Had you somehow managed to find yourself at Sounds Beautiful by accident, I wonder how long it would take before you clocked that this was no ordinary festival. Falling over the same weekend as Glastonbury, Sounds Beautiful has all the recognisable traits of the great British summer fest as we have come to know it. The Arcadian surrounds. The constant threat of rain. Ageing hippies and juvenile sesh heads. And someone, somewhere, strumming Wonderwall.
But then what would you make of the Russian flag fluttering above the campsite? Or the strange insistence on the use of cash everywhere you go? Or the fashion revival for sloganeering T-shirts — except, hold on, it isn’t “Frankie Say Relax” that people are sporting, but instead phrases such as “Covid-1984”?
Just around the time Chris Martin began singing Yellow at Glastonbury, in a field near Wimborne, 50 miles southeast of the Pyramid Stage, a man named Darren Nesbit was performing a number about something called the new world order and what he wants to do with it.
“You can stick your new world order up your arse,” Nesbit railed to the tune of She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain. Other shibboleths were also dealt with in the song: central banking, fracking, the mainstream media and the “poison vaccine” — all skewered by the “up your arse” formula.
So yes, Sounds Beautiful is no ordinary festival. By its own description it is a “truthers’ awake alternative to Glastonbury”. By most other people’s description it is a music-based conference for conspiracy theorists, where over the course of four days a broad church of antivaxers and flat-Earthers, Putinites and new agers, can join together to explore the depths of the rabbit hole.
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Not so long ago, these sorts of people might have been at Glastonbury. They were the benign cranks who sold dowsing rods and stood on top of empty beer crates raving about Lee Harvey Oswald. As long as there have been theories there have been conspiracists. For the most part, though, they were consigned to expounding their ersatz insights in relative isolation. But then they started to find each other. Through the internet, a community developed. And then when Covid struck, that community ballooned in size, with the upheaval of the pandemic providing fertile soil in which to seed sinister claims about state tyranny and population control.
What was hitherto a largely subterranean online movement has begun to sprout above ground. Conspiracists appear in town centres handing out copies of The Light, a conspiracy-based newspaper founded in 2020. They run schools where children are taught the latest bogus theories. And now there are festivals too, with Sounds Beautiful just one of several to have opened in Britain since the pandemic.
The festival is held in the grounds of Gaunts House in Dorset, the ancestral seat of the Glyn family. Sir Richard Glyn, the 10th Baronet of Gaunts, is something of an eccentric himself, having previously used the 18th-century pile to host “survival and profound togetherness courses for young people” in the face of an unnamed “encroaching darkness”.
Among those performing are many of the celebrities of the movement: Nesbit, editor of The Light, played with his group the Daz Band; Michael Manoel Chaves, a former paramedic, who told his audience that politicians who rolled out the vaccine “needed to be executed” as part of a “Nuremberg 2”; and Hope Sussex, a suspected illegal school exposed by The Times last year, which was putting on a range of “educational” activities.
• Hope Sussex school trains next generation of conspiracy theorists
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Having followed the trajectory of these people over the past few years, I was curious to see them in their element. And so down the M3 I headed on Saturday morning, within a stream of late-comer Glastonbury traffic, before swerving towards Andover and down towards the south coast. “Welcome to paradise,” said the man on the gate as he checked my ticket, before looking up to the clear blue sky and adding, “Sun shines on the righteous.”
I parked, bought a beer and shortly afterwards fell into conversation with a man named Dave, who explained that it was his aptitude for trigonometry, in combination with a revelatory trip on ayahuasca, a South American psychoactive beverage, that led him to the conclusion that the Earth was flat. Heliocentricity was, he said, just another example of how “they” have sought to disenfranchise people. “By making the Earth a globe, they took away from people the truth, the truth that it is us who stand at the centre of creation,” he said, handing me a card with details for how to purchase his £3 app.
A man who smelt of burnt sage then joined the discussion and there was a lot of talk about the sixth dimension. I peeled away and went to look at the stalls. On sale were alternative remedies, tarot card readings, swirl-patterned sarongs and hemp rucksacks — all of which you’d likely find at any other festival. But what you probably won’t see on Worthy Farm is a Tesla healing machine. A sign outside a small white tent proclaimed the device to be the “technology ‘they’ don’t want you to know about”. “Say goodbye to pain, fight infection, tame inflammation,” it promised. Inside was a contraption that looked as if it might have been liberated from Victor Frankenstein’s lab — a jumble of nodes, cables and glass tubes.
The purveyor of this revolutionary treatment is Clive de Carle, a supplements salesman from Wiltshire who made headlines a few years ago after claiming that diluted bleach could treat autism. He was off giving a talk but the woman running the stall in his absence was pleasant and friendly, and we got chatting about the festival and others we had been to. She said she used to work on the gates at Glastonbury before it became too corporate. “And then of course they’ve got that satanic witch there this year, come to cast a spell on everyone,” she dropped in casually. Who, sorry? “Marina Abramovic, the artist. She’s a spirit cooker. Her and her mates in the elites, they eat people. Look it up.”
Of course when you do look these things up, you see it’s obviously total nonsense within about two clicks. But to a conspiracist, that is easily explained away by the fact that Google and the media, or anywhere you might look for facts, are all in on it too. They are part of that amorphous “they” that looms over this festival. “They” told us that the world was round, forced us to take a deadly vaccine, and are trying to enslave us with 5G and 15-minute cities. “They”, the politicians, the businessmen, Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, all in cahoots and trying to shackle us, and yet somehow the only people who have managed to perceive this plot against humanity are the ones in this field singing about shoving central banking up “their” arse.
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It would be funny were it not quite so serious. Conspiratorial thinking is a symptom of a wider malaise in society. But so, too, is it a disease itself, one that weakens the body politic. The movement spreads lies, dissolves trust and deepens divisions. To give a concrete example of this harm: Britain is in the middle of a measles emergency, seven years after the virus was thought to have been eradicated from these shores. That is in part due to the false claims made in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield about the MMR vaccine, which continued to be promoted by antivaxers.
• Exposed: the ‘illegal school’ teaching children conspiracy theories
To give another — Hope Sussex. In January 2023, The Times revealed that former far-right activists were running an organisation suspected by Ofsted of being an illegal school where kids were being taught conspiracies as well as trained in using crossbows and swords. Hope Sussex says it is not a school but a facility for home-educating families. This year, the paper exposed another suspected illegal school in Manchester called Universallkidz where children were instructed in foraging and self-defence to help them to survive and defy whatever “they” would throw at them.
Hope Sussex co-founder Matthew Single, a former member of the BNP and an ardent supporter of Vladimir Putin, was running an event for children at the festival entitled “weird science”, for which he had brought along his homemade flamethrower. In the evening I found him behind the tents surrounded by a group of excited small boys as he showed one of them how to fire bursts of flame into the air. But it didn’t last long. A worried mother intervened to make him stop, pointing out that they were all standing directly in front of a car full of petrol. “It’s good fun,” he told her. “Would you like a go?”
In the morning a light drizzle was falling. The sun had disappeared but the righteous were still there, groggily climbing out of their tents and making for the portable toilets. Another full day of the festival was still to come, but I didn’t have the stamina for it. Instead, I decided to leave paradise and head back to the real world.
