Lost in Vagueness

12 years ago, I picked up a camera

and started to film Roy Gurvitz.

He was the driving force behind Lost Vagueness,

the festival within the festival

and the invention which saved Glastonbury.

I knew he was a winner, you see.

I supported him right from the word go.

The Lost Vagueness thing was very good.

He brought this incredible element

to the festival, which was this partying,

this Lost Vagueness and everything that it brought in

and all the tribes involved in it.

It was just amazing.

It was providing an excitement

that had to be there.

Without it, Glastonbury probably would've died.

I thought Glastonbury was quite out there,

and yet someone within Glastonbury

was running something even more out there.

There was something about the chaos that he loved

and stoked and celebrated

and actually that's kind of one of the things

that made it brilliant.

But it wasn't possible to carry on like that.

We nearly destroyed ourselves and each other.

Whoa!

[cheering and applause continues]

Glastonbury is one of the most famous festivals

in the world

and now much more than a music festival.

Roy is one of the people who helped change this.

We weren't selling the tickets like we should've done.

It wasn't a sellout situation.

So I thought, "What can I do to put out something different?"

And Roy was doing the ballroom dancing

and hiring in the gowns and stuff.

‐ Hi, Roy. ‐ Hi. How are you doing?

Thank you for allowing us into your oasis of civilization.

You're welcome.

Ballroom dancing. Why?

Well, it's s just an excuse to get people dressed up

and have a bit of fun and have a laugh.

Most of the people that come in here do want to take part.

Michael, big fan of ballroom dancing?

Not really, no.

I announced it to the world and it went everywhere,

Australia, America.

We sold the last of the tickets

because of the ballroom dancing story.

Extraordinary, wasn't it?

So I really feel I owe Roy a favor

because of the ballroom dancing thing.

Roy's eight and a half years younger than me.

He got all the love because he was a baby.

My father had a really, really bad temper.

When he was in a good mood, he could be a lot of fun,

he was always singing and playing games,

but he had a dark side.

This'll give you an idea of what my father was like.

That's my mum, and you can see how beautiful she was.

And that was my dad. Can you see?

With the gold chain, and very clean,

very smart, very dapper.

Now, I never discussed politics or religion

ever with my father.

But for some reason, Roy,

this is when he was a lot older, when he was a teenager,

started arguing about... I think it was about religion,

and Roy stormed out and said,

"I hope I never see you again as long as I live."

And that was when he cut himself off from everybody.

'Cause I never saw him for 20 years. Neither did my mum.

Every year they become more visible.

Every summer more and more young people opt for what they see

as the freedom of life on the open road.

But what they encounter is the hostility of local residents

and the attention of the police who regularly move them on

from sites that they're occupying illegally.

I'm a county court bailiff. I'm here from...

I did go and try and make my own way in life,

and I suppose if home life had been better,

I would've carried on living at home.

I left at the end of the '70s and you'd got the miner strike,

the whole traveler thing, I lived on the road,

there was the squatting thing going on, Margaret Thatcher.

I'm only too delighted to do anything we can

to make life difficult for such things as hippie convoys.

I've been beaten up by the police, I've been arrested,

thrown out of squats, had vehicles taken,

do you know what I mean, this whole sense of

it all just seems really unfair.

Roy was a traveler, you know, in the '80s,

and he was kind of a gang leader type.

Travelers were always a massive part of the festival.

But from a child's perspective, 'cause I was about 10 or 11,

there were elements of it which were a little bit unsettling.

Well, I met Roy, I'd just gone on the road,

thrown away all my bricks and mortar existence

and bought a truck and was just living in that,

and we were coming down to Glastonbury,

and Roy came sort of shambling up,

and he hadn't got a vehicle or anything then

and he wanted to be my hitchhiker.

She just sort of dropped me off

and threw me out in the middle of a field

and then left me there and drove off,

which is kind of, you know, it's what women do, isn't it?

He'd never been to Glastonbury before.

But I will say he did manage to blag us in somehow.

He's quite kind of verbose, isn't he,

and he's got a lot to say, he's got a lot of ideas,

and everything's wrong and all that.

I have memories of just watching my dad and Roy interact,

and it was, like, mostly funny and also quite aggressive.

There were times when I was, like,

"I think he's talking the piss out of you."

He was kind of troublesome, but on the other hand

I thought I could deal with this bloke,

and he became a link for us,

between me and the travelers, really.

Things were really good for a while

and then there were all the riots in 1990.

We just wanna go somewhere!

Glastonbury had become...

effectively out of control.

There were Molotov cocktails

being thrown outside the window

and kind of telegraph poles coming towards us,

and that was really scary at that point.

I got taken up to my granny's house,

which was up at the top of the road,

and all I could see were ambulances just coming out.

I was, like, "What's going on down there?"

It felt like the end of the world.

It had to change 'cause it was fucking horrible.

It was violent, it was nasty, it was...

Yeah, it was either gonna die a death

or something major... major had to happen.

Michael asked me

whether I would come and help him

sort of restructure the festival.

And I took on the responsibility

of having the entertainment license

and... and running the festival, effectively.

I just started telling people

we need to get a lot more creative

if we want this to continue,

making it presentable and changing the look

from being quite crusty and aggressive,

you know, everyone's wearing paramilitary clothing.

Wanker.

We had such a bad reputation.

We were, like, really getting slagged off everywhere.

Everyone called us crusties.

The fucking press used to shit on Glastonbury.

It was, like, mud‐hell crusty city.

A few years later we came up with the idea of

why don't we just wear dicky bows and tuxedos and ballgowns,

put the men in women's clothes?

And it altered everything.

It made everything entirely different.

The same people, but suddenly people were going, "Wow."

And out of that was born Lost Vagueness.

I'd been doing bars there

for 10 years before Lost Vagueness even started,

and I just thought, yeah, we'll do a cafe

with a... with a casino behind it.

And it was only half a dozen of us and a roulette table

and we made it look like there was a whole casino going on.

Everybody wanted to get in there.

So the following year we put it up and we let people in.

And that was a big mistake.

To let people in? It was packed. Oh, alright.

No, no, no, you're missing the point.

It worked beautifully as this illusionary space

that didn't really exist that people could see.

Once you let them in, the magic's over, isn't it?

It's like showing someone...

showing someone how to do a magic trick.

The magic's gone.

But... Well, it was for me,

but it... obviously it carried on, as you well know.

After the success of the ballroom and the casino,

Lost Vagueness became the official after‐party

in Glastonbury.

I found them all in various asylums up and down the country,

asked them if they'd like to come out for the day

and a lot of them said yes.

Look at the back of that lorry. Look how well packed it is.

How long does it take to plan?

I suppose a good six months

of solidly concentrating on this particular event.

You've got the to‐do list, I take it.

‐ I met Roy when I was 17. ‐ Yeah.

That's a fucking long time ago.

I'd been doing a cabaret called the Velvet Tip Saloon.

Roy asked us to do a sort of exotic weird cabaret thing.

It started off just being, like, a £5 gazebo from Argos

with some fabric hanging up in it.

People were starting their own little interesting side projects