Copyright © Alby Stone 2020
It was musical mayhem up on the Pyramid Stage. The Hellraisers Redux, second on the bill, always first to the bar. A rare two-drummer line-up, John Bonham and Keith Moon flailing away at their respective kits, not so much keeping time as competing for arrhythmia. Phil Lynott doing the worst-ever impersonation of a bass guitarist, held together by nothing more than a sleepy smile. Jim Morrison swaying unsteadily at the microphone stand, alternating between incoherent mumble and indecipherable scream. Rory Gallagher seemingly playing a different set entirely. A symphony of bum notes and missed beats. Several sheets to the wind, every one of them. Guys whose idea of the twelve-bar blues was the absence of a thirteenth pub to crawl to. The stage was littered with evidence. I’d never seen so many empty JD and tequila bottles in one place. In their prime, sober or even lightly pickled, the Hellraisers Redux would have been magnificent; but the punters only wanted to see a drunken, edgy shambles that would conform to the popular lack of imagination and nostalgic tabloid stereotype. Nobody could tell what they were playing and nobody cared, least of all the band, just as long as the bottles kept coming and the wheels continued to fall off.
Disgusted with that disrespectful bread-and-circuses spectacle, I wandered through the muddy field, skirting the flags and young men with tipsy girls perched on their skinny shoulders until I found the John Peel Stage, where the great man himself was introducing a combo of wizened undead folkies fronted by Sandy Denny and Nick Drake. Not my cup of tea at all. I stayed for the first number – an eerie but predictable rendition of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, with Denny in admittedly fine voice – but left when Drake took the mic for ‘Streets Of London’. Voters’ choice again, of course. You can’t trust people to get anything right online. Too many chemical variables, too few functional brain cells. Democracy? Even the body politic can’t sustain that many arseholes without ending up drowning in the inevitable.
Now I had a choice. Look for a beer tent or endure the remainder of the Hellraisers Redux set? Definitely not the beer tent. A fiver for a pint of pixels? No thanks. As for the Hellraisers Redux – fuck, I couldn’t bear another minute of that awful shambles. So what else was on offer? What could I do to while away the hour or so until the Shades came onstage? Well, there was an alternative. On a whim I had paid extra for a backstage pass. It meant going back out into the mud, but…
The VIP Lounge – actually a seemingly limitless marquee decked out like the interior of the Palace of Versailles, with waiter service and air conditioning – was a Who’s Who of several golden ages of popular music. Like everything else in this world where pleasing a whimsically perverse public was where the money was made, it was all a bit off-kilter. Sinatra in a ripped t-shirt and bondage trousers holding court at a table where Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse hung on his every word. Elvis Presley trading jokes with Syd Barrett and Leonard Cohen at a table stacked with insubstantial cheeseburgers. Dusty Springfield playing cards with Des O’Connor and Bob Marley. Ian Curtis in a zoot suit, in earnest discussion with John Lennon and Jacques Brel. Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochrane dressed as hippies. Brian Jones and George Harrison talking about the good old days. Mick Ronson complaining to a martini-sipping Dean Martin that he hadn’t been invited to join his old mate Dave in the Shades, much as he respected Jimi. Inscrutable old bluesmen jamming in a corner with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen. Van Vliet declaiming weird poetry to assorted acid casualties. Aretha demonstrating a complicated dance to Ella, Billie and Bessie. Marley, Toots and Joe Strummer sharing the biggest spliff I’d ever seen. Scott Walker trying to read a book while being harangued by Mark E. Smith. Joey Ramone playing pool with Steve Peregrine Took. Lemmy, Mick Farren and Larry Wallis plotting to tear down the fences and make it a free festival. Bolan and Pete Shelley comparing guitars. McCartney strobing in and out of view, the jury evidently some way from a majority decision. A dizzying array of stars. A galaxy of reclaimed black holes. But so detailed, so real.
So wrong.
A waiter handed me a cocktail but I couldn’t drink it. There would have been no point trying. And anyway, I felt sick. Giving people what they wanted was all very well – but this?
Outside, the mud was worse than ever, now a gruel-like liquid that trickled into my shoes and splattered up my trouser legs. I might have been wading ankle-deep in brown paint. It wasn’t quite the full Glastonbury experience – for that I’d need to lose my tent, get my sleeping bag stolen and have my stomach pumped – but it felt eerily authentic. Worth enduring, hopefully. Back at the Pyramid Stage, Viv Stanshall was at long last introducing the Shades. This was what I’d been waiting for. The Glasto vrMix supergroup to make anyone with a soul salivate. Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Dave Greenfield, John Coltrane, Hendrix and Bowie. I wasn’t too sure about having the Andrews Sisters on backing vocals, but what the hell. This was going to be great.
And it was, for a short time. The Shades started their set with ‘Heroes’, sounding all the better for the muscular bass, soaring synth and a wall of undulating left-hand fuzz distortion, then Bowie took a back seat while Hendrix drawled through ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and Bruce belted out an apocalyptic ‘White Room’. Then… Eh? A twitchy, Young Americans-style souled-up version of ‘The Laughing Gnome’. Hendrix aping Ziggy Stardust-era Mick Ronson as the Shades ploughed through a medley of ‘Agadoo’, ‘Funky Gibbon’ and ‘Shudupa Your Face’. I stared incredulously. This couldn’t be happening. Surely not. Normal service would be resumed, wouldn’t it? But when Bowie started crooning ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)’, I could take no more and angrily tore off the VR headset.
Glasto vrMix, my arse. Another triumph of so-called democracy over reason and good taste. I’d paid a hundred quid for this fiasco. Really, I should have known better. Deepfake events like this were all very well, but dependent on viewer votes which were always at the mercy of pranksters, drunks and trolls. And sometimes hackers substituted ‘refakes’ for advertised genuine films and shows. Why, only the week before I’d sat through an online double bill of Casablanca with Tommy Cooper instead of Bogart and a Citizen Kane featuring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their Derek and Clive incarnation rather than Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. That had been interesting, if mildly disconcerting.
‘Play it, Sam. Just like that.’
‘If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough. This bloke came up to me…’
Still, everyone wanted to see the dead stars they’d missed first time around, or the ones they simply missed. Offering an opportunity to see, in glorious virtual reality, deepfaked appearances on the Glastonbury stages by the greats whose bodies were sadly less immortal than their works had been a stroke of genius, both lucrative and crowd-pleasing. And nothing pisses off some people like blameless folk enjoying innocent pleasures. Personally, I’ve never understood how anyone could get their kicks from sabotaging someone else’s fun just because they can. The tech is just so easy to use. And it’s potentially dangerous. Remember when that guy in Manchester faked Linda Lovelace and scenes from Deep Throat into Bedknobs and Broomsticks on Netflix? Or his version of The Railway Children, featuring Jimmy Savile, which traumatised kids and outraged adults up and down the country when switched for the original on BBC1. The sickest of sick shit. Sure, that character was too stupid to cover his tracks and is now justly serving time for offences ranging from copyright infringement to making and distributing kiddie porn, but that only goes to show that any idiot can do it.
It isn’t all bad, of course, and the deepfaked insertions are not all dead stars. There was the first Glasto vrMix, with the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Oasis; the Bootleg Monterey Pop with the Sex Pistols and the Clash, something for almost everyone. And even some of the prank fake movies are a pleasant surprise. Raiders of the Lost Ark with Larry Grayson as Indy was hilarious. And who in their right mind would want to forget Alien with Joanna Lumley as Patsy Stone as Ripley?
It got me thinking, though. I mean, when you get right down to it, any film or TV drama is wholly fake. Made-up stories, actors playing parts, special effects, liberties with historical fact, improbable science… We get used to the fantasies we know and don’t like deviation. Does it actually matter if different actors play familiar roles, or whether dialogue or storyline are altered? Or if a long-dead singer releases post-mortem recordings, as long it sounds like them and the music fits the expected image? On my iPod there’s a fake Frank Sinatra singing a swinging ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, backed by what I would swear is Nelson Riddle and his orchestra; a plastic Plastic Ono Band recording of the title theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, complete with reverb, feedback and extended primal scream workouts from John and Yoko; and a Joe Strummer facsimile raucously belting out a song composed by a so-called AI, with lyrics that are authentic-sounding but undoubtedly gibberish. It raises that awkward question, of course. If a fake is so good as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, then is it truly a fake? What is the ‘real thing’ anyway, and is it any better than a brilliant forgery? According to Kant, we never experience ‘the thing itself’, only a simulation of it created by our minds from what our crude, limited senses convey and our limited brains interpret.
But I’m waffling, and approaching maudlin self-indulgence. Sorry, but I do a lot of that. Well, either I do or it’s whoever is really writing this – to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what this is. A story? A memoir? A parable? Damned if I know, assuming there is an actual me doing the knowing. Some scientists say we’re probably living in a computer simulation, in which case the whole universe is fake and it doesn’t matter a damn whether I exist or not, or if I’m a true representation of myself. Not that I believe for one moment that I’m not real. Cogito, ergo sum and all that. But Descartes takes us back to Kant again. There’s no logical reason why my perception of self shouldn’t be subject to the immutable law of das Ding an sich. Algorithms permitting, of course.
Whatever. Enough of this recursive philosophising, if only to avoid getting me started on Baudrillard and Lacan, and reasoning myself wholly out of independent biological and intellectual existence. Let’s get back on track and finish this factual/fictional story/memory or whatever the hell it is, if it’s anything at all.
Right, so I was furious. A hundred pounds down the drain, an evening ruined. If I could have got my hands on the faker who ruined my Glasto vrMix, I’d have throttled the bugger. Oh well, the almost certainly vain attempt to get my money back could wait. I had the night to myself, with plenty of booze and snacks laid in. I kicked the VR headset to one side and settled back on the sofa, opened a bottle of beer and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, and switched the television on. It was just before nine on a Saturday night, so there was bound to be some Scandi-noir on BBC4, unless the Beeb was yet again saving money by filling the airwaves with carefully Savile-free Top of the Pops repeats. It was only when I put my bare feet up on the coffee table that I noticed they were muddy. Wet mud. Real mud? Maybe.