GLORIOUS GLASTO

No, we haven’t got our dates wrong – the original Glastonbury Festival cropped up on a farm in southwest England 50 years ago this month. Locked down by Covid to an online party for its Big 5-0, it’s the perfect excuse to revisit the wildest and (frequently) wettest greenfield gig in the world.

WORDS BELINDA BECKETT

SOWING THE SEEDS

In 1970 an eccentric Somerset dairy farmer snuck through a hedge to see Led Zeppelin play at a neighbouring festival and decided he could put on a much better one.

“I was playing Lola to the cows through a sound system in the milking parlour when the idea struck,” explains Michael Eavis, an 84-year-old true son of the soil. “I had a better site, facing Glastonbury Tor in the Vale of Avalon – it was all a bit romantic. So I phoned the Kinks and booked them for £500. My favourite band coming to the farm! It was an amazing feeling.”

His headline act backed out on discovering that Pilton Pop, Folk & Blues Festival was a paltry 1,500-ticket affair but Marc Bolan rode along on his White Swan to save the day. Staged over the weekend of September 19/20, the £1 entry fee included free milk.

Since then, the psychedelic tented city that materialises across Worthy Farm’s green acres like an LSD hallucination has become Glastonbury’s other Holy Grail. Now held during five days and nights over June’s summer solstice, tickets for this year’s cancelled gig cost £265 apiece and all 135,000 sold out in 34 minutes!

It would have been the 37th edition, counting fallow years to allow the farmland to recover from the aftershock. The record crowd was 300,000 in 1994, including fence jumpers.

MASSIVE APPEAL

Sprawling over as many fields as can fit into 500 football grounds, you have to climb the 17-metre Ribbon Tower to appreciate the scale of Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts.

Interspersed between a patchwork quilt of tents are 80 stages headlining every genre from jazz, trance and indie pop to RnB and electronica, each with their attendant music bars, food stalls, themed nightclubs and electronic sculptures fashioned from last year’s rubbish. Arcadia’s fire-breathing 50-tonne scaffold spider stole the show for 17 summers.

Shangri-La is a postapocalyptic walkthrough ravecum-art-gallery; Cineramageddon offers drive-in movies in vintage cars; learn to trapeze and take in a comedy show at Theatre & Circus; or follow cryptic coded signposts to The Rabbit Hole, a secret underground Wonderland where Prince Harry and Kate Moss boogied the night away in 2013. If you’re not packing a tent, you can hire a tipi with solar showers and a log-fired yurt sauna a stoner’s throw from your wigwam flap.

MYTHOLOGY AND MYSTICISM

Glasto takes its cue from the farm’s setting in the kingdom of King Arthur, a rural idyll steeped in legend and covered in ley lines. Glastonbury Tor inspired the island of Avalon where the sword Excalibur was forged, while the ancient Abbey was once said to house the Holy Grail.

Glasto’s Healing Field keeps the spiritual vibe alive with naked yoga, therapeutic gong baths and solstice rituals enacted around a contemporary Stone Circle. It’s a nice little earner for Glastonbury town’s thriving New Age community of crystal healers, tarot readers and chakra aligners. Gardeners too. In 1999, cannabis plants were found among the municipal flower beds!

WORTHY CAUSES

Starting in 1981 when it championed the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Worthy Farm festival has raised millions for Oxfam, Greenpeace, Water Aid and local charities. A lot of it’s down to the 2,000 volunteer stewards, litter pickers and cleaners who have to muck out 4,000 loos.

Glasto is also lot greener than the days when everyone left their rubbish and tents behind. Tractors are run on waste vegetable oil, refuse is recycled and tent pegs are biodegradable since a cow choked to death on a metal one.

Over the years this family farming firm have taken Glasto pilgrims into their hearts and home, tending to chemically over-enhanced revellers, returning lost children to anxious parents, and giving back to the community.

GLORIOUS MUD

Straddling flood plain, Glasto is famous for it. Festival-goers wear their mud spatters like badges of honour and the soggiest Glasto on record is hotly disputed. The original ‘Year of the Mud’ in 1997 required a slurry tanker to suck up the overflow. In 2005, enterprising punters paddled around in inflatable canoes. Michael Eavis declared 2016 the winner. “I’ve never seen mud like it, we must have bought up every single bit of woodchip in the south of England.”

GLASTO 2021

If 2020 was the first festival to be a washout without rain, next year’s gig will doubly make up for missing its Big 5-0, pandemic permitting.

Scheduled for June 23- 27, as many of this year’s headliners as possible – Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Macca (again), Diana Ross – will be rebooked alongside new top billers. As most Glasto fans are rolling over their deposits, returns will b'e rarer than gold dust when they come up for grabs next month. But you can go there virtually any time of year via the website.

glastonburyfestivals.co.uk

PYRAMID POWER

Glastonbury Main Stage

Doubling as a hay barn in winter, the main Pyramid Stage has headlined a stream of big names. Beyoncé, The Boss, the Dalai Lama on his 80th birthday and even ‘Ohhh, Jeremy Corbyn’ in 2017 can all lay claim to having appeared live in a cow shed.

One tenth the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, its 292 audio speakers, 354 microphones and 3,743 spotlights can be seen and heard for miles around. Check out these vintage Pyramid players:

2000 DAVID BOWIE’S performance of Heroes made grown men weep. Many feared his new ‘experimental’ sound would be self-indulgent but they were so wrong.

2004 SIR PAUL MCCARTNEY became the first Beatle to headline, treating the crowds to a staggering 33-song setlist from the world’s best back catalogue.

2008 LEONARD COHEN’S timely Hallelujah moment, just as the sun set; JAY-Z’s take on Wonderwall to get back at Noel Gallagher who said the rapper would have ‘no f***ing chance” at Glastonbury.

2013 THE STONES finally made it to Glasto, with Jagger called it “The alternate Ascot – a cultural event that embodies the odd side of Englishness.”

2016 ADELE’S powerful performance three days after the Brexit referendum lightened the mood. A poll revealed that 83% of Glastogoers were Bremainers.

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