Heavenly Jukebox

Dancing to the Heavenly Jukebox Hits, before the plug gets pulled…

Stream the playlist here: drft.tips/HVNLY

After I started work at Heavenly, music festivals took on a whole new meaning. My focus went beyond headliners and clash-finders, and instead my life in summer became a string of weekends each promising the welcoming arms of an extended family and hours of dancing.

Unlike my Heavenly peers, I don’t DJ – it’s too much like learning to drive which, if you can’t tell your left from right like me, is incredibly difficult. But I can’t get enough of dancing to the music played by the Heavenly Jukebox crew, and when we’re out in the fields and under the stars, with friends who thrive in the same environment, the freedom and the joy reaches dizzy new heights.

So – among all the other adjustments and all the anger, fear and frustration of lockdown – having a whole summer of those valuable experiences cancelled has been hard. Music, as it is for many of you, is a constant in my life, and that’s where I turned for help. I dived straight into old playlists and rooted around my most-Shazamed tracks to find memories of summers gone by. I wrote down my Heavenly Jukebox hits and sent them in a letter to Jeff with no context. Looking back now this seems like quite an odd thing to do, but it provided me with a great deal of solace. Making lists, gathering memories, can help in desperate times.

You probably know that the Heavenly mantra, “Believe in magic”, comes from the Lovin’ Spoonful song, and that song also includes another line: “The magic’s in the music and the music’s in me.” The songs on this playlist are full of magic, and I carry each one of them in my heart, dancing along with the Heavenly Jukebox every summer.

In the face of all this uncertainty, I’m not sure I could manage without the sounds of the Heavenly Jukebox, one constant that keeps on keepin’ on. Listening to these songs, I recalled each memory that comes with them at festivals: overdoing it on the first night in the cricket clubhouse at Sea Change clapping along to the recently discovered alternate mix of Marvin Gaye’s Where Are We Going?; feeling the rain on my cheeks in Green Man’s walled garden stood next to a handful of other sodding wet dancers to the Green Door All-Stars’ Come With Me jostling together backstage at The Stonebridge Bar at Glastonbury. Each time and place has its own tunes, played beneath the Jukebox umbrella by Jeff, Danny, Carl, Daisy or Diva. No matter what’s going down in the fields, the Jukebox always calls to me, and to others too. I’m looking at you, Nina, Sophie, Neal and Pauline, Tony, Suna, Snake-hips Harvey. Gill with her gin, James and his mad hair, Olive and Webster, reluctant dancer but a great poet Will Burns, the Parker family and so many other smiling faces. (I miss you all.)

One really vivid Heavenly Jukebox moment was the Sunday night at Port Eliot in 2018. I’m not saying my friends are better than yours (they are!) but when all the half-arsed festival dwellers head home on Sunday afternoon and only the hardcore are left behind, the party really does take on another meaning and the Jukebox has a whole life of its own. When our main Heavenly man Jeff played the first track in the CBTR bar by the river Tiddy that night, all those aches and pains from evenings gone by dispersed (until sometime in the early hours, when the power finally got cut off). For six hours we danced, moving and grooving between benches and chairs, talking, hugging, falling and laughing, believing in magic. That night’s set closed with John Gary Williams’s The Whole Damn World Is Going Crazy and it makes me weep, how true that is, and that we can’t all dance to it again, together, right now.

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