Glastonbury blues
Blue-lipstick girl (that's me!) went to Glastonbury two weeks ago. The blue lipstick wasn't just a fashion statement: I've been working polychromatic lips for six months, thanks to Shu Uemura's Rouge Unlimited range. No, it was a litmus test. Was Glastonbury still a miscellany of weird and wonderful youth subcultures? Or merely a depressing convergence of lagered-up faux indie kids who listen to the Killers and the Kooks and drink in All Bar One, west London socialites and bizarre Establishment figures such as Harry Enfield and Andrew Marr?
When I first visited Glastonbury in 1990, I had a face full of piercings and a shaved head, and wore a dress that I'd made out of a see-through plastic shower curtain, crafted in homage to Rifat Ozbek's New Age collection. Not one person among the carnival of crusties, ravers, indie kids, goths, punks and Madchester baggies commented on my appearance. Now, 17 years on, will an infinitesimal subversion in make-up go similarly unheeded?
We're trudging through mud to our tent. A man plants himself in front of me. "Are you dead?" he asks challengingly. "Your lips have gone blue." I roll my eyes with the petulant touch of Thora Birch in Ghost World. Am I in a provincial pub at closing time on a Saturday night, or a cosmopolitan convergence of radical freaks? It looks like the former.
I walk into a backstage party. A rather beauteous young man with curly hair sidles up to me. "Are you in a band?" he asks. "Er, no," I reply. "Maybe it's your blue lips," he concedes. Two hours later, I am standing in a field waiting for Arcade Fire. A man moves towards me, then kisses me full on the mouth. "Ah, blue lips," he says with a smile, and disappears off into the night. Perhaps the Glastonbury magic isn't dead after all.
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Or then again... The next day, an overconfident music-industry Hooray Henry in a camouflage waistcoat bowls up to me looking smug. "Is something wrong with your circulation? Your lips have gone blue," he says. "Freak," I shout at him. In retrospect, maybe this was the wrong thing to shout. Perhaps "coked-up conservative tragedy on legs" might have been better. After all, freakdom is a thing that not all of us have the privilege of experiencing. And, from the above evidence, at least half of the people at this festival don't get the original spirit at all. Which really is a kind of death.
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