Well well well… If you can think of a more perfect union of band and venue than the Ozrics on the Avalon stage at Glastonbury, I'd like to hear about it. Rolling up shortly after the start, the tent is, unsurprisingly, rammed. The band are whipping through their psychedelic repertoire with precision and grace… Having been a sometime Ozric Tentacles obsessive, last time I saw them live was 97. They were great then, how would they be five years down the line? It's always a shame when the band you see for old time's sake have become just sort of… washed up. However, from the first number it was clear they had certainly not changed for the worse, despite numerous personnel swaps and tectonic shifts in mainstream musical fashion. What becomes clear is that they are completely of their own dimension - they are timeless, and like hippie fashion they never go out of style (though whether they ever got "in style" in the first place is debatable…) If anything they have sharpened up as they mature, bashing through crazy chord changes and turn-on-a-sixpence tempo mood swings with laid back nonchalance.
	The famous visuals are present and correct too, and noted with a smile is the presence of the same gnome-decorated rotating backdrop that they had all those long years back. Added to tonight's mix are many more hi-tech light fracturing devices; if you squint just right you can start to see the screens in 3-D... It's a heady mix, with synth bleeps, driving guitar, and ethereal flute solos purpose-built to transport you some way out of normal space. How all this is coming across to the six-year old boy perched on his dad's shoulders just ahead of me is anyone's guess…
The show intensifies as it progresses, building the colour and texture into fantastical peaks and troughs. Flute and guitar, the only surviving original members, are bouncing off the drums and synths. Lights strobe across our vision as the sound whirlpools about the tent. As one friend put it "It goes really far-out, and then just when you think, wow, this is really mad, it goes even more far out!" Couldn't have put it better myself.
Words: Marilyn Kahan Pictures: Jacqui Crabbe