Glastonbury tour de force
Glastonbury: 50 Years & Counting BBC2, SUNDAY JUNE 19, 9PM
In a film three years in the making, producer/director of the acclaimed
David Bowie Five Years trilogy Francis Whately creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of Glastonbury for this social and musical history of (probably) The World’s Greatest Music Festival, as told through the testimony of its principal curators, Michael and Emily Eavis, and the artists who have appeared there over the years.
This is not a chronological plod through the festival’s evolution, so much as a thematic and story-driven exploration of the peaks and troughs, the agonies and the ecstasies, that have shaped its many eras. Balancing the driving forces of social conscience and hedonism, Glastonbury has always been both a world apart and a barometer of the state of the nation. Cameras take viewers backstage and deep into the archive to reveal the forces that have driven this alternative nation between utopia and dystopia, the Greatest Night Of Your Life and a Muddy Field In The Middle Of Nowhere.
Opening with Billie Eilish and Stormzy backstage in 2019, viewers are almost immediately plunged into the nuclear threat that drove Glastonbury’s alliance with CND in the early 1980s, before meeting Johnny Marr and Mike Joyce of The Smiths who share how their 1984 slot reconnected this hippie gathering with the musical zeitgeist.
The template of Glastonbury’s combination of social conscience and musical immediacy has been set. The film then journeys back in time to the first Glastonbury festivals – the inspirations of dairy farmer Max Yasgur’s Woodstock in 1969.