"Bringing that amount of queerness into what was traditionally a very heterosexual, even quite macho culture, was important. "It was so great to have disco at a festival that had been dominated by rock and rave up until that point." And for a third thumbs-up, the festival slowly shifted into a physically more curious and inclusive space. "We were one of the few all-night venues and it became this thing - if you knew about it, you found it and you traipsed across the mud to find it." On another, it was joyfully musical. "The first year we were like an island in the middle of this lake of mud," Luke recalls. On one level, it was the furtive secrecy of it all, something clandestine amid an increasingly over-exposed event that was now diarised and sold by the BBC. That first early summer of 2007, it was clear that something had shifted in the Glastonbury ethos.
"From the very start we fell in love with it." Brick-by-brick, Steve and Gideon built it. "Then I got there and thought, 'wow, it looks even better than the drawings.'" The attention to detail in the sketches portrayed a loving approximation of the perfect imaginary night-time space. "I remember Gideon showing me the drawings and thinking 'as if it's ever going to look like that?'" says Horse Meat alumnus, walking disco encyclopaedia and one of the British DJ greats, Luke Howard.
Moustaches were distributed for charity at the door kiosk, free for anyone willing to reveal their manhood for bargain entry. Somewhere in the middle of Tony's wonderful landscape rested the emotional spirit of the NYC Downlow, Glasto's gay nightclub brim-full of possibility, in which a cascading new sense of freedom and personal liberation can begin to resemble reality. Amid this imaginative Dream-State sprung from his hands, Tony led some medical help in the form of the Gross Profit Hospital, where open your heart surgeries were offered and bleeding cuts stopped. In front of both tiny school and church were makeshift gravestones for Boris Johnson, Amber Rudd and others for whom the spirit of kindness is professionally, politically and personally anathema. In the Universicool of St Corbyn's there was a library, kitted out with books for loan including Marxist Spencer's Food Bank Recipes, Love in the Time of Co-opera, Fifty Shades of Red and Tory Mathematics. The devil's banished to the hills, past our open borders and beyond, sit cold and hungry exposed to the truths we laid bare.
The trickle now a steady stream, from the great heights a collective pool emerged and we comfortably bathed in its warm waters. Collectively we rose, our voices reached out and the redistribution began.