I’m Colin, this is Olive and we have been coming to Glastonbury for 15 years. In that time, we have seen one act. It was Leonard Cohen, Sunday night on the Pyramid stage, the sun had just dropped – it was one of those perfect moments. It was 2008 and it is still a vivid memory. It took someone like Leonard Cohen to make us trek all that way. Nobody else has pulled us since. No one has remotely come close.
We’ve had a spot in the Healing Field for years. We hear tales from the rest of the festival, that other world. People our end call it Babylon. As far as we’re concerned, we’re at the best part of the festival, so why would we go to Babylon? We’ve heard about people going down there and getting corrupted. We just stay pure in our little bubble.
I have a sense of coming home when I go to Glastonbury. Call me a hippie. Music is an essential part of the festival, but it has so many unique things about it. There is this Green Fields vibe – the crafty bit, the healing bit – then there is the more commercial, young-people stuff. The way those two aspects of the festival support each other is wonderful.
When we first turned up, we had a gong and a tent. We thought: “We’ll do something; we’re not sure what.” This has evolved into what is now a polished routine: you lie on the mats, we bang the gong and you are bathed in sound. It can be meditative. The easiest way to pitch it would be a relaxing session, but that would be an oversimplification.
Some people find a gong bath energising. They drop down into deeper states of consciousness. If people have grief or trauma, that can be triggered to release. It can be a profound experience. But we never say: “Come have a gong bath session, it’s going to do this,” because it is all potentials.
We’re very popular. We sell out of sessions very quickly. You might think that it would be hard to access that deeper consciousness with the sound of the festival, but we lead people into it quite artfully – even if I say so myself. We say that it is just the symphony of life.
I heard Kylie Minogue is playing on Sunday [She is on at 3.45pm, in the “legend” slot.] Would I go down for Kylie? Na – she can come up, if she wants to see us.
