Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Founder of the Glastonbury Festival and a Methodist dairy farmer from Somerset.
On the island
Eight records
First track, What is Mark Boland and T Rex and the Children of the Revolution, seeing he was the first band to to appear at the festival anyway, and he did an incredible set on that evening, I must say, september the nineteenth, nineteen seventeen.
Our second piece of music will be Pee-Wee Hunt, Twelve Street Rag, which is a song that really swept me right into pop music at a very tender age of about nine or something. And when I heard that, I knew for sure that there was something out there that was going to be totally different from all the chapel stuff and sort of singing around the piano with the kind of stuff we used to sing around the piano, you know, like we sang all the right things at that time and suddenly Pee-Wee Hunt and Twelve Street Rag sort of swept me off my feet actually, and I was totally gone on a mission at that point.
How Great Thou ArtFavourite
Elves are supposed to say how great they are, but it's the most amazing gospel song. And I was going through the Welsh Mountains. I was having a meeting with some of my wonderful green ladies and she's run the Greenfields of Glastonbury. And I put that on the CD on the car player. Fantastic, and driving through the Welsh Mountains. It's very powerful.
The fourth track is The Grateful Dead, kind of a hippie band Extraordinaire, really. And um we used to go off to London to see The Grateful Dead and go to those all night concerts where they played for about sixteen hours or something. That's a non stop. It was great. I mean they were so good.
Bob Dylan and I Threw It All Away. I've always been a Bob Dylan fan right from the beginning and and uh and uh this is a lovely track of his, I don't think you can get one better than that.
Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before
Well the Smiths came and played 1984 it was, wasn't it? And I went up to Bristol to see them. Actually my son, Patrick, who's actually GP at Bath, and he's got a proper job. It was Patrick who said to me I ought to go and listen to The Smiths. So I shot up to Bristol University, went into their social hall thing. It wasn't a very big event because they weren't very big then. And so I listened to them and I was completely knocked over by The Smiths live. And so I went round and asked us and said, Do you want to play at the festival next year? So they said we'd love to. We'd been having hippie stuff up to then. And suddenly the Smiths, you know, were very cool and very fashionable. And it just changed the whole event so much that it suddenly became a big sort of pop festival then.
A Stone Rose is actually played at the Pilton party, which is a fundraising thing for the village. It's a bit like the Village Fate, really. And so the Stone Roses said that they'd come and play if they could headline the year after, you see. I didn't really believe that they were going to come, but um every single one of them turned up. It's actually unbelievable. There are only five hundred people listening to them.
Club have probably performed for us for about five times, one time in particular when we were stuck for a performance for the Bilton party.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:27What did this glam rocker from London [Marc Bolan] make of rural Somerset?
Well, he was great actually. It was an absolutely amazing performance. When he turned up, though, he turned up at the gate in a bureaucrat or a Cadillac, a huge American cup. It was all covered in some kind of velvet or something. I put my hand on it and just stroked it. I said, Super car, nice car you've got. Because I did security and and I took the money on the gate, I did everything in those days, you know. And so he screwed me, he said, Take your hands off my car, man.
Presenter asks
1:34How much did you pay him [Marc Bolan] for that gig?
Uh five hundred quid and I couldn't afford it, so I paid the deposit at fifty pounds. I had to pay the rest off from my milk jack.
Presenter asks
10:46How do you think those two years at sea changed this young man?
I think it was a major part of my life actually, because it was so mind boggling to go straight into that situation. I mean, from a rather sheltered home life in the Wellsworth Edward School. Suddenly fishing round brothels in Monbaset looking for crew. I mean It's quite extraordinary, really, wasn't it?
The keepsakes
The book
Peter Ackroyd
I've always been interested in Blake. He's about three hundred years ahead of his time really.
The luxury
I'm going to learn to play the mouth organ. I loved it when Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and even Chris Martin actually, when they do the mouth organ, it's very effective.
Presenter asks
13:49Why was it important to you not to sell the farm?
Probably because I'd always been there and my great grandfather came and moved in eighteen sixty four. So something had been there a long, long time. I didn't want to walk away from it just like that.
Presenter asks
16:47How did all that [the festival] begin for you and Jean?
Gene and I actually went to the Bath Blues Festival and fell in love with the whole idea, the really of a festival. I just could not believe that that could happen, you know. It just went a few miles away from the farm. There was no fence, there were no gates, nothing, no people taking money or anything. And the Moody Boos were playing. Millions and millions of people there, and they're all lying about in the sun, and uh but they look absolutely fantastic, I thought. So I fell in love with the whole concept straight away. And I said to Gene, I can't wait to get on the phone tomorrow to do my own show.
“I understand I was conceived on Silbury Hill. That's pretty good, isn't it?”
“I don't get depressed, no, I never get depressed.”
“I'm not really a rap music fan myself, I have to say, but... at the end of the day it was a huge success.”