GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

It was 1983  I think when I first came to Victoria Park, the East London Greenspace named after  That Old Queen. That Saturday afternoon I swam with friends in a large,  beautiful municipal swimming pool built back in Vic’s day .

I’d happened upon the pool with some friends and we couldn’t believe our luck. Entry was cheap as chips, the place was empty.

This was Saturday on a hot summer’s day in the middle of the Club Wham Tropicana Era. This was how  the east end was back then, gals all clad in ultra short minis, guys dressed up like divvies, many of the white uns affecting an orange ochre shade - the streets being full of disco pubs and tanning salons.

You could say that that was the time that Britain was under the jackboot of Thatcher, masochistically forgetting what was good and right. Maggie and the herald of free enterprise stealing from the people buddies knew what the people wanted. Fridges, microwave meals, a chanced to feed at the fatcat trough.

So the electorate, under the guise of getting what they wanted, lay back and allowed the government to tear up and do away with the things they needed.

When we came out of the pool the  old guy  manning the pool gate told us that was it - the last day the pool would be used.

We were flabbergasted but, sure enough, on Monday the bulldozers moved in and, by the days end, that old beautiful pool was gone.

But the will to experience and create beauty is innate  - and in recent years the space where the pool once was has become the location for the friendly vibey 2 day summer fest called Lovebox.

Ive seen tiny miracles there from Jimmy Cliff to the Bees, to Geno Washington laying it down, making his fiery 60s soul real again for a tent full of sweaty all ages groovers.

But, had you told me that it would be in Victoria park  near that pool that I’d finally get to see Sly Stone, or that I would be seeing Sly Sylvester Stewart Stone anywhere, ever …Id have to have said – you must be shitting me.

And – not just Sly. Round about 9 pm on 21/07/07 it was the indubitably righteous, musically magnificent totally exalted, mixed but mainly black, extensive band The Family Stone, the collective that spread out like a many tentacled beast from the stage of Woodstock and the studios of California into a possibility of a new America – A new fucking world mate - that took the stage.

I admit that – foolishly, because what do cynical, come and show me what you got critical ponces REALLY know? –I was worried about the show on the strength of a report from those who had read a review of the start of the comeback tour of the century in Perugia Italy earlier this month.**

 Headlined I Wanna Take You Lower the review was a depressing and all too predictable account of a washed up musician and a make do band.

And it was certainly NUFFIN’ like the show that graced Victoria Park and the space where the pool used to be and banished all the crimes and the sickness and the waste that has gone before.

The old Draconian jackboot was still in place though. People had been held up at the gate earlier in the day, ticket holding folk, prevented from getting in to see the music they paid for.

You can see whats going on in Britain now,20 years after a right wing government changed into one that was , momentarily, disgusised as a left of centre one. Its swinging so far tgo the right again its like being in the Reich.

WE burn thousands of innocents in the Middler East, we live in fear of bombs from the desperate ansd insane and there’s things like the  the constant and ludicrous war on drugs, the anti skunk propoganda, pedalled by  allcomers and  the lets put Pete Doherty in a cage and use him as pin cushion voodoo doll mentality – sheee-it!

So its no surprise that Sly’s show would be the focus for a heavily enforced zero drug policy. Sly’s great - and never ever fully appreciated enough - contribution to the raising of the collective human consciousness has been downplayed in favour of prurient interest in what drugs the guy is taking or has taken.

Reviewers like the guy in The Observer, and no doubt when I been “doing my job”, me,  every sad sick fuck, in fact,  who works in an industry over obsessed with the medicine behind the magic – we’ve allowed the great pool of life to be contaminated by these concerns.

But a little of how important this music is was rammed home on the way in. The only doing their jobs Boys n Gals in Flurorescent jackets, their vans all around, the guy beside me, eyeing me up like the Narc of legend while the security guy goes through bags  one intones loudly into the mic “this is a drugs bust”.

If someone was carrying - or stoned – Sly’s well seasoned paranoid anthem Somebody’s Watching might have sprung to mind.

 But shit on all that.

Shit on the rain and the corporate presences and all the gimmicks and all that and ….DANCE TO THE MUSIC!!

Listen to those horns soar, the feelnomenal  12 string bass, look at those beautiful women and that guy with the dreads onstage  singing and you fall in love all over  again as you realise that THIS was Sly and The Family Stone’s 60s revolution was all about.

Not a cult of an individual, not about the drugs, not about all that superstar hooey -  but a powerful conjoining of cultures  OF A WHOLE COMMUNITY.

The names may have changed but these were - and are - the hottest musicians imaginable playing music that they loved, deeply appreciative of the legacy ( a legacy not aired out in a live context for over 30 fucking years)…

Certainly some things were the same as the show the Observer critic saw. Sly only came onstage for a short time, Sly looked different to the way he did 30 years, the band members were different and…. no shit Sherlock?

And you – were you onstage at all?

 Have you invented a whole style of music, has your prose come within a fucking light year of lifting the collective spirit to the places Sly and Family did ?

And , furthermore, are you hanging out with the people you did over 30 years ago, and looking the same? Oh yeah and have you in the years in between experienced the ravages of a musician life, the death dealing war on Black American Poet God Princes, COINTERPOL, seen an industry you helped create turn into a fashion obsessed corporate feeding trough?

And have your articles inspired a whole new generation of musicians to dare to go to the places where the fuckers who keep us down (rather than let us get down) don’t want us to go?

Oh yeah and, recently,  have you fallen off a cliff before writing your review ?

LOOK!! LISTEN!! Its Sly and The Family Stone - for fuck sake. Those beautiful women singing Everyday People, an absolutely top whack band  making those great avant garde right on the money and deep in the pocket pop tunes live and breathe and fire again?

Good THIS is beautiful I am bathing in a place beyond that old pool tghats just a memory - long BEFORE Sly ever walks on stage.

This is so real and good and it makes up for the pool not being there. And thankfully the  miracle of music across time and space is there to be witnessed in the little kid –can’t be more n 7 0r 8 - on his dad’s shoulders in front of me.

The kid is fucking having it, dancing like a loose goose head jutting, arms out, totally in there with Dance To The Music.

The kids joining in on the great big “Gulders” too, the wordless vocalising that grows out of the phenomenal funk, making real the urge to raise our voices to the sky and praise the miracle of the king and his clan returned.

And when Sly does  appear the similarity isn’t  with some old sad washed out hasbeen - its with a giant of American music.

Late period Miles came to mind - that lovely slurred, sinewy snakey  voice was right in there, the sly slouch of the body of course, the whole persona that engaged and sidled his way in like a golden worm going into the pop brain, was miraculously intact. And the great band where right there, curled in round him.

 The chemistry changed subtly, brilliantly when he appeared, the way it always does among a group of crack players when a great musician, a legendary forcefield (James Brown, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison) enters their orbit.

Sly wasn’t just there – as so many bands are these days – to be witnessed he was there, as his best music always has been, as a motivating force, extolling and getting our participation.

Come to bless us, to say a little thanks , perhaps, to the people, the people who have, through their dancing and listening, through their we will not judge you, you giant, you bigger beautiful part of ourselves, attitude.

I mean that little kid on his dad shoulders he aint never going to get to swim in that ole Viccy Park pool. But what did he need to know of  what was past, what was gone?

And what did he need to know of what Sly had smoked or fucked or injected or snorted?

What did he need to  know of the Sly myth as he was right there with us in the ever living now -  feeling the miraculous thriving surviving beauty of the Sly and The Family Stone REALITY.

Honestly if this aint something to get down and give thanks for - I don’t know what is.

So, on your knees please. Stop pedalling corporate cack and critical canards because - as the great Liverpudlian minstrel Dean Johnson put it earlier in the week when he graced London with his natural born to be on stage greatness…kneeling down IS better than bending over.

Thank you Mister Stewart, thank you Mister Johnson!