Did David Bowie once cause Terry Reid to levitate at Glastonbury Festival?
David Bowie had this magnetism that often makes you question whether he was even human. He played into that, of course, but the way he spoke, performed, and held himself sometimes felt a little too alien to be considered a simple act.
Bowie’s breakthrough was an explosion. When he came along, the point of entry was his appearance. Rather than play into overdone rock ‘n’ roll tropes with muted tones and clean suits, Bowie wore loud colours, eccentric makeup, and often spoke about society’s disillusionment through an otherworldly lens.
He was, fictionally and in another way we can’t quite describe, an entity sent to Earth to deliver an important message. For countless musicians, it was the message of musical genius. “David ain’t from here,” Nina Simone once said. But her endearment came from his wisdom, and how anybody could go to him and he’d talk in a way that made you wonder where he’d got it all from.
Simone once said Bowie talked her down, telling her she’s a “genius” and that, “where you’re coming from, there are very few of us out there.” Most of his pieces of advice coasted the line between pragmatic and abstract, where he could tell you you’re amazing and that you have the secret no one else does, all in one sentence.
It’s also why people became drawn to him in any given setting. Terry Reid, for one, recalled when he played at Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage in 1971. He was performing with Linda Lewis when Bowie watched on from the side of the stage, but he also got to know the Starman in bits and pieces through the whole experience.
“David was a very, very interesting guy,” Reid later told The Guardian. “He listened deeply and understood what I was trying to do. A real thinker. I wish I’d spent more time with him.”
In a separate interview with Uncut, he was a bit looser with his words, a bit less diplomatic with how Bowie’s demeanour made him feel both excited and uneasy. For starters, he remembered everyone being “hammered”, which immediately explains the chaotic energy around all the strange events that ensued. Like Bowie “talking, talking, talking” about “the summer solstice and all sorts of things are gonna happen” to the point of it being “scary”.
But then something weird happened during his set, which wasn’t all that weird until Bowie found him afterwards. During Reid’s performance, he started to jolt off the stage, something akin to levitating in a rhythmic, pulsating fashion. He realised that the people at the side of the stage were stomping their feet, making the stage rise and fall in the middle.
When he spoke to Bowie after, however, the alien messenger hinted at it being something else entirely. “The stage is built out of these scaffolding boards, which are flexible,” Reid said. “So as they’re doing that, they’re flipping me up in the middle.”
He went on, “I told David about it, that it was the people at the side of the stage, and he said [in a conspiratorial whisper]. ‘It’s more than that…’ We had such a good time. I got on great with David, he was a real sweetheart. He was very interested in everything. Everything was possible.”
While it’s unlikely that some unknown power made it all happen, it certainly made Bowie the most interesting one in the room.
