I first heard deep house and they listened to it respectfully as they poured pills down their throats. They enjoyed it. They just didn’t seem excited.

I looked at my old mates up on the stage. They were pouring pills down their throats too. For about twenty years now they’ve been playing the same music in the same way and taking the same old drugs. I don’t do drugs any more and the music has lost its freshness for me.

We’ve all aged. I’ve moved on. I’ve changed. They’ll always be my friends although maybe, deep down, they’ve watched me go and regarded me as a sell-out. But there’s only one way to experience the sense of discovery and wonder all through life that started at my first Glastonbury, and it’s not by doing the same thing over and over again. It’s by continually growing and changing as you age.

Thanks, Glastonbury. Maybe you’re still doing amazing things for some people. But once I belonged with you and all the other misfits. Now I’m a misfit inside your fence too. So, from me, it’s good bye.

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