Brian Boydon music
Archaeological digs have revealed that midsummer festivals have been held in the Glastonbury area since 500 BC. This is just one of the worthless but interesting facts related by author George McKay in Glastonbury: A Very English Fair.
As the music festival is derided for being too "middle class" and overrun by toffs who arrive in their 4x4s with au pairs and organic food in tow, it's interesting to read McKay's pinpointing of Glasto as an arena for "idealism, anarchy, being young, getting old disgracefully, trying to find other ways, getting out of it, hearing some great and truly awful music".
Festival culture, he adds, is all about "a politics which admits pleasure, pop and rock music, temporary community, landscape, nature, promiscuity and narcotic".
That was written in 2000. Today's Glastogoersseeking a bit of "rock music, promiscuity and narcotic" must preregister months in advance with photo ID.
Critics have been queuing up to take lumps out of Glastonbury since it was announced that the 2008 festival - last year the most heavily subscribed arts event in the world - had failed to sell all of its 145,000 tickets.
This year's line-up hasn't helped, but for many the acts on stage are secondary to the whole Glastonbury experience. The malcontents' gripe seems to lie with the registration process, which strikes many as a bit Orwellian and contrary to the Glasto spirit of mild rural anarchy.
Longtime organiser Michael Eavis says he will change the preregistration requirement for next year's event. He admits that it's "all a bit tedious" and no matter how much you enforce it, the secondary selling on of tickets will always, regretfully, be a part of the festival scene.
The schadenfreude taken by other festivals in Glastonbury's perceived decline is stunningly hypocritical. Since it began in 1971, Glastonbury has always been at the forefront of promoting serious global concerns, introducing an ecological message long before it was seen as almost mandatory. Perhaps most importantly, it has always been run as a nonprofit event. Bands charge a lot less than for other festivals because they know that all money raised goes to pressing causes.
The amount of branding at commercial festivals has suffocated any residual sense of "rock'n'roll". But when the BBC cameras pan over the Glastonbury site, you see only Greenpeace, WaterAid and Oxfam banners. A total of £2 million was split between these three organisations from last year's ticket sales.
That link, for good or ill, between rock music and political activism/awareness-raising was first forged in the Somerset hills. Many of Glastonbury's initiatives (such as its massive "Green Fields" site) have gone on to outgrow the festival, most notably The Big Green Gathering, which now runs as a stand-alone event.
Take a stroll around any other summer festival and you will see a multitude of ideas that were "inspired" by the Glastonbury Festival. All those hippy-dippy add-ons, all those eco initiatives, all those "holisitic" areas were, from the beginning, Glastonbury staples. As you stumble around your branded, corporate VIP and VVIP areas this summer, you might at least acknowledge the Glastonbury spirit and ethos that informs your festival of choice.
For Eavis, the prospect of the first non-sellout in recent years is not something to be feared: "This has been the first year where there hasn't been a mad ticket scramble and I think we will end up with proper Glastonbury lovers this year. A lot of those people haven't been able to come over the last few years because of the nightmare of getting tickets, so in a way I hope we end up with a distilled Glastonbury crowd this year."
Rave on Glastonbury.
