I don’t know about you, but music festivals always seem like busy places to me. Not exactly in keeping with a love of donning outdoor gear and heading for a lonely headland by the ocean. Each year we go to a local festival, entry wristbands provided gratis by the organisers to stop us complaining about the din from the centre stage, which happens to be about four hundred yards from our front garden as the crow flies. Or rather as the rooks fly in their thousands at roosting time each evening. Ali and I dip in and dip out of the show, bemused by the multitude of bright bucket hats and improbable steampunk glasses, feeling like fish out of water in the clothes we wore when we went to do the shopping at Aldi a couple of hours earlier. With a limit of ten thousand revellers, it’s about as much as we can cope with. And only in small doses at that.
So while various people I know, including my own daughter seem quite content to shell out huge wads of money if they’re lucky enough to get through the online queues and hours of hanging on the telephone, the thought of going to a full sized festival scares the living daylights out of me. Crikey, that's at least two song titles in the last sentence. Obviously I’d have been rather keen to see Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Santana at Woodstock amongst others in 1969, but I was only three at the time and I didn’t have a passport yet. Even if I did, I’m not sure my parents would have agreed to me travelling all that way on my own.
But along with seemingly half the nation, we’ll quite happily tune into the televised broadcasts from Glastonbury each June. Last year an eighty year old Paul McCartney took us back to the days I’m not old enough to remember, with a repertoire in which I knew every song as an old friend. And this time it was the farewell concert in this country by Elton John, a man who has an uncanny knack of appealing to every generation. While I’ve never rushed to buy any of his records, it felt like one of those performances that would stay locked in our memories - a special event that transcended music and connected so many people. Watching that joyous sea of souls in the audience, dressed in all manner of colourful and crazy apparel, grinning, singing, crying, making marriage proposals(!), waving at TV cameras and escaping life's shackles in those two hours was what touched me most of all. The enormous outpouring of love was so infinitely palpable, even to those of us watching from our sofas at home. What a wonderful thing to witness at a time when not everything in the world is going entirely swimmingly.
As we watched, twenty year olds belting out each chorus, standing next to seventy year olds doing exactly the same thing, I was struck by how his songs have become a roadmap of peoples’ lives, the emotions from both the performers and the crowd bursting from the screen and into living rooms everywhere. Every song took someone to a memory somewhere back in time it seemed. Happy memories and sad ones, small and insignificant memories and life changing moments all happened to someone to the soundtrack of "Your Song" or "Rocketman." When he was joined by Rina Sawayama for a blast of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” I was immediately transported to that long hot summer of ‘76, watching cracks appear in the ground where there were once puddles and overdosing on Dartmoor blackberries. So many shared moments, so many personal ones, all happening together in those Somerset fields on a Sunday night in June.
And then as he sang “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” a small wavering voice, one that I know so well piped up from the other half of the sofa. She never remembers the words to songs, and the ones that do come back she habitually puts in the wrong order, quite often deliberately because she knows it drives me to distraction. She even sings the words of one song to the tune of another, just to watch my exasperation levels hit the ceiling. But there in soft tones, “butterfly,” then “fly away,” and “high away” came in regular triplets as I watched her quietly through moistened eyes. “That was always my favourite one,” she confessed after it had finished. I’ve had “Butterfly” in my head for the last few days on permanent loop and I’m not bored of it yet. In fact I might never be. It was only the next day that I realised Elton had made another moment somewhere for someone. One I’ll forever treasure alongside somebody I’ve loved beyond words since the first time she grinned at me across a crowded office all those years ago.
And here’s the butterfly, walking along the Offa's Dyke Path on the border of England and Wales above Hay Bluff, patiently tolerating my preoccupation with landscape photography and grand scenes away from the crowds as she so often does. Thanks to Elton, life’s roadmap has another smiling signpost in the shape of a perfect butterfly. I even rushed out and bought her a copy of the record.
