Lost Vagueness

Roy Gurvitz, founder of the cult festival crew Lost Vagueness, chats to Charlie Hope.

I was standing in the casino tent in the Lost Vagueness field at Glastonbury 2002, in Welly boots and a mud splattered midnight blue off-the-shoulder ball gown which I had had to hire to get past the casino’s strict black tie door policy. A tuxedoed croupier was dealing blackjack to a few of us, ankle-deep in rain water and sludge but similarly smartly attired. Burlesque girls swung overhead on a trapeze. Nearby my friends got married in the Chapel of Love and Loathe. I don’t think it lasted. In the next door ballroom a DJ played swing, jive and big band numbers to a wasted but appreciative crowd. Welcome to the wonderful world of Lost Vagueness!

Cabaret, burlesque and circus performance has been on the rise for a few years now and there’s some great stuff about - our own AKA has sometime Lost Vagueness cabaret star and burlesque choreographer extraordinaire Miss Lady G Luck regularly performing her aerial rope act at our Friday night, Blind Tiger. Long before all this became fashionable, daddies of the outrageous cabaret Lost Vagueness were throwing twisted theatre parties in fields and in festivals. We spoke to the top dog Roy and asked him about the glitz, the glamour and why they’re not doing Glastonbury this year…

Endclub.com: So how did Lost Vagueness all start, I heard it started as a football café…

Roy: That was one incarnation of it, yes. We started in various locations and guises. In terms of our history with Glastonbury, I first went there in 1986 as a lonely tourist and ended up camping next to a stage which was then the Wango Riley stage (Wango Riley's was a legendary field in the early festival’s old travellers' days), which had Nick Turner’s pyramid over it. All these people came over and started setting it up and they didn’t know me at all, I was just sat there and for some reason they said to me “do you want to look after this and run it for the weekend?” I was involved in Glastonbury from 1986 as site crew, and worked at Glastonbury as a volunteer; the concession being you were given a space to use for your own purposes during the festival. I ran a bar selling wine, whereas most people ran bars selling beer, so that was my extraordinary thing going on. It just grew from there. One year I did do a World Cup cafe, but not in the way you would expect. I actually showed World Cup games in 1990 - I thought there’s not really much point in showing all the England games because we’ll just get knocked out in the first round and it’ll be really boring – so I showed all the games from 1966 and 1972 and that era when England were winning, and showed the corresponding game. I remember there was England vs. Germany in 1990 and that was a game we won in 1966, and we lost in 1990. I showed the game we won simultaneously to the live game and so while everyone else was watching the 1990 one everyone in my tent had no idea they were watching an old match and thought it was a new team because they were all a bit out of it, so yeah…

So it was the ultimate World Cup then as an England fan?

Yeah…a little bit tongue in cheek. And I remember when the actual final was on I was so fed up with football by then anyway I just played an omnibus edition of Eastenders instead. It just seemed more appropriate, much to the utter dismay of ardent football fans…but fuck it, it was only a small tent. So that was the sort of thing that I did, and after that I did a small cabaret tent, which went quite well and then the following year we did the casino there to try and be a bit different. To some extent we wanted to try to upset people in a way, because we were up in the green fields and we just thought if we did a whole tent with the emphasis on money it would rock the boat, but it became very popular with the healers and the green fields, and effectively it sort of built a bridge between the very, very green people and the then very mainstream people running the main stages. All and sundry wanted to be in the casino, it was the place to be. Lord only knows why, to this day I can’t properly explain it, it was just how it was and it grew from there. We did it for a couple of years and then introduced the dress code…

Yeah we’ve been there and seen the black tie dress code in action... how do you come up with the little twists like that?

Lost Vagueness sort of grows organically and at the time it just feels like the obvious next move. To some extent it’s like a game of chess, once you’ve made the opening three moves you kind of have very little option after that as to what’s actually going to come next, and so you just go with it. When we were doing the casino, the next move wasn’t to make the whole thing bigger but to put more emphasis on the casino itself. So the next step was to build a ballroom, because everyone was dressed up anyway to get into the casino and not everyone could fit in, they were overflowing into the field so then came the ballroom. Once we had that going there was a feeling of Vegas starting and so along came the chapel.

So the chapel was part of its natural evolution?

Yeah, but it was also somewhat inspired by a feud going on at the time between Michael Eavis and a local lady who had erected a big wooden cross at the foot of the site, because Michael had erected a stone circle. I remember the headline in whatever paper reported on it at the time was ‘Good Versus Eavis’ which was a fantastic headline, and that was the inspiration for the chapel. So I thought Vegas theme, good versus evil, that works, then the Christians started saying “great, they’ve got a chapel now instead of a stone circle” and it flummoxed all the hippies who were in the stone circle going “oh, we’ve got a chapel”, but in the end everyone loved it. After the second or third year we did it, Micheal Eavis came round on one of those tour buses full of the elderly people of Pilton and he had a microphone on the bus saying “here’s the Glastonbury festival cathedral”, so it grew from being a chapel to a cathedral in 2 or 3 years haha. So that’s how these things developed.

So how about the people behind Lost Vagueness and the performers, where do you find them all?

Well I usually find them under Waterloo Bridge in cardboard boxes and things. I package them up and take them away in my van ha ha! I don’t know where I find them, they sort of find me. They’re very much gluttons for punishment I guess.

Was it always an enjoyable experience despite the weather?!

Working it can be an ordeal rather than an experience. As you’re aware, this year we’re not going to Glastonbury. We’ve just had enough after last year. Last year there were a whole load of issues but primarily the bad weather. The ground conditions are just terrible. I’ve been there 20 odd years and progressively it’s got worse but last year it was beyond the pale. It rained solidly for a 2 week period before the festival so the ground was already soggy before people arrived, and then it continued raining for a week. It just meant that we had to deal with equipment getting buried in the mud, whole stages, steel decks, bits of décor, our lighting and props…compare it to Pompeii, where everything just disappeared never to be seen again. Some archaeologist will find it in a couple of centuries time and have to try and work it out haha.

So what have you got on instead this year?

Well we were hoping to be travelling up to a festival in Cumbria but unfortunately we’ve just heard it’s lost its backing. It’s a bit of a blow as it was only really earlier this year we decided we weren’t going to Glastonbury, so we hadn’t really made any other serious plans for anything else. So it’s a shame it’s disappeared. There’s nothing large on the radar for this year which I think is a good thing. We’re just doing small events, I’ve just been up to Doncaster for a festival up there, there’s another one called the Hothouse festival which we did the closing party for, there’s a club re-launching itself down in Brighton and we’re going to go down there and do some stuff with them…At the moment we’re working on lots of small parties to keep us going. We’ve definitely taken our foot off the fast forward pedal and now we’re just kerb crawling I suppose, it’s not a problem, we’re just seeing what’s passing us by and where we can go with it.

Tell us the most outrageous thing that’s ever happened to you at Lost Vagueness…

Well I think it’s outrageous that Glastonbury are still using our name to push the 30,000 tickets they’ve got left unsold.

There's also the interview with Shangri-La, the new Lost Vagueness, that’s on the Glastonbury website, it sort of snubs LV’s ideas. You might say there’s no need to knock Lost Vagueness…

It’s just pure fantasy. It is outrageous and I was dumbfounded when I read it, there’s very little fact in there, it just contradicts itself. Shangri-La says there’ll be nothing the same as how Lost Vagueness did it, but the people that work there will be the people that are Lost Vagueness. I haven’t read a press release for Glastonbury that doesn’t mention Lost Vagueness, I actually had to force their hand to announce that we weren’t appearing! At the moment that’s the most outrageous thing I can think of. I could recount stories of transvestites in tap shoes in my bed and things like that, but that’s an everyday occurrence…Glastonbury using our names to sell tickets, now that is outrageous.

Published: 6/05/2008