The Sunday Morning Service at Greenbelt 2009 focussed on the stories of the people living in the land called holy – especially the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories.
The webpage we've built here will give you more resources – where you can go next with these stories. But we'd love to know what you made of the service and the issues it raised. Join the conversation by commenting below.
My Greenbelt has been slightly different to most. In amongst arranging press conferences and planning interviews with what feels like every local BBC radio station in the UK, time to stop and watch is understandably limited, as is time to write reviews of what I've seen or conjure the words to describe it…
Last night I took an hour off to see Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip's performance poetry mixed with electro beats. It was their first Greenbelt experience and they clearly didn't know what to expect, hence the early between-song banter from Pip: 'I'm trying really hard not to swear!'. But they soon relaxed, throwing out jokes about the 'uplifting' (or otherwise) nature of some of the tracks from Angles, last year's acclaimed debut album. They played most of the hits early on, starting with The Beat That My Heart Skipped and rattling through Look For The Woman and their biggest track, Thou Shalt Always Kill, complete with the radio-friendly version of the lyrics.
By the time the duo reached the end of the set the crowd had grown and was sufficiently warmed up for headliners Royksopp, but there was still time for Letter From God To Man; Pip's take on theology set to Sac's sample of Radiohead's 'Planet Telex'. For me it was one of those Greenbelt moments that I've had a few of over the years; Pip's presence seemed to grow further as the crowd cheered along with the prose, and as the song reached its climax it felt like Sac vs Pip belonged as much on Greenbelt's worship programme as the Mainstage music line-up.
(by Andy Tate)
Greenbelt is like New Year's Eve without the mild sense of disappointment.
This is the best description of the festival that I know. They aren't my own words of Wildean wisdom, unfortunately, but those of Cole Moreton who told me that he, in turn, borrowed them from poet and priest Mal Doney. Unlike the 31st December, however, the Bank Holiday weekend seems genuinely charged with the possibility of change and less chance of dodgy television (though the advent of The Jesus Arms creates the risk of other, less holy, post-festive sensations). But, in the spirit of the best parties, you get to hear great music, reconnect with old friends and make new ones.
For an inveterate chatterbox like me, the plethora of opportunities to drink tea and gabble endlessly about music, books and ideas is very heaven. In my lifetime, Greenbelt has always existed on what Robert Browning once memorably named 'the dangerous edge of things'. One thing that keeps me coming back to Greenbelt is that it continues to wrestle with issues of faith and justice and to recognize that good questions are more important than easy answers. And it has been brave in hosting sessions by figures like Peter Tatchell, Billy Bragg and Iain Sinclair alongside the established, safer Christian speakers. And what's not to like about a festival that introduced me to the sounds of Duke Special and the writing of Fredrick Buechner (if you haven't read him, please do). I confess that I am a hopeless idealist when it comes to Greenbelt: it's simply the most inventive, warmest and riskiest place on earth – a place that, since my most awkward adolescent years has given me a sense that the church, in its broadest, messiest sense, is worth a wager of faith.
(by Simon Jones)
There's a problem though, sometimes. You come to get inspiration and it's easy to find. The artists are inspirational and so are the activists. The musicians can find the secret chord that David played and even the holy people can make you believe that being holy might matter. Greenbelt's creativity comes from its middle, its beginning and end.
But then. The artists are more artistic than you, and the activists more active. The holy people are holier than you and the comedians are funnier. The musicians play better than you and the poets are more poetic … sometimes, sometimes, it feels as if you can't add anything. Cant contribute, be part of it, join in.
But then and but then. Into this surfeit of excellence walks Billy Childish (a most excellent man). The trouble begins, he says, when people start trying to be successful with their artistic ability. Every artist is trying to get to the point where people applaud their special genius. It's the assumed part of creativity, that it's there to wow people, to impress them.
What rot, he scoffs. What nonsense. Either everyone is special or no one is. How does doing the thing that you're good at tell you anything about yourself? It's the failing that tells you that. It's in the failing that you find, and expand, your limits. It's in the failing that we reveal our true selves to each other, not in the triumph of our successes. Art – and religion, he adds – needs to be more than a cosy nest for the able.
Most days of the week this might be eight parts nonsense. His artistic failures sell quite well, after all. Even Billy knows, one suspects, that if you lined up everything he said against itself it wouldn't really add up. It would fail somewhat.
But today, when confidence leaks away in the face of a festival edifice of impossible achievements, it feels like a welcome corrective. Is the artist the master or the servant? Your skills aren't things to have confidence in, they're things to avoid. Having fewer of them might even mean that you're closer to self-discovery. Having weakness, you can read somewhere, might make you strong.
Fortunately, Greenbelt is full of people who have spent a lot of time failing. It's out there to find. In the meantime, do the thing you're not good at. Fail. Learn. Live a little.
By Kari Stewart, talks administrator.
(There's a group of people you'll rarely see at Greenbelt without a phone pressed to their ear. Here's a quick story illustrating the kind of thing they'll be working on.)
Running across centre course… my phone rang. Again. It was a lovely volunteer from Contributor's Reception who had a rather confused Alister McGrath with her. He was under the impression that he was going to be speaking at 10:00 am but the programme/daily diary she had said he was speaking at Jerusalem at 1:45 pm. Not sure where the mix-up happened, but regardless of that, we had a bit of a problem.
Alister was meant to be speaking at another event in the afternoon. He managed to switch things around with the other event so that he could be at Greenbelt for the afternoon slot, but he had a request: since he would be arriving back on site just half an hour before his talk started, he wanted to make sure that he would be able to pull into site, park, and get to his venue quickly – an entirely reasonable request.
I grabbed programme coordinator Matt Stone to find out who I could talk to about getting Alister a parking spot near the grandstand. Matt directed me to Operations Manager Stuart Radcliffe who said that Alister could park in Essential Users parking right next to the grandstand. He passed me over to another Operations worker who provided me with a parking pass for Alister.
I phoned Alister back and gave him instructions for how to enter the racecourse in order to get to the parking lot and asked him to phone me when he was five minutes away so that I could meet him at the entrance and give him the parking pass. Everything went according to plan. Alister phoned me just when he arrived on site. He wasn't sure exactly where he was in relation to where he needed to be, but we worked out that he was right outside Contributor's Reception. I directed him around to the entrance next to Centaur and handed him the parking pass. He pulled into the car park in plenty of time to get to his speaking venue.
I was really pleased walking by later to see a huge crowd at his talk and to know that it was very much worth him rearranging his schedule.
by Steve Lawson, originally posted on his blog.
This year is my 17th Greenbelt. At 4 days a year, that’s over 2 months of my life spent either in a field – or on Cheltenham Racecourse – listening to music (and most years playing it to), listening to talks, seminars and debates, hanging out with friends – and meeting loads of new ones – and failing to sleep uncomfortably in a tent.
As a 17 year old the importance of my first Greenbelt was almost entirely cultural – I saw 60 bands in 4 days in my first year here. The cultural importance was merely that they weren’t all shit, and some were even rather good. One or two were bands that my friends at school would’ve heard of. As a kid growing up with a huge social and cultural gulf between his school-life and his church-life in the late 80s, that was significant. It was the kind of place that I could’ve brought my friends, and not cringed at the supreme bogusness of everything that went on. It was also the kind of place where ‘bringing your friends’ wasn’t the aim. There was no clandestine intention to it, no need to proselytize, just ‘be’.
Over the next 10 years (’90-2000), Greenbelt, despite being one weekend a year, helped shape, inform and challenge my nascent political and spiritual development and exploration. The Evangelicalism of my youth was pulled apart and reconstructed without the mind-numbing anti-intellectualism and adolescent treatment of doubt and conformity. My innate discomfort with all kinds of fundamentalism – religious, anti-religious or that most vociferous of English fundamentalisms; football – was given a voice, a cogent argument and the reminder that the hatred of fundamentalists is its own kind of pernicious fundie-ism.
Everything was up for debate, but nothing was thrown away just because it wasn’t cool, or didn’t fit the latest intellectual fad. The debate was grown-up, the conclusions were almost always qualified with the terms of the ongoing debate, the route into a personal journey that could end anywhere, and the success or failure of that journey wasn’t defined by the desired outcome of any other ideological group.
The seminars I went to and the books I bought at Greenbelt were utterly pivotal to me ending up where I am now…
Where am I? That’s not really any of your business 
– it’s certainly not pivotal to whether or not Greenbelt’s role in my life has been overwhelmingly good. It has. And it has been in the lives of people whose conclusions about the questions they were encouraged to explore were completely different to mine.
It continues to occupy a place in my life that causes me to think, question, challenge and to lean ever more heavily on Grace, forgiveness and the ‘death of smug’.
A friend on twitter has the phrase on her avatar “Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow” – each of us is, as Wavy Gravy said, a temple of accumulated error, and Greenbelt is pretty much the only place I’ve able to consistently forgive my error-filled messed up self, and explore how to make better mistakes. Long may in continue.
One of Greenbelt's photographers, Jonathon Watkins, walked around site yesterday, took some pictures of the set-up and has posted them all on Greenbelt's Flickr photostream. And don't forget, if you're taking your camera this weekend and will be uploading the results to Flickr, tag your photos 'greenbelt09'.
by George Luke
I’ll probably lose a million music journo credibility points for the confession I’m about to make, but here goes anyway. Until recently, I’d never listened to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album in its entirety before. And I probably still wouldn’t have, were it not for Ed Richmond, Head of Greenbelt’s music group. Last week, Ed sent me an email asking if I’d write something about Gary Crosby’s Nu Troop, who are performing the entire album at this year’s Greenbelt.
Gary’s no stranger to Greenbelt; he last graced the Mainstage in 2005 as leader of the Jazz Jamaica All-Stars, who closed that year’s festival with a rocking Motown ska party (Jazz Jamaica also played Mainstage a few years prior to that). Some of the other musicians in Nu Troop’s lineup have also played Greenbelt before in other guises. One of the most memorable was Soweto Kinch (Nu Troop’s current saxophonist), who made his solo Mainstage debut in 2007. Who could forget him making up a rap on the spot with photographs members of the audience had sent him from their mobile phones?
Anyway, back to Kind of Blue. According to Herbie Hancock, “It’s a cornerstone record not only for jazz. It’s a cornerstone record for music.” The first thing I did after receiving Ed’s email was hop on to Spotify and listen to the original, which Miles recorded back in 1959. Within the first five minutes, I was kicking myself for not having picked up on it earlier.
I was genuinely moved by what I heard. It’s always intrigued me how jazz can be its most subversive the more laid back it sounds. Kind of Blue is smooth in a way so-called ‘smooth jazz’ can only dream of being. It’s radical; it exudes excellence, and it’s several other things I just can’t bring myself to write, for fear of coming out with the sort of pretentious stuff music journalists often spout (hmm, just lost me a million more points there). It makes perfect sense that so many jazz artists are queuing up to pay tribute to this legendary record on the 50th anniversary of its release (Gary’s Greenbelt gig is one of several tribute shows taking place around the world).
Sunday afternoon on the Mainstage will be more than just a gig; it’ll be one of the coolest 50th birthday parties you’ve ever been invited to. And you are invited – so be there.
George Luke is a journalist, broadcaster and member of the group of people who book the music for Greenbelt.
Over the weekend, our Commercial Manager Phil Smith will be recording a video diary and posting it on YouTube, and here's his first effort. (Loving the sunglasses, by the way…)
With not long to go now, we are looking forward to the visual arts programme coming together after a year of planning.
As well as all our exhibitions that you can come to see, we've got lots of things you can take part in so here's a round up of what you can do & what you need to bring with you to the festival.
Bring a photo [preferably mounted] to the hub on friday when you arrive where we are having an exhibition of everyones images over the weekend. then on Monday you can come back & swap your pic for another one in the exhibition.
A little moment of space on Saturday afternoon in the hub to come & be creative – knitting, drawing, writing, reading – whatever, with a mellow dj set playing in the background.
But remember – Shhh!, no talking just creating ! Some materials will be provided or bring your own.
Bigger and better this year, we have 27 classes. Take a look here for the full line up – http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/system/downloads/visualarts/2009/greenhaus-timetable.pdf
Last year the classes were booked up very quickly so this year we are changing things a little & its first come first served, choose your class & then queue up outside cottage rake before the session is due to start.
Back again this year, bring yourself and an open mind and have a go at your self portrait, teachers will be on hand to point you in the right direction and you might just surprise yourself.
Following on from the Marvel Comics panel, an opportunity for all you budding illustrators and graphic novelists to get advice from some real life comic book professionals. Bring a selection of your artwork along to the hub.
Billy Childish one of our Visionaries artists and Speakers has created a limited edition print for us and we are giving 100 of them away free. Visit 6 of our visual arts venues to collect a rubber stamp on the back of your daily diary then come to the info desk in the hub to collect your print.
