John Michell's 70th Birthday Party
Aquarius was definitely in the ascendant in Glastonbury on the evening of Saturday February 8th when an assembly of the wonderful and weird gathered to celebrate John Michell's 70th birthday. The Glastonbury Assembly Rooms have seen everything from Burns Night (complete with vegetarian haggis) to woad workshops and this evening a huge crop circle painting adorned one end of the room and enlarged reproductions of all John's book jackets were pinned round the walls like paintings. Such titles as The New View over Atlantis, Phenomena, The Earth Spirit, The Dimensions of Paradise, Simulacra, City of Revelation, and his first book in 1967, Flying Saucer Vision.
At the other end of the room an aerial view of an Egyptian temple was hung from the wall. This was in fact a giant seating plan with hand-painted labels like flags pinned on a war map. Ancient titles and esoteric authors, wizards and druids, fairies and photographers, poets, editors and artists, singers and Sufis came from far and wide to salute this man of vision's three score years and ten. So modest is John that one could mistake his expression of bemused delight for the look of someone who has walked into another chap's party. His girlfriend Rosie Hall looked magnificent, and glided elegantly beside him like a Degas dancer, with a mass of golden curls at the nape of her neck and a tight satin bodice.
John is much loved by so many and it was by no means all his friends who were lucky enough to be at this wonderful event. Jamie George, founder of Gothic Image Book Shop, and his wife Frances as well as being old friends are organizational angels who put huge effort into arranging such things, which seem to just happen spontaneously. After a delicious curry was scoffed and a wild assortment of electric conversations started ( I sat between the founders of The Fortean Times, Bob Rickard and Paul Sieveking) the tables were pushed back for the evening's entertainment and tributes to John, which started with a poem for him by Candida Lycett-Green, daughter of the poet John Betjeman. Her great fondness and admiration for John was wittily conveyed by declaring "You are my Henge, my crop circle - if I am the bottom you are the top".
Two of John's cousins and his brother toasted him, admitting that they didn't always understand his books but had nothing but admiration for him.
Jerry Hall, beautiful and tall, strode warrior-like to the top table to raise her glass "to my favourite living author". The poet Edward Tudor-Pole gave a brilliant potted history of his friendship with John and had a way with words which captivated everyone.
Jamie George sang, unaccompanied, a poem by W.B.Yeats which he knew to be John's favourite, which he had recited when walking around sacred places in Ireland with the Georges and folk singer Julie Felix. Josie George and two of her friends from the London Dance Studio did an intriguing dance, Fluidology, choreographed by Josie, combining traditional ballet, jazz, hip hop and moon dancing in an organic charismatic way.
Julie Felix then produced her guitar, a microphone was placed in the middle of the room and her familiar and powerful voice overtook the place with a Mexican birthday song in Spanish. She had "been our troubadour" walking around sacred Ireland, John later said.
Haggis McLeod, a Juggler Extraordinaire, threw multi-coloured bowler hats up into the roof beams and caught them like bubbles catching the light, yellow, scarlet and green, to Sinatra's song I Get a Kick out of You. He learned his art from gitanes, Spanish gypsies, who pass tricks down from generation to generation. He thrilled us with fire juggling, explaining that there is nothing but saliva between the flames and the inside of the mouth. His wife, Arabella Churchill, organizer of the Glastonbury Children's Festival and a familiar face in the town beamed proudly, reminiscent of her statesman grand-father, Sir Winston.
Rory Motion in a red tartan suit gave an inspired rendition of "Albert and The Lion" changing the dread lion into a joint of marijuana and the effect it had on the boy and his parents. The air was suitably misty with fragrant smoke as if by magical special effects........... A remarkable performance of spoon playing by the European Spoons Champion Simon Beresford was compelling as he hurtled the silver-plated soup spoons up and down his thighs, calves, arms and other peoples laps, rippling his fingers as if plucking the strings of a lute. Impossible.
The Avalonian Free State Choir lined up at the end of the room, where the seating plan had been invisibly removed, and sang a repertoire of songs from all over the world, ending with the very beautiful Celtic Prayer, which they had sung with Julie Felix on her 60th birthday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. They sang Jerusalem as a tribute to John's studies of the sacred geometry of the Temple of Solomon.
At midnight the twelve strokes of Big Ben plodded through the room and a hush fell as it was announced by Jamie George that it was the hour of John's birthday and a superb rendition of the song spontaneously broke out. Three little aliens suddenly appeared with huge ET heads, actually 3 of the several angelic- looking children who were at the party, (one of whom was Mick Jagger's daughter) carrying two enormous birthday cakes all lit up and quivering - one decorated with a crop circle, the other with a vesica piscis (sacred sign of the fish). John blew out the candles, champagne was served. John raised his glass and, ever-thoughtful, enquired as to whether everyone had some before proposing a toast "to God, my Creator."
Chris Jagger and his Band provided multifarious music and Julie Felix stepped onto the stage and sang Forever Young. We certainly felt it. As Albert Einstein said and the invitation to the party had reminded us:
'Great spirits will always encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds.'
But on this evening there was no opposition and no one present was mediocre. We were later told that the festivities did not fully end until 9AM the following morning.