Ejected from Global Gathering for being black

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Picture the scene if you can, half past 4 in the Morning on Saturday 29th July at the Global Gathering 2006 festival. This reporter has spent the past 9 hours drinking and raving to the extreme yet somehow managing to find the time to do my job and jot down notes on the acts in the process. Loosely put people I’m wrecked, I’m tired, I’m drunk, I’m wasted and I’m smashed. It’s been a damn good day that’s undeniable but all I wanna do right now is find my tent and get some much needed shuteye and recharge my cells in order to attack the next day vigour.

I find the campsite and am confronted by a sea of tents, literally stretching out as far as the eye can see. I’ve got no bloody clue where my tent is exactly I just know it has a flowery design’ so unperturbed; I set off in search of my gazebo gingerly stepping over tent supports and the limbs of various intoxicated clubbers. I wander that campsite high and low, up and down and every single last area in between and after half an hour of searching eventually I hit paydirt!  I find a tent with a flowery design! Now you must remember that I am slightly inebriated at this point and uncertain as to where the opening of said tent is. I have a look around and apparently catch the attention of a “well meaning doogooder” who of course looks to be typically forward thinking, progressive and unprejudiced towards other races with his black bomber jacket, dr martens and clean shaven head.

He asks me what I’m doing, I inform him of the situation, he thinks it’s bullshit. He calls over a few of his mates, all of whom look me in the eye with the kind of smug, self satisfied confidence that comes with knowing that you outnumber a man 6 to 1 and are just looking for an excuse to kick his head in.

They then call security, you see some black guy had stolen from a campsite earlier on and my being black too means they must have found their man. Forget the fact that they can’t tell me what clothes this guy was wearing or how tall he was, he’s black, I’m black, we’re both the same man, common fucking sense. I mean, it’s not as though more than 1 negro can ever be at Global Gathering at any given time is it? Course not.

I show them my press pass, I tell them that I’m here to cover the event for myvillage.com, I tell them that I’m a little drunk and lost, looking for my tent which is of a flowery design like the one they spotted me by. I even offer to call my friend who was in the tent so that he could corroborate my story and they didn’t wanna know. “A black man staying in a flowery tent? A likely story” they said.  I told them it wasn’t actually my tent but my friend’s and that was water off a duck’s back. They did not want to know.

Anyways after a 15 minute discussion in which they called me every name under the sun and threatened me with physical violence, I’m searched, stripped of my press passes, tickets etc and ejected from the grounds despite the fact that I had nothing on me that wasn’t actually mine.

To make things even better, this is now about 5 in the morning and I’m 8 MILES away from civilisation. I bravely traversed the countryside amongst all manner of insects and wild animals and eventually reached to the train station at Stratford Upon Avon. Of course the next train wasn’t for an hour so I was then bestowed upon the supreme privilege of sleeping on a bench to pass the time.

To summarise, I had a great time at Global until I was proven guilty of theft because of the colour of my skin. It’s a shame that prejudice bigotry and plain stupidity are still rife and are condoned on a corporate level.

As I walked to the train station, I passed Roni Size, Carl Cox and Grooverider all who had just finished a set at Global Gathering filling a van full of stolen loot. It dawned on me that maybe the security men were right, all black people are thieves!