The fence…

The fence…

The Fence. This picture is from 2000.  I walked into my first Glastonbury in 1990 clutching my ticket in my hand.  The entrance then was pretty undefined.  I recall a big gap and that was it.  Being the honest social that I am I searched for someone to give my ticket to.  There was no one.  Oh well, I thought and made my way into one of the most transformative moments of my life.  But security in 1990 was so much more informal.  The fence was an aspiration rather than anything substantial. In fact, I don’t think it circled the entire site?  One night my friends and I climbed over it form the inside to make our way down some lane to find a spontaneous rave that we’d heard about.  Someone had thoughtfully placed a milk crate either side to make it easier to do so.  Plus it was only about five feet high. Over the subsequent years the fence and the security grew.  Partly in response to healthy and safety but also because of the increasingly disciplinary and authoritarian nature of the Conservative government.  With the Criminal Justice Act of 1991 they declared war on fun.  (Does anyone remember Kill the Bill demos?) It was the act of parliament that forbade gatherings of more than three people and the playing of repetitive beats. They had ground down the Miners and organised labour in the eighties.  And in the nineties they turned their attention to any cultural opposition of the neoliberal project. Mainly by death of a thousand bureaucratic cuts that could stop in event in its tracks with a maze of compliance and regulation to meet.  Dance music and festivals were firmly in the sights.