The Children of the summer’s end, Gathered in the dampened grass…
Julien Temple‘s Glastonbury film has just ended a successful run at
The 135 minute film is now planned for the Berlin Film Festival on February 10th and 11th and is scheduled for an April 14th nation-wide UK cinema release via Pathe.
DB’s performance of “Heroes” from his triumphant appearance on Sunday June 25th 2000 at the famous festival (above) “features prominently towards the end of the film,” according to a marketing spokesman for Hanway Films.
The film itself follows the evolution of the festival since it began in 1970, through both professional footage and home videos collected from festival-goers. “I think the festival does bring together a certain kind of free-thinking Englishness that in a very interesting way mirrors the changes that have happened in the wider culture,” says Temple.
It was ragged and naive, It was Heaven…
Julien first attended the festival as a university student in June 1971 when he ran away from school to join 12,000 free-spirited music fans at the Glastonbury Fayre at Worthy Farm in Somerset.
The atmosphere “affected me deeply”, he says, and he clearly remembers waking up at dawn on the morning of the 23rd to see David Bowie on stage:
“There was this sense of the festival being very much one connected event and everyone waking each other up and saying ‘you’ve got to see this guy, he’s amazing. And he was.”
Julien remained impressed enough to work with David almost 25 years later on more than occasion.
Despite his public image, photographic evidence proves that
David Bowie didn’t actually change his hairstyle for 29 years!
Sadly it seems that 1971 performance wasn’t captured on film by a documentary crew present at the time that included one Nicolas Roeg among its number.
However, David’s set was recorded on audio tape which was generally reported to run as the list below, and included an unscheduled appearance by an enthusiastic lady during Oh! You Pretty Things who seemed to have enjoyed the local herbs…the performance was also remembered by David for a break in the set while he tried to remove a flying insect of some kind from his keyboard!:
Oh! You Pretty Things
Kooks
Changes
Amsterdam
The Supermen
Memory Of A Free Festival
Song For Bob Dylan
There is some debate as to how accurate this setlist is, as some think David may have also performed Bombers. Perhaps we’ll find out one day, as tantalisingly stated by the organisers in one of the inserts for the triple LP,
Although they continued to express their gratitude to David for his performance thus: “Along with the several hundred sleepy hippies who saw and heard David at Glastonbury Fayre we’d like to say thankyou to a magic gentleman…”
As you all know, while Revelations had none of DB’s 1971 performance, it did include a contribution from him in the form of a specially re-recorded Spiders version of The Superman, which later surface as a bonus track on the Ryko version of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and on the 2002 30th Anniversary 2CD Edition of same.
The same Revelations booklet included the above shot of David outside Worthy Farm itself, site of the Glastonbury Fayre which numbered 12,000 fans in 1971 and enjoyed 112,000 paying customers last year.
Many thanks to BowieNetter Zardoz for his pointer to a BBC story about Julien’s film