Glastonbury Festival
Glastonbury Festival (formally Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts and known colloquially as Glasto) is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place in Pilton, Somerset, in England. In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums have been recorded at the festival, and it receives extensive television and newspaper coverage.
Regarded as a major event in British culture, the festival is inspired by the ethos of the hippie, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the free-festival movement. Vestiges of these traditions are retained in the Green Fields area, which includes sections known as the Green Futures and Healing Field. Michael Eavis hosted the first festival, then called Pilton Festival, after seeing an open-air Led Zeppelin concert at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.
The festival was held intermittently from 1970 until 1981, and has been held most years since then, except for "fallow years" taken mostly at five-year intervals, intended to give the land, local population, and organisers a break. 2018 was a "fallow year”, and the following festival took place from 26 to 30 June 2019.There have been two consecutive "fallow years” since then due to the COVID-19 pandemic
History
Michael Eavis in 2010
1970
The first festival at Worthy Farm was the Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival, hosted by Michael Eavis on Saturday 19 September 1970, and attended by 1,500 people. There had been a commercial UK festival tradition which included the National Jazz and Blues Festival and the Isle of Wight Festival. Organiser Michael Eavis decided to host the first festival, then called Pilton Festival, after seeing an open-air concert headlined by Led Zeppelin at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music at the nearby Bath and West Showground in 1970.
The original headline acts were The Kinks and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders but these acts were replaced at short notice by Tyrannosaurus Rex, later known as T. Rex. Tickets were £1. Other billed acts of note were Steamhammer, Quintessence, Stackridge, Al Stewart and Keith Christmas.
1971
The "Glastonbury Fair" of 1971 was instigated by Andrew Kerr after being found and introduced to Michael Eavis by David Trippas and organised with help from Jean Bradbery, Kikan Eriksdotter, John Massara, Jeff Dexter, Arabella Churchill, Thomas Crimble,Bill Harkin, Gilberto Gil, Mark Irons, John Coleman, and Jytte Klamer. The 1971 festival featured the first incarnation of the "Pyramid Stage". Conceived by Bill Harkin the stage was a one-tenth replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza built from scaffolding and metal sheeting and positioned over a blind spring which was found by dowsing.
Performers included David Bowie, Mighty Baby, Traffic, Fairport Convention, Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Fairies, Skin Alley, The Worthy Farm Windfuckers and Melanie. It was paid for by its supporters and advocates of its ideal, and embraced a mediaeval tradition of music, dance, poetry, theatre, lights, and spontaneous entertainment. The 1971 festival was filmed by Nicolas Roeg and David Puttnam and was released as a film called simply Glastonbury Fayre.
1979
There was a small unplanned event in 1978, when the convoy of vehicles from the Stonehenge festival was directed by police to Worthy Farm; the festival was then revived the following year (1979) by Churchill, Crimble, Kerr and Eavis, in an event for the Year of the Child, which lost money.
1980s
The Pyramid Stage in 1985. A large area of mud covered this area.
The 1980s saw the festival become an annual fixture, barring periodic fallow years. In 1981, Michael Eavis took back solo control of the festival, and it was organised in conjunction with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament That year a new Pyramid Stage was constructed from telegraph poles and metal sheeting (repurposed from materials of the Ministry of Defence), a permanent structure which doubled as a hay-barn and cow-shed during the winter.
In the 1980s, the children's area of the festival (which had been organised by Arabella Churchill and others) became the starting point for a new children's charity called Children's World. 1981 was the first year that the festival made profits, and Eavis donated £20,000 of them to CND.In the following years, donations were made to a number of organisations, and since the end of the Cold War the main beneficiaries have been Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, who all contribute towards the festival by providing features and volunteers, who work at the festival in exchange for free entry
Since 1983, large festivals have required licences from local authorities. This led to certain restrictions being placed on the festival, including a crowd limit and specified times during which the stages could operate. The crowd limit was initially set at 30,000 but has grown every year to over 100,000. 1984 saw the stage invaded by children during The Smiths set.[25][26] Weather Report played the main stage, and Elvis Costello headlined the last night for almost three hours. In 1985, the festival grew too large for Worthy Farm, but neighbouring Cockmill Farm was purchased. That year saw a wet festival with considerable rain; Worthy Farm is a dairy farm and what washed down into the low areas was a mixture of mud and liquefied cow dung. This did not prevent festival-goers from enjoying the knee-deep slurry in front of the pyramid stage.
1989 was the first year that impromptu, unofficial sound systems sprung up around the festival site – a portent of things to come. These sound systems would play loud, electronic acid house music 'round the clock, with the largest, the Hypnosis sound system, rivalling the vol
Location
Glastonbury Festival is located in SomersetGlastonbury Festival
Map showing the location of the Glastonbury Festival within Somerset
The festival takes place in South West England at Worthy Farm between the small villages of Pilton and Pylle in Somerset, six miles east of Glastonbury, overlooked by the Glastonbury Tor in the "Vale of Avalon". The area has a number of legends and spiritual traditions, and is a "New Age" site of interest: ley lines are considered to converge on the Tor. The nearest town to the festival site is Shepton Mallet, three miles 5 km north east, but there continues to be interaction between the people espousing alternative lifestyles living in Glastonbury and the festival. The farm is situated between the A361 and A37 roads.
Worthy Farm is situated at grid reference ST 590 397 in a valley at the head of the Whitelake River, between two low limestone ridges, part of the southern edge of the Mendip Hills. On the site is a confluence of the two small streams that make the Whitelake River. In the past the site has experienced problems with flooding, though after the floods that occurred during the 1997 and 1998 festival, drainage was improved. This did not prevent flooding during the 2005 festival, but allowed the flood water to dissipate within hours. The Highbridge branch of the Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway ran through the farm on an embankment, but was dismantled in 1966 and now forms a main thoroughfare across the site.[175] Another prominent feature is the high-voltage electricity line which crosses the site east–west.
In recent years the site has been organised around a restricted backstage compound, with the Pyramid stage on the north, and Other stage on the south of the compound. Attractions on the east of the site include the acoustic tent, comedy tent and circus. To the south are the green fields, which include displays of traditional and environmentally friendly crafts. In King's Meadow, the hill at the far south of the site, is a modern small megalith circle which, like Stonehenge, is coordinated with the summer solstice, and since 1990 represents a stone circle.
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